Mountain Road at Night - Scenic Landscape Wall Art for Home & Office Decor - Perfect for Living Room, Bedroom, or Workspace

Alan Rossi’s Mountain Road Late at Night is a brilliant first novel, which deals with what William Faulkner spoke of in his Nobel acceptance speech, “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.” This debut will find a place in our literary tradition, our best writers’ textual conversations about what it means to be human. It is written in fluid stream of consciousness - much of it set in the beautiful backdrop of North Carolina’s gorgeous Blue Ridge Mountains. In a photo journal about the setting written for editor Pan Macmillan, Mr. Rossi wrote that these are “old, old mountains mountains, rounded by time on a scale we can’t imagine, though we might be able to name it.” Polarities such as knowing but not knowing and fusion of western and eastern worldview are threaded through all elements of the novel. In the photo journal, he shares that he meditates silently for seven or eight hours for three or four days each year in a cabin that inspired the one where Nicholas, April, and their four year old son Jack lived before the couple was killed after a party late one night. (The photo journal is available at panmacmillan.com) Nicholas and April left no will and so the question of which family member/s will raise Jack is the central conflict, which we see through the perspectives of four narrations. As they grapple with raw grief, we see that Nicholas’s brother Nathaniel, his mother Katherine, and April’s mother Tammy have vastly different perspectives on who is best suited to do that. Nathaniel struggles with his ensuing angst on page one “on the unasked but deeply felt question, what did the boy want and need? The answer was both too simple and too impossible to approach: Jack wanted his parents.” Nathaniel is an indecisive but good man. The prologue to the section from The Four Great Bodhisattva