The fifth and last of Hebert’s Darby novels (after The Passion of Estelle Jordan ) continues his birdseye view of the small New Hampshire community whose inhabitants are engaging illustrations of a deeply ingrained class system as American as the state motto that provides the book’s title. Live Free or Die is also the name of drifter Frederick Elman’s camper/pickup truck, in which he reluctantly returns to Darby to take over his father’s trash-collection business while the older man is recovering from a fall incurred while poaching on private land owned by the Salmon family. “Squire” Reggie Salmon, now dead, poured his fortune into this property, the Trust, leaving his widow and daughter, Lilith, virtually nothing more than the imposing family manse. When the trash man’s son takes up with the Squire’s daughter (though the only thing they have in common is their “shared despair”), the rigid social hierarchy is disrupted. Meanwhile, the town is embroiled in a class-driven controversy over maintaining the Trust lands as a private preserve or developing them with condominiums. Among Hebert’s themes here are the alienation of parents and children, of natives and newcomers, and of rich and poor. His eye for social nuances is acute, and he illuminates issues of class and culture with wry humor and compassion. Subtlety is not his strong suit, however; often he slows the narrative by over-explaining his characters’ inchoate thoughts and emotions. Still, much of this novel is perceptive and provocative.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

“For more than a decade Ernest Hebert has been shaping with relatively scant fanfare one of the most interesting accomplishments of contemporary American fiction – a five-volume cycle about Darby, a southern New Hampshire hill town, into which the texture of class is as skillfully woven as it is in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County.” –Boston Globe

“You stay in your hometown, you end up more of a stranger than if you’d started new someplace else.”

The struggle between the indigenous rural working class and the upper crust intensifies in this final novel of Hebert’s Darby series as Freddy Elman, son of the town trash collector, and Lilith Salmon, daughter of a prestigious family, embark on their ill-fated love affair.

Seeing Darby through new eyes, Freddy comes to realize that “the kind of people who hunkered down among these tree-infested, rock-strewn hills” is “dying out, replaced by people with money, education, culture, people ‘wise in the ways of the world’.” As that world increasingly intervenes, the lovers’ attempt to bridge the chasm that divides their class-alienated families inevitably collapses.

“For more than a decade Ernest Hebert has been shaping with relatively scant fanfare one of the most interesting accomplishments of contemporary American fiction – a five-volume cycle about Darby, a southern New Hampshire hill town, into which the texture of class is as skillfully woven as it is in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County.” –Boston Globe

Live Free or Die (Hardscrabble Books-Fiction of New England)

The Old American: A Novel

His first novel in seven years once again shows Hebert (The Dogs of War) as a meticulously accurate and inspired author of character-driven literary fiction. Again using the sharply observed setting of New England, he goes back in time to create an unforgettable character in Caucus-Meteor, interpreter, visionary, king and “old American.” The Algonkian chief is central to this mesmerizing captivity narrative set during the French and Indian Wars and based on the true story of 35-year-old Nathan Blake, an Englishman abducted by Indians from his home in Keene, N.H., in 1746. (Blake lived with the Canadian Indians for 10 years before being ransomed by his wife, Elizabeth, and returning to New England, where he died at the age of 100.) Hebert’s powerful tale resonates with the honor and dignity of its protagonists. With his own tribe decimated by disease, the grieving, elderly Caucus-Meteor joins an Iroquois raiding party and, almost by accident, acquires Blake as his slave. As their slave/master relationship evolves, the two men become close, eventually working together to negotiate with the French in hopes of securing the village’s future. Blake assimilates, becoming the tribe’s leader, marrying Caucus-Meteor’s daughter Black Dirt, and losing, as Caucus-Meteor predicts, his desire to return to his former life. Caucus-Meteor’s poignant remembrances provide rich details of the culture and customs of the Canadian Indians. A description of the ritual of the gauntlet, a ceremony all slaves must endure, is physically brutal, yet beautiful in its psychological complexity. The integrity of Hebert’s work is one of its most salient characteristics. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

In 1746, Nathan Blake, the first frame house builder in Keene, New Hampshire, was abducted by Algonkians and held in Canada as a slave. Inspired by this dramatic slice of history, novelist Ernest Hebert has written a masterful new novel recreating those years of captivity.

Set in New England and Canada during the French and Indian Wars, The Old American is driven by its complex, vividly imagined title character, Caucus-Meteor. By turns shrewd and embittered, ambitious and despairing, inspired and tormented, he is the self-styled “king” of the remnants of the first native tribes that encountered the English. Displaced and ravaged by disease, these refugees have been forced to bargain for land in Canada on which to live. Having hired himself out as interpreter to a raiding party of French and Iroquois, Caucus-Meteor returns from New Hampshire the unexpected possessor of a captive, Nathan Blake.

He decides to bring the Englishman to his own village rather than sell him to the French. Ambivalent about his former life, Blake gradually fits into the routine of Conissadawaga. Meanwhile, Caucus-Meteor struggles to protect his people from the rapacious French governor. Constantly plotting and maneuvering, burdened by responsibility, the Old American exhibits cunning and courage. A gifted linguist who was forbidden to learn to read or write; a former slave who is now a king; a native leader who has seen more of London and Paris than his English captive, who knows more of European politics than the French colonial administrators, Caucus-Meteor is a brilliant, cantankerous, visionary figure whom readers will long remember.

The Old American: A Novel (Hardscrabble Books-Fiction of New England)