Thief of Dreams - Hardcover

John Yount is the author of five critically acclaimed novels: Wolf at the Door, The Trapper’s Last Shot, Hardcastle, Toots in Solitude, and Thief of Dreams. A longtime professor at the University of New Hampshire, he has been the recipient of grants from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. According to John Irving, Yount is “a completely original voice in contemporary American fiction.”

This novel by the author of Hardcastle (St. Martin's, 1984) and Toots in Solitude ( LJ 1/84) is what a plain-writing William Faulkner might have done. Madeline Tally has gone back in a trailer to her parents' hill farm in 1948 North Carolina with her 13-year-old son James after leaving her drunken, wandering husband, Edward. But running away is not enough, and both Madeline and Edward find that absence still makes the heart grow fonder. This confounds James, who, in turn, runs away to confront nature, thinking it simpler, only to run afoul of its impersonality. All learn which dreams, or feelings, are to be taken seriously, which kept in their place. The narrative technique recalls Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, while James's maturation by confronting nature, along with vivid hunting and fishing scenes, evokes Go Down, Moses. Warm, human; recommended in its own right.
- Kenneth Mintz, formerly with Bayonne
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