Goodnight, Nebraska
Copyright © 1999
by Tom McNeal
Random House
How to Buy
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July. Nebraska. Saturday Afternoon. At McKibben's Mobil Station,
prudently situated at the intersection of Highway 20 and Main Street, a
boy, a loner, is the only passenger to step down from the bus. Randall
Hunsacker is seventeen, and the small farm town of Goodnight,
Nebraska, is his punishment. It's also his last chance to escape events
back home — a shooting, a car crash, a family in disarray. And even
as he resists absorption into this strange small community, Randall will
become a part of it. Goodnight, Nebraska is a stunning first novel
about small-town America, where high school football, pheasant hunting and
the Friendly Festival are as vital as the wheat harvest. In Randall, Tom
McNeal creates an outcast whose redemption lies in Goodnight; and in
Goodnight's citizens, he creates an unforgettable populace. Goodnight,
Nebraska is Randall's story but it's also the story of the town that
takes him in, of the widow Lucy Witt, the Lockhardt family, the Eleventh
Man Bar and Grill, and the Sleepy Hollow Trailer Court. — from the
jacket
Tom McNeal's Goodnight, Nebraska is the most quintessentially
American novel I've read since Richard Russo's Nobody's Fool.
Tough-minded and tender, funny and sad, unfailingly entertaining and
dramatic, Goodnight, Nebraska is character-driven fiction at its
best. And Mr McNeal's harshly beautiful Nebraska landscape and dark little
prairie towns are as vivid and true as Ivan Doig's Montana. When award time
rolls around this year, look for Goodnight, Nebraska to be right on
the list. I read it in one rapt sitting. — Howard Frank Mosher
With a remarkable understanding of the fleeting yet often monumental
compromises that form human life, Tom McNeal captures the essence of
small-town American existence. In clear and confident prose, he evokes
with deep feeling the passing of time, the security of belonging somewhere,
the sweet sadness of settling for something less than you wanted.
I enthusiastically recommend this splendid first novel. — Willie
Morris
Combine Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio with John Cheever's
Wapshot Chronicle and you'll have a sense of the zest, humanity,
and hard-won wisdom that Tom McNeal has found in his small Nebraska
town. It's a piquant novel, full of aching charm, as big-skyed as its
landscape, and one of the most engaging views of life on the Great Plains
that I have yet to come across. — Ron Hansen
Bruce Springsteen's album Nebraska evokes the
spare spirit of the Midwest perhaps better than anything in American
music. Terence Malik's haunting Badlands does the same thing in
American cinema. Now, Goodnight, Nebraska, a phenomenal debut
novel by Tom McNeal, accomplishes in literature what The Boss and Malik
did for the Great Plains in other forms....Like the later stories of
Raymond Carver, Goodnight, Nebraska demonstrates
that under the callused hands and hearts lies a soft-beating hope —
the chance
for reconciliation and acceptance. McNeal has written an uncommonly human
novel; he describes a landscape where, however briefly, the numbness
disappears and things as insignificant as interlocked hands, a simple
statement,
or even a drive on dirt roads means something larger, the promise of
something better. — BookPage
An irresistibly engaging novel, full of all the things that matter:
character, chance, compromise, sex, and violence. — Pete Dexter
...McNeal's description is masterful, like a winter so cold that
"pheasants turned into the wind and died where they stood." —
Nebraska Life
...impressive... — Publishers Weekly
The intensity of desperation in the American heartland marks this first
novel by McNeal, as married life for a young Nebraska couple proves
rocky, and even rockier for the bride's long-married parents. —
Kirkus Reviews
The story of their marriage, and that of Marcy's
parents, explores the small, unremarkable moments on which lives and
loves turn for better or worse, for life or death. A fine first novel.
— Library Journal
Few novels written today make the reader want to leap inside
and join the action. Goodnight, Nebraska,
McNeal's first novel, is just
one of those gems. His story about love and hatred, loss and
redemption in small-town America truly is a phenomenal piece
of prose. Goodnight — the name of the town at the center of the
story — dispels any rose-colored images of rural life. The harsh,
realistic depiction of the meanness and evil produced from
ignorance and isolation is reminiscent of lives in Truman
Capote's In Cold Blood. Still, McNeal's mythical small town
remains warmly compelling, and as its name suggests,
dreamlike, otherworldly, and outside of time. His storytelling is
magnificent, deftly changing time, place, and narrator to create
a spellbinding plot. — Booklist
You'll want...to buy copies for all your reading friends. McNeal's writing
is thoughtful and clear. He breathes full, throbbing life into some two
dozen characters, each so startlingly vivid that the book can be read
straight throughout without a single pause to sort them out. — San
Francisco Chronicle & Examiner
What a remarkable debut! Tom McNeal has...created a small town that is as
vivid and alive as Sinclair Lewis's Zenith, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg,
Ohio, and Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon. — Denver Post
Deft, touching, and humorous. In the tradition of Richard Ford, Raymond
Carver, and Anne Tyler. — Christian Science Monitor
Stunning. A really wonderful novel; strange, sensuous, bold and unbearably
moving. It is also haunting, lyrical and morally complex. McNeal is
persuasive on the subject of love and its variations and his writing
implies the wisdom of perspective. — The Sunday Times of London
With a slow, sympathetic meticulousness, McNeal delves into the history and
feelings of a whole community and exposes its gentle, ordinary heart.
By page 50, you're in thrall to its clutch of small dramas; by 300,
you're dreading
its end. — The London Gazette
One of the season's best first novels....Gentle and bighearted." —
Adrienne Miller, Esquire
...a phenomenal debut novel....Like the later stories of Raymond Carver,
Goodnight, Nebraska demosntrates that under the
callused hands and hearts lies a soft-beating hope. — Book Page
Tom McNeal's novel is a splendid, rich piece of work evoking the bleak
small town. Life here is a chore. Little exists to breathe vitality into it.
Except McNeal's art. — St Louis Post Dispatch
One to go to bed with — ;a top night-time read. With stunning
precision, McNeal offers us a Little House on the Prairie for the
Nineties. — Tatler (London)
The questions at the heart of this wonderfully complex novel are: "What
happens to a dream deferred?" and "What is the price of deceit?" The ways
those questions are posed and answered are well-crafted, surprising,
complex, and, at times, beautiful. — Dallas Morning News
An enthralling, irresistible book. McNeal gets it, delivering a strong,
true look at the lives of ordinary people. — Lincoln Journal
Star
Must read. A miraculous first novel, in which McNeal has taken the
unpromising subject of a boy's absorption into a small town and created a
literary work that's compelling and unforgettable. — New Woman
(UK)
Goodnight, Nebraska is a complex, often suspenseful, and always
beautifully told story whose finale will, but shouldn't, surprise you.
— San Diego Reader
A strange, bumpy, and memorable trip through smalltown USA...a compelling
journey into the heart of American life. — Redbook
McNeal has written a novel at once humorous, absorbing and dark,
as much about the shadowy side of human nature as it is about the good.
There is great sadness here, and tenderness. But most of all, there is a
depth of humanity that many authors never attain. — Norfolk
Virginian-Pilot
Randall Hunsacker steps off the bus already resisting Goodnight, and we
resist it along wtih him, though we all will be won over....McNeal's sense
of character is as truthful as his sense of place. — The Boston
Globe
An old show-biz adage has it that you're supposed to leave the crowd
begging for more, and does Tom McNeal ever. McNeal's finger isn't on the
town's pulse: He has opened up the chest, and has his hands around its
heart. — The San Diego Union Tribune
Completely compelling. A beautifully drawn portrait of a town that at once
confines and cradles the people who grow up in it. — Linda Wertheimer,
NPR, All Things Considered
Fans of Larry Watson's work should also appreciate this first novel from Tom
McNeal. It's the frequently gripping story of a troubled youth, off to a bad
start in Utah, who gradually regains his bearings in a small Nebraska
farming
community. McNeal's short story experience is in evidence in his ability to
establish strong characters and realistic settings in an economical fashion.
The character types should be recognizable to anyone familiar with life in
towns too small for secrets. — The Independent Reader
A vivid, tender and thoughtful portrait of a Great Plains farm town. These
sad, secret stories bring out McNeal's most assured writing, and are his
finest and most lasting gifts to the reader. — Los Angeles Times
Describing Great Plains communities that, "like weeds, spring up
when it rains, dry up when it stops," Wright Morris once noted, "The
withered towns are empty, but not uninhabited." This predicament — in
which the landscape's sheer vastness overwhelms its residents — has
always captivated American writers. In the hands of authors as varied as
Willa Cather and Jane Smiley, the region's endless skies and vistas can
seem as oppressive as the shadowy confines of a jail cell. Fitting squarely
within this tradition, Tom McNeal's first novel, Goodnight, Nebraska,
delivers us deep into that part of the heartland where just-plain-folks go
quietly stir-crazy, even as they're cheerily waving "Howdy" from their
pickup trucks....haunting in its descriptive details....a meticulous
rendition of the gritty reality of smalltown life. McNeal
is aware that many more of us will accept the
sadness we know than will venture out in search of a possibly painful
unknown — and he renders Marcy's final decision in language whose very
plainness feels musical. Resignation has seeped into the pores of all his
characters, and it is this quality that he illuminates most
effectively....
— New York Times
Goodnight, Nebraska by Tom McNeal is a stunning first novel about
small town America. — Ritter Book Reviews
Goodnight, Nebraska is, quite simply, a tale of the American
Desolate. It is a story than can only happen in the barrens of Utah
that becomes a story that can only happen in the sorrow of Nebraksa.
A story of how lonely can become lonesome. A story of a young man and
the tragedy his life must become before redemption can be found in the
arms of reconciled love. ... The small society he creates is a mixture
of Main Street and Gomorrah, a town hwere everyone claims to be innocent,
no one can leave, and everyone pays for their sin. To tell of the most
striking element of this work would be to spoil the sick surprise that
turns into redemtption, communion in a parched land. — Timothy
Black, Nebraska Territory
Tom McNeal expertly creates and accumulates a collage of characters in Goodnight,
Nebraska who either dysfunctionally, capriciously, or resignedly cope with their human,
or inhuman, conditions. ... Is it a good read? You bet. Take it along on vacation. Lend it
to your friends and chew on it with coffee or a brew, but watch out for Frank Mears.
— Mary Jo Raff, Nebraska Territory
Once I started reading it, I didn't want to put it down and I didn't want it to end. —
Rod Wagner, Nebraska Center for the Book News
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What the Critics Say
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