Abbeville

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Until the dot.com bubble burst, George Bailey never gave much thought to why his grandfather seemed so happy.But then George’s wealth vanished, rocking his self-confidence, threatening his family’s security and making his adolescent son’s difficult life even more painful. Returning to the little Central Illinois farm town of Abbeville, where his grandfather had prospered and then fallen into ruin, flattened during the Depression, George seeks out the details of this remarkable man’s rise, fall, and spiritual rebirth, hoping he might find a way to recover himself.Abbeville sweeps through the history of late-19th through early-21st century America—among loggers stripping the North Woods bare, at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, with French soldiers at the Battle of Verdun, into the abyss of the Depression, and finally toward the new millennium’s own nightmares. At the same time it examines life at its most intimate. How can one hold onto meaning amidst the brutally indifferent cycles of war and peace, flood and drought, boom and bust, life and death?In clean, evocative prose that reveals the complexity of people’s moral and spiritual lives, Fuller tells the simple story of a man riding the crests and chasms of the 20th century, struggling through personal grief, war, and material failure to find a place where the spirit may repose. An American story about rediscovering where we’ve been and how we’ve come to be who we are today, Abbeville tells the tale of the world in small, of one man’s pilgrimage to come to terms with himself while learning to embrace the world around him.From Publishers WeeklyPulitzer Prize–winning editorial writer Fuller (Fragments) delivers a resonant, intricate saga of the multigenerational Bailey/Schumpeter family of Abbeville, a farming community in central Illinois. Karl Schumpeter goes to work as a clerk at his uncle's logging outfit before moving at the end of the 19th century to cosmopolitan Chicago to deal in grain futures. Once married, young Karl returns to Abbeville and prospers as an entrepreneur and banker. Almost 40 at the outbreak of WWI, Karl oddly travels to France to serve in the ambulance corps (showing shades of Hemingway, another Illinoisan). Later, after Black Tuesday, Karl's illegal loans to friends and family land him in prison. Impoverished and humiliated, Karl eventually returns home to Abbeville and the shell of his former life. Years later, Karl's grandson, George Bailey, loses his livelihood in the dot-com bust and searches for meaning and strength by examining Karl's earlier travails. However, the dot-com bust pales when juxtaposed to the 1929 crash. The tales of the past generations feel more compelling and immediate. Fuller's a talented writer, and his gifts are on full display when chronicling Karl's life and times. (June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistFuller, author of The Best of Jackson Payne (2000), a superb jazz novel, now turns to a more conventional, multigenerational tale of life in Middle America. Although the story of a grandfather and his grandson, both entrepreneurs who fall on hard times, is less complex structurally and thematically than the saga of saxophone phenom Payne, it, too, finds the deep core of humanity in its characters. George, the grandson, a Chicago financier whose career crashes when the dot-com bubble bursts, turns for guidance to the life of his grandfather, Karl, a Central Illinois businessman, whose fortune was lost in the Depression. Jumping between George and Karl, Fuller moves from logging in Michigan’s North Woods, through commodities trading in early-twentieth-century Chicago, to farming in small-town Abbeville, Illinois, following Karl’s attempts to build a legacy and then to reconstruct a life after the legacy crumbles. Each segment of the story pulses with the emotion of felt life, but it is the cumulative effect, the building realization of what family interconnectedness can mean to the individual, that gives this old-fashioned novel its contemporary power. --Bill Ott