Saturday Review: “Writing The Hurt” a review by John Lang in NCLR Online Winter 2024 of Charles Dodd White. A Year without Months (2022)
TW: the full review contains writing about abuse and self-death
Lang lets us know that “This new book is a deeply moving collection of fourteen essays, most of them “written ‘as a piece’” (xi), says White…” and that these are nonfiction pieces, drawing on White’s upbringing in Georgia and North Carolina.
Lang doesn’t shy away from the list of awful things White’s family members have done, and course-corrects the review with, “So grim a catalogue of the flaws in these people and the resulting pain they experience might make A Year without Months seem overwhelmingly depressing. Not so, however, because White is also attentive to their positive traits and their persistent capacity for acts of kindness and love…”
Reading these essays and the trauma between White, his father, and his son, it comes as no surprise that, as Lang reminds us, “Father-son relationships are also the principal focus of White’s first novel, Lambs of Men (2010; reviewed in NCLR 2011), whose composition he describes in “What We Gain in the Hurt,” the essay from which this review draws its title.”
Read the entire review in the Online Winter 2024 issue out now! And order the book from Bookshop.org or your favorite independent bookseller.
