Publications -- Scholarly:  "Innocents at Home."  Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.  September 27, 1998.  1J, 8J.

At the outset of When Angels Rest, twelve-year-old narrator Donny describes his first lesson in the school of hard knocks.  After one of his schoolmates breaks Donny’s arm with a baseball bat, two others pile the punishment on the already bested young reporter:

"That was Sugrue 'Sog' Alan who slammed the baseball bat down on my arm; Sog was not yet seventeen, too young to be drafted or even to join with his parents' permission, but he was big enough, tough enough, not to have needed the baseball bat; he could've broken my arm with his bare hands if he'd tried.  His best buddy, Larry Duckworth, was only fifteen, but already the handsomest man in Stay More since all the best-looking ones had been drafted or joined up.  Maybe Larry was vain and even jealous of my nice face, for he chose not to break my arm but to blacken one of my eyes.  The only one of them that I might have beaten in a fair fight was Jim John Whitter, who spelled it Witter and maybe was right but whose stupidity kept him a year behind me in school although he was a year older than me.  He took advantage of how the other two had already defeated me to do something he couldn't have done alone: kick me in the groin."

As a prelude to the rest of the story, the breaking of Donny’s arm is as inspired as it is sobering.  Throughout his career, Harington has earned critical praise for the inventive comedy of his novels.  When Angels Rest is Harington’s first new novel since Butterfly Weed (1996), which focuses on the touchingly humorous adventures of Doc Colvin Swain, Stay More’s leading physician.  A deceptively whimsical book, Butterfly Weed is a worthy descendant of the American Humorist tradition, a novel that would do Washington Irving or Mark Twain proud in its ability to spark the reader’s laughter.

When Angels Rest, though, takes a more serious turn right from the opening page.  As a six-year-old, Donny appears prominently in Lightning Bug, one of Harington’s earliest and warmest novels.  But in this latest novel, Donny is forced to come of age, and this maturing process exacts considerable costs from the young narrator.

Set in the final months of World War II, When Angels Rest brings the sweeping effects of international conflict all the way home to Donny and the other residents of remote Stay More.  The title, in fact, makes for a clever pun when reduced to its three-letter abbreviation: when angels rest from their labors, war steps in to fill the void, with all the expected painful consequences.  If truth, as the old saying goes, is the first casualty of war, then innocence is probably the second, a lesson Donny (or "Dawny," as authentic Stay Morons pronounce it) learns firsthand.
 
 

When Angels Rest, in fact, is a novel about the vulnerability of innocence.  In their isolation from mainstream American culture, the Stay Morons have remained charmingly unself- conscious.  As Donny notes early in the novel: "[I]n Stay More there were only two social classes anyhow, with hardly any distinction between them: the poor and the dirt poor – or, from a different perspective, since none of us were starving and all of us were fairly happy, the rich, and the feeling-rich."  Can such innocence survive the angels’ recess?

When Angels Rest does not offer an easy answer to this question.  Donny’s first experience in war combines with his first experience in romantic love, and the progress of both contests is brought masterfully to a single climax at the end of the book.  Love and loss, innocence and experience, life and death – all are wedded to each other in this book. Harington’s epigraph captures the novel’s spirit: "In all the wild imaginings of mythology a fanciful spirit is playing on the border-line between jest and earnest."

Not surprisingly, then, When Angels Rest makes for a more somber reading experience than Harington’s previous novels.  Like Mozart turning from the sprightly themes of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik to the melancholy minor chords of the Requiem, Harington has filled When Angels Rest with the markers of a darker authorial vision.  Harington’s earlier novels jump back and forth between jest and earnest, but they settle pretty clearly on the side of jest, smiling at life, consenting to all of fate’s strange decisions.  But When Angels Rest straddles the line.  The serious elements of Donny’s story earn at least a draw in their tug-of-war with the humorous elements.  It is no coincidence that both Part I and Part II of When Angels Rest end with memorial services.

