Furnace Creek teases us with the question of what Charles Dickens’ Pip might have been like had he grown up in the American South of the 1960s and 1970s and faced the explosive issues that galvanized the world in those decades: racial injustice, a devastating war, women’s and gay rights, class struggle.
“A funny, moving, and true rendition of everybody’s story: surviving our childhoods, which can be uniquely challenging if you’re Southern, and queer. Boone is a natural novelist, and Furnace Creek is a genuine accomplishment.”
—Michael Cunningham The Hours
[This] ingenious re-telling and re-imagining of Dickens’’ Great Expectations . . . plays innocence against experience, youth against age, privilege against poverty, in an America of the 1960s. Its narrator is endearing and knowing and also, like the novelist, a born noticer.
- Colm Tóibín, Author of The Master and The Magician
“With lyric beauty, welcome frankness, and rare emotional urgency, Boone reimagines Dickens’ Great Expectations in the American South . . . with a queer perspective and countless new and illuminating approaches. Exquisite prose and a storyteller’s elan.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Boone’s prose is lyrical and inventive, merging Dickensian wit and texture with a dash of Southern gothic. The characters are delicately drawn and elegantly complicated.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A page-turning novel, a spirited American retelling of an English classic . . . . Boone brings both worlds vividly alive with his ebullient prose. A joyously ambitious debut!”
—Marianne Wiggins, Pulitzer and National Book Award nominee for Evidence of Things Unseen
“Furnace Creek has everything brilliant novels have . . . It is also wickedly funny, that rare novel full of charming humor and sharp cultural commentary at every turn.”
—Dana Johnson, Flannery O’Connor Award for Break Any Woman Down
“A sweeping, Gothic tale of sex, race, and a young man’s education. I was totally entertained and, most of all, seduced.”
—Viet Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer
“A playful reimagining of Dickens, a tautly plotted thriller, a beautifully observed coming of age story: Furnace Creek . . . seizes you from the beginning and refuses to let you go.”
—Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, author of Becoming Dickens and The Turning Point: The Year that Changed Charles Dickens and the World
“The love of literature hinges not just on beautiful writing but on an awareness that the stories of the past have a lot to teach us in the present. By transposing Dickens into our own era, Boone demonstrates just that—and also shows that those stories belong to all of us, regardless of our gender, sexuality, or time in history.”
—Lewis di Simone, Gay and Lesbian Review International
“The richness of [its] characters makes Furnace Creek work brilliantly. But more: Boone gives them stories that compel the reader to see them as individuals in a specific time and place. Boone’s writing . . . is at times lyrical, memorable, and always in service to the story.”
—Barry Qualls, Southern Review of Literature
No one can outdo Dickens when it comes to creating characters that hold; but what Dickens couldn’t do that Boone can is give [Great Expectations] a modern twist by exploring the inner life of his teenage protagonist, which is as turbulent as the times . . . A wonderful novel with psychological depth to match a period in American history that was both stormy and exhilarating. Boone is a masterful writer.”
—Molly Engelhardt, Books Cover to Cover
“No single review could possibly encompass the abundance of lives and life underway in [this] novel—nor should anyone wish it to. That’s why we read books like this one: to get happily lost in their capacious, prodigious pages. A satisfyingly substantial libation built upon a potent spirit.”
—Greg Bills, author of Fearful Symmetry and Consider This Home
For years I didn’t realize why it was called furnace creek, even though I’d been uncovering bullets in the vicinity ever since I was old enough to explore the creek on my own. The bullets in question were misshapen slugs of Confederate vintage, buried in the flinty soil, scattered in the underbrush, and sometimes wedged between the rough-hewn slabs that made up the sides of that rocky mound built on the steep embankment overlooking the creek. Decades of creeping ivy and a skein of Virginia honeysuckle held the mound in place, frustrating any temptation that its roughened walls might harbor to tumble earthwards.....
That was the “furnace”—a towering outdoor stone oven in which molten lead had once been shaped into the slugs we kids showed off whenever we unearthed them from their recesses one hundred years later. It was one of the countless Civil War relics that haunted the mountains and valleys of Franklin County, reminders of a cause that, long since vanquished, stubbornly refused to vanish. But to my young fancy, the blackened furnace, hidden in the woods on the edge of town, looked more Egyptian than Confederate: it loomed in my childish imagination as a four-sided pyramid whose top had been whacked off twelve feet above the ground...
And whacking off was the fine art I learned there the summer of 1965, lying prone on those grim stones as furnace creek—taking its name from this landmark—churned and chortled through the forested landscape surrounding my perch In that initial onslaught of adolescence, as I was coming into my first and most vivid impressions of a wider world lying in wait just beyond the horizons of my vision, stealthy as a bobcat readying to pounce, I had found a haven for my solitary vice, so recently learned and so eagerly cultivated, on the top of that old relic. Stretched out on its summit and hidden by a shroud of greenery, visible only to unquiet jays hopping from branch to branch overhead, I found a refuge from the domestic surveillance that attended every creaking bedspring or locked bathroom door in my parents’ well-regulated house...
Here, dappled in sunlight that purified the act whose pleasure even then was obscurely related to the guilty suspicion that I ought not be doing what I so obviously wanted to do, I learned to bring myself to delirium with strokes as sensuous as those summer hours of daylight were long. That was the summer when semen still smelled astonishingly fresh, an elixir of unfathomed potency. That was the season of unmediated expectation, when the simple ecstasy of touch was all that was needed to bring me off again and again up in my leafy eyrie, my hideout from the world, ten-bike-minutes away from the chores I was avoiding at home...
How vividly I still remember the day I first came into a sense of my place in the world—that is, my place as something more culpable than a thirteen-year-old boy whose greatest misdeeds to date had been bullying his younger brother, tracking muddy prints across the newly waxed kitchen floor, neglecting his prayers. I was lying atop the furnace on that particularly blazing and humid July afternoon, shirtless and the elastic waistband of my shorts pushed to my knees....
It was that kind of hazy day when the air conspired to look as thick as it felt, so that the sweat generated by the humidity and compounded by my handy exertions swamped me in a lubricant as much a deterrent as a stimulus to satisfaction. My vision had gone white from staring at the sun straight overhead, and just as my pent-up labors verged on completion, a dark fist bore down on my chest, a rasping voice demanded.
“-GIVE ME YOUR NAME, BOY, QUICK!” —and my world turned upside down."Only the mediocre are always at their best."
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
"If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence."
"It is what you don't write that frequently gives what you do write its power."
“Never say you know the last word about any human heart."
“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders."