The Vanishing Moon Hardcover - 2004

Excerpt

The summer of 1931 was a season of dying trees. Had we talked to any of the farmers who lived nearby, we would’ve understood that this blight wasn’t a curse or an omen, simply the habit of a beetle and the fungus it carried. But in the particular stand of woods where we lived there was no talk of Dutch elm disease, nor any of the other plagues that preyed on bark and leaves. Instead, we took the dying trees as a personal insult, an emblem of our lives: the house in Cleveland deserted, Father out of work, and Mother going blind. The trees became a permanent feature of our landscape; stark, implacable teachers instructing us in broken dreams, admonishing us, despite the promise of better times, that most of what we hoped for in life was impossible, that to believe otherwise was impractical, even dangerous.

Media reviews

‘Memory is all,’ says the narrator at the end of The Vanishing Moon. Yes, it is. This novel captures the collective memory of an American working-class family, with all its pain and poetry. In its dramatic sweep, the book becomes nothing less than a history of the twentieth century in the United States. Joseph Coulson is what we used to call (with apologies to the vegetarians) a meat and potatoes storyteller: clear, vivid, big-hearted. So many unheard voices speak and sing through his voice. Listen. —Martín Espada

Joseph Coulson chronicles the American family with enormous intensity. His sense of history is vast, his sense of detail fine, Coulson is the ferryman to that America just beyond – tragic and wondrous. —John Reed

Vanishing Moon is the lyrical account of the Tollman family’s demise, but it is so beautifully crafted that one keeps turning the pages rapidly; that is, when one isn’t stopping to ponder its poignantly poetic phrases depicting the scenery and dynamic characters. —The Historical Novels Review

The Vanishing Moon...explores human frailty with the simplicity and directness of haiku...at times achieves the quiet beauty of William Maxwell's finest work—generous, episodic, elegiac but not sentimental...Coulson seems to want to bring Faulkner to Ohio. —The Nation

Citations

• Booklist, 01/01/2004, Page 820
• Library Journal, 12/01/2003, Page 164