None of that is to suggest that When Angels Rest is all tears, of course.  Harington is still Harington, the Ozarks’ very own court jester.  From the great War Effort Knit-Off to the army’s frustrated attempts to find secluded Stay More, Harington seldom passes up an opportunity to make the reader laugh.  But the brightly-colored jokes and comic plot developments are cloaked by the great sable overcoat of Donny’s lessons and losses.

Harington is justly pleased with his book’s accomplishment.  To walk – for the full length of a novel – the fine line between comedy and tragedy is no small feat, and he knows it.  "I would raise a point that there's a distinction between comedy and tragedy on the one hand, and jest and earnest on the other hand.  Comedy can be just as much in earnest as tragedy, while tragedy (as I try to show) can be just as much in jest as comedy."

Harington’s observation speaks volumes about his versatile background.  As much at home in the language of literary theory as he is in Donny’s delightfully authentic Stay More dialect, Harington can set the critic straight one moment and jaw amiably with a flannel-shirted Arkansawyer the next.

Visitors to Harington’s study have noted his varied taste in books, nourishment for his wide-ranging imagination and interests.  Over-sized collections of art and photography take up space next to generously-illustrated reference works on botany, the sources of considerable authentic detail in the plant population of Stay More.  Dictionaries of the English language are bolstered by dictionaries of slang and regional dialect, while books on local folk traditions accompany anthologies of classical mythology.

But when it comes to writing novels, Harington’s homework does not end with his personal library, considerable and eclectic though it is.  During the summer of 1997, when Harington worked daily to finish the manuscript of When Angels Rest, his study was also home to works on U. S. Army protocol and medieval Chinese war philosophy.  Among the three-ring notebooks that line the top of Harington’s bookshelves, each labeled with the abbreviated name of one of his novels, the one marked "WAR" contains hundreds of pages of photocopied testimony on the psychological effects of World War II, particularly on country people.

Of course, as the author is quick to point out, he writes fiction, not history.  None of his research would matter if his imagination did not first give birth to ingeniously human stories.  The trick, then, is to express the expansive vision of the artist in the authentic voice of the Arkansawyer.  Much more learned than any of Stay More’s residents, Harington disciplines himself not to let his vastly superior culture dominate the yarns he spins about the humble, uneducated Stay Morons.  It is as if a juggler had donned a straitjacket to make his act doubly impressive.

Small wonder, then, that Harington has been nicknamed the "Faulkner of the Ozarks."  Like the Nobel Prize winner who set his novels in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, Harington ranges his plots back and forth across history, but grounds them consistently in the ‘postage stamp’ of Ozarks soil that he has mapped out so thoroughly in his imagination.

This choice is not without its risks.  By setting all his novels in Stay More, Harington leaves himself particularly open to labeling as a ‘regionalist,’ a term he has always shunned.  To write good ‘regionalist’ novels, Harington well knows, is to have severe limits placed on his achievement – a bit like leading the minor leagues in home runs.

In contrast, Faulkner’s work has managed to avoid the ‘regionalist’ label in large part because of fortunate timing.  His rise to prominence corresponds with the appearance of American literature programs in universities and colleges across the country, where he is now a staple, probably the most read and discussed of all twentieth-century American authors.  Famous for the complexity of his work, Faulkner has benefited enormously from his popularity among scholars and professors of literature.  Thousands of books, articles, and lectures have labored to untangle the complicated family relations and densely-packed prose of Faulkner’s novels and sketch a portrait of the serious writer beneath.

But Faulkner enjoys one other crucial advantage over his Ozark counterpart: his work is, at heart, both tragic and moralistic.  Faulkner’s novels brood over the history of the South like a dark angel, dramatizing its sins and offering itself as a means of redemption.  A pulpit-pounder cleverly disguised as a novelist, Faulkner invites the South to an old-fashioned tent revival in his books, issuing altar calls to the faithful to come and purge themselves of their transgressions.

