Hard Rain Falling
Tags: crime-fiction, general-fiction,
Don Carpenter’s first novel Hard Rain Falling, is almost as bleak as a book can be. The main character, Jack Levitt, was given up at birth by young, troubled parents who both died young. He was raised in an orphanage where kids had to fend for themselves against the cruelty of others.
Regarding the religion the orphanage administrators had tried to force on the hungry, unloved children, Jack reflects:
It did not take much thinking on their part to see that if Jesus Christ and God approved of the administration of the orphanage, in fact preferred it to home and parents, then they were the enemies of the orphanage children because if that hollow cavity in their souls was the love of God then God was the ultimate murderer of love.
Jack runs away from the orphanage at seventeen and hooks up with a crew of drifters in Portland, Oregon. He finds himself right at home with the gamblers, pool sharks and petty thieves who have to hustle their next meal. He drifts into trouble and ends up in juvenile detention. He’s never had any real love in his life, and all he sees is a faceless system of oppression thwarting him at every turn.
When he sees a sadistic guard abusing a fellow prisoner, he tries to kill him. For that, he’s punished with solitary confinement, spending months in a tiny underground cell with no light at all.
Upon release, he finds himself drifting still. He has no skills, no direction, no understanding of how to make his way in a world where he doesn’t understand the rules. He lives by his appetites, eating, drinking, screwing, sleeping, never sure of where his next dollar will come from.
He’s sent to San Quentin for statutory rape, after sleeping with prostitutes he didn’t know were underage. Morally, he has no problem with prostitution. Hadn’t he himself been a prostitute, he reflects at one point, when he was a boxer, beating up other men with whom he had no beef, doing it just for the money and to entertain other men who didn’t care about either fighter?
He arrives in San Quentin and finds it to be an extension of the orphanage, of the cold and structured institutional upbringing he had known.
He was still trying to absorb the sights and sounds of the prison; it was his new home, and he expected it to be, almost wanted it to be, his home for the rest of his life. Because to think any other way was to hope, and he hoped he had given up hope.
In prison, to his surprise, he finds love for the first time. This experience finally opens him up to change on his release. He chooses to stop drifting, to find some purpose. He marries, feels gratitude for what he has, and he thinks to himself:
People who hadn’t been through the mud, as he had, and by that he meant people who hadn’t dragged themselves through the mud, hadn’t seen society and man at its and his worst as he surely had, were missing the really rich pleasures of life because they had nothing to compare them to.
There is no happy-ever-after ending. Nothing will undo Jack’s fundamental damage. But, faced with a life in which he has no guidance, in which he has to learn everything on his own, the hard way, he does grow and learn.
This book has an unusual rawness and a depth of unsparing intensity. It’s a haunting read. Given its humane but unvarnished views on race and homosexuality, I’m surprised any publishing house had the guts to publish it in 1966. I’m equally surprised it went out of print, and I’m grateful to NYRB for bringing it back.