Return To Oakpine: A Novel

(Paperback)

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Description

In this finely wrought portrait of Western American life, Ron Carlson takes readers to the small town of Oakpine, Wyoming, and into the lives of four men trying to make peace with who they are in the world. In high school, these men were in a band. One of them, Jimmy, left Oakpine for New York City after the tragic death of his brother. A successful novelist, he has returned 30 years later, in 1999 - because he is dying. With Carlson's characteristic grace, readers learn what has become of these friends and the different directions of their lives.

Reviews

"A love story and a wilderness adventure that mount to a climax of shocking, and satisfying, violence."
Los Angeles Times

"Carlson never drops an extra word or a false phrase, even as The Signal accelerates like an avalanche...If men can't be brought back to fiction by books as fine as this one, it's their own damn fault."
The Washington Post

"Powerful...a bittersweet love story and a rousing adventure."
The Miami Herald

"Read Ron Carlson's latest, The Signal, and you'll be convinced that the answer to your worries resides in the woods, in getting back to basics....It's a sweet, tidy little book about a broken rancher. And yet it won't just help you pass the time, it will help you out." Esquire

"Long revered as a master of the short story, Carlson has a talent for describing landscape (both internal and external), and that translates here intact. At fewer than two hundred pages, it's beach ready, too."
GQ

"Ron Carlson is probably the best American writer you've never heard of."
The Daily Beast

"Uncommonly fine...Carlson's writing is crisp and blunt, much like the very Wyoming landscape he describes. The Signal is about small, tight things that widen out into immensities. it is about love and regret and the pain of loss and the wild parts of Wyoming." Chicago Tribune

Praise for Five Skies:

"A life-changing work of fiction."


Los Angeles Times

"Carlson's style--low-key, deliberate, reminiscient of both early Hemingway and contemporay James Salter...can turn even a shopping list into a poem."


The Washington Post

"A masterpiece."
The Atlantic

"Ron Carlson's beautifully crafted and emotionally wrenching novel about nonverbal but deep-feeling males in flyover country is more refreshing than an ice-cold Coors." Entertainment Weekly

Praise for Return to Oakpine

Carlsons new novel, with its themes of male friendship and second chances, hoes much the same furrow as his lovely previous books Five Skies and The Signal Carlsons crafted an emotive yet pellucid prose style that conveys the profound spiritual satisfactions of homecoming.The Wall Street Journal

As stirring and memorable and utterly rejuvenating a novel as youll readCarlson infuses these pages with such conviction, such perfectly orchestrated pathosthe book is as lean and structured as a sonnet, and it has a split-focus climax as sharp as an ax.The Washington Post

In this new book of his, Ron Carlson has done a splendid job of making a reader feel at home in OakpineCarlson can sometime sound the music of the entire novel in a single sentence.Alan Cheuse, All Things Considered, National Public Radio

EngagingThese men and their tender, disgruntled families get almost enough to sustain them, but not quite enough to calm the inner cry. These characters will stay with you because this is how we are too.The New York Times Book Review

[An] eloquent and moving novelthe tension that drives Return to Oakpine [is] between what we want to do and what we need to do, between our dreams and our responsibilities.Los Angeles Times

In this novel by an American master, four middle-aged friends, once members of the same high school band, reunite in their Wyoming hometown thirty years later, reconciling the people theyve become with the kids they used to be.O, The Oprah Magazine

Carlson excels in small-town Western Americana, in both embracing and interrogating nostalgia in quiet, controlled prosea humane portrait of the lives we lead and leave behind, peeling back nostalgias gold veneer with grace, empathy, and a pragmatic sense of optimism.Kansas City Star

Author Bio

Ron Carlson is the author of five story collections and four novels, most recently The Signal. His fiction has appeared in Harper's, The New Yorker, Playboy, GQ, Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He is the director of the writing program at the University of California at Irvine.