About this item
Highlights
- "[Delaney] cares about details and understands their importance to the larger themes of loss, desperation, and betrayed loyalties.
- About the Author: Edward J. Delaney is an award-winning author, journalist, filmmaker, and educator whose previous works of fiction include The Acrobat, The Big Impossible, Follow the Sun, and Broken Irish, published by Turtle Point Press.
- 336 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Literary
Description
About the Book
"1958. A horrific road death on the edge of a small reservation in central Wyoming sets into motion years of pent-up recrimination by the people of nearby Suncreek. Its sheriff threatens to use the event to make an example of the teenage driver, Nelson Antelope. Agent Tim Hubbard of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a Korean War vet who came here as a retreat from harder realities, decides to thwart that effort. Hubbard begins the difficult search for Nelson Antelope but can only get there through understanding the century of friction that has boiled in this remote and arid place. The white residents of Suncreek deeply resent the Towhoc tribe's windfall - oil deposits that have turned the desolate reservation into something of sudden value. But the tribe struggles with its newfound money, which has brought them a modicum of wealth for which they have been swindled and abused. Hubbard journeys deep into a reservation he has never truly known. In its recesses, he has moments that are dreamlike in their dark truths and gothic in their grim lessons. Despised by the tribe and the whites alike, Hubbard must understand how he came to be a stranger in this strange place, hiding in a uniform without knowing what he has become. In his pang of duty, he sets into motion conflict and violence. His marriage is crumbling and he has lost faith in himself. He begins to push back against the judgment, greed, resentment, and emptiness he sees all around him, but also sees what lies deep within himself. A batch of dusty reports from a long-ago agent named Dorrance tell a parallel story and inform Hubbard's own. Dorrance exits the Civil War wounded and discharged and finds work as a correspondent for Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune. Post-war, Greeley recruits Dorrance to lead an ambitious, if naèive, effort at Utopianism. He works in Colorado and then Wyoming, reluctantly stewarding a small tribe adjusting to the first shocks of internment. Hard Margins is about captive people and their desire to escape their fates, and of the captors who desire equally to escape theirs"--Book Synopsis
"[Delaney] cares about details and understands their importance to the larger themes of loss, desperation, and betrayed loyalties. His characters are . . . fully realized, familiar people, whose failures are heartbreakingly authentic." --The Boston Globe
A Bureau of Indian Affairs agent in a remote Wyoming reservation reckons with the clash of cultures, his own failings, and the attempted destruction of a people.
Five teenagers take a joyride through the barren landscape of a small Wyoming reservation. Only four survive. It's 1958, and the death triggers years of pent-up tensions between the town of Suncreek and the members of the Towuk tribe. The locals barely subsist in a tenuous small-town existence; the Towuk are still mourning the loss of their long-gone way of life. The white residents of Suncreek deeply resent what they see as the Towuk tribe's windfall--oil deposits that have turned the desolate reservation into something of sudden value. But the tribe struggles with its newfound money, which has brought them a modicum of wealth for which they have been swindled and abused.
The town's sheriff threatens to make an example of the teenage driver, Nelson Antelope. Tim Hubbard of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a troubled Korean War vet, acts to thwart that effort and protect the boy. Shut out by the tribe, Hubbard finds guidance in the archived reports from an earlier agent named Dorrance. A protégé of Horace Greeley and his Utopianism, Dorrance was recruited to make farmers out of a horse-borne nomadic tribe--and thus force hard boundaries on how and where they could exist. The dual tales of Hubbard and Dorrance chronicle these conflicted stewards and the devastating toll their reluctant mission takes on a culture not their own.
Morally complex and fully relevant to today's issues of freedom and land occupation, Hard Margins is about captive people and their desire to escape their fates, and the captors who desire just as fervently to escape theirs.
Review Quotes
Praise for HARD MARGINS
"In the West, as in Faulkner's South, the past isn't dead. It isn't even past. Edward J. Delaney's gripping new novel captures the dashed hopes and stifled ambitions that are too often avoided in telling the story of Manifest Destiny. Hard Margins is an achievement, as starkly beautiful as the landscape it describes."
--David Wright Faladé, author of The New Internationals and Black Cloud Rising
"Taut and atmospheric, Hard Margins is a gripping read about people pushed to their limits--and sometimes beyond. It kept me up all night. This fine a novel all too rarely comes along."
--Steve Yarbrough, author of Stay Gone Days
"In this remarkable novel, we have the rare opportunity of reading about the modern-day West as it really is: the discovery of oil on the tribe's land is 'the complicated windfall of a dying tribe, ' producing a toxic dependency like the per capita checks the agent gives out every month. And yet there is hope . . . even in the agent's final realization that 'his fate is now only in seeing this through.'"
--Sallie Bingham, author of Taken by the Shawnee
Praise for Edward J. Delaney
"A masterpiece." --Library Journal (starred review)
"Beautifully and heartbreakingly balanced." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[Delaney] demonstrates great dexterity and storytelling acumen in his lyrical page-turner." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Muscular and taut. . . . A great story that reaches into a reader's life [and] poses important questions about people, fate and community." --Shelf Awareness
"Edward J. Delaney is an enormously gifted writer." --Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Late City
"If you're anything like me, you Will. Not. Be. Able. To. Stop. Reading." --David Abrams, author of Brave Deeds
About the Author
Edward J. Delaney is an award-winning author, journalist, filmmaker, and educator whose previous works of fiction include The Acrobat, The Big Impossible, Follow the Sun, and Broken Irish, published by Turtle Point Press. He is the recipient of a PEN/New England Award for Fiction, an O. Henry Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. He lives in Bristol, Rhode Island.