Harington, on the other hand, declines the urge to moralize.  Like his characters, his stories prefer open air to church pews, an expansive view of the actual stars in heaven to a homily on the Hell that awaits sinners.  In The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, when a string of preachers tries to set up shop in Stay More, the only one who succeeds is Long Jack Stapleton, whose sermons consist of mental "picture-shows" depicting Old Testament stories in scandalously faithful detail.  Stapleton’s version of the story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden focuses not on their sin and the fall, but, instead, on the loving bounty of Creation.  The serpent remains a minor character, while Adam and Eve, the first married couple to enjoy life’s generosity, remain front and center.

Stapleton’s show prompts one believer to observe that Eden looked like nothing so much as Stay More on a nice summer day.  The remark is far more apt than any Stay Moron could ever fully realize, for in Stay More, Harington has imagined a kind of paradise where all the sins the characters commit are finally absorbed and survived with the help of the divinely generous love implicit in all creation.  The morality of Harington’s vision, then, lies in the way his stories encourage us to smile through the tears, to endure hardship without giving in to pessimism, to say yes to life even at its most difficult.

This is the lesson Donny must learn in When Angels Rest.  Harington puts him through several devastating personal losses in the course of the novel.  And Donny’s only possible consolation is a newfound ability to transform his pain into art.  Will Donny embrace this offer, using his newfound creativity to salve his scars, or will he turn it down?  By accepting the artist’s creativity as a means of healing, by saying yes to life, Donny allows the book to take the crucial step up from the level of witty tragedy to deadly serious, triumphantly difficult comedy.

In the choice he gives Donny at the end of When Angels Rest, Harington subtly suggests that he and his narrator share more than a nickname.  If he risks turning some readers away with the backwoodsy Ozark surface of his novels, Harington understands that he runs an even greater risk with readers who fall into the old trap of considering comedy a lesser kind of literature.  Can a writer whose critical reputation has consistently surpassed his sales figures continue saying yes to life by writing serious comedy, or will he finally give in to the seductive bleakness of tragedy?

In When Angels Rest, the author finally chooses to say yes along with his narrator, but the affirmative response here is more difficult than ever before.  Harington’s description of his latest novel makes it clear just how hard he has worked to account for likely criticisms of his work without betraying the deep comedic tradition of the Stay More novels.

"I like to think that WAR is perhaps more accessible to the general reader, from Oregon to Maine, who doesn't want to get bogged down in the Ozark dialect the way my other novels can impede page-turning.  I like to think the story is more universal, liberated from any accusations of ‘regionalism.’  And I like to think that the story is sufficiently compelling, touching, and artistic to engrave the memories of Gentle Reader as well as Ungentle Critic."

While many writers bravely claim to be indifferent to the number of readers they attract, Harington makes no bones about his intention to win a wider audience for his books.  Framed above his study door sits a sign that reads "Stay More, Population 1," a clever reminder that Harington is the sole proprietor of the little Ozarks town he has created.  But each book he writes is an invitation to Gentle Reader to join him and – at least temporarily – double Stay More’s population.

The last sentence of Harington’s description strikes another chord.  Gentle Reader is Donny’s friend and confidant, born the very moment that Sog Alan breaks the young narrator’s arm.  Gentle Reader sits next to Donny in school from that day forward, and remains his companion through frustration and fulfillment.  Gentle Reader embodies both Donny’s personal loss and his artistic gain.

By giving young Donny this Gentle Reader for a companion, Harington arms his narrator with the perspective to overcome tragedy, to find the serious comedy in life.  Like his author, the narrator of When Angels Rest learns to put boundaries around his losses and disappointments, to contain them and transcend them with humor. But this transcendence would be impossible without Gentle Reader.

"So this story, this world, if it will exist at all, will exist only in your mind, for as long as you can hold onto that future tense.  That will be your promise.  Mine will be to find all the stories of Stay More.  We will conspire: my secret to you is that you will be, as you have been, the real creator of this world.  Your secret to me is that you will have known that, all along."