The Underworld A Novel [Hardcover]

InAn excellent and terse account of a devastating mine fire in Idaho in 1972&taut stretches of introspection and screenplay-ready dialogue [reveal] characters acting against their own best interests&Canty honors labor and thoughtfully challenges the commitment the townspeople make to the thing that is so clearly ruining them.If you haven't spent an evening or two in the grand company of Kevin Canty's work, now is your time to start&Canty's chosen genre is fiction, but he peddles truth.Cantys real genius lies in his subtly drawn depiction of the emotional and psychological landscape of this 'big incomprehensible thing.'Cantys care with prose recalls Raymond Carver, and his empathy for the common man extends a bloodline that reaches back to the likes of John Steinbeck and William Saroyan&Canty has a gift for turning the commonplace into the extraordinary by asking the right questions and allowing the truth to unfold.[P]olished, deeply empathetic&Cantys controlled, spare prose provides an ideal vehicle for excavating these emotional depths&His sculpted, lapidarian cadence deftly navigates the terrain separating numbness and pain&to illuminate the fragility and preciousness of life.Canty offers a masterly story of heartbreak and struggle against fate and bad luck while heroic themes of love and forgiveness carry this memorable novel.Drawing on a true disaster, this brittle, compassionate story tells of a mine fire that devastates a small Idaho town&Canty has a keen eye for details in this setting and suitably dry, spare prose&[A dead-honest encounter with the hearts and minds of working-class America,[Canty] is one of my favorite contemporary writers because of his amazing gift for character and image&For readers of Russell Banks andRichard Ford, a novel about loss,love, and redemption following acatastrophe in a small mining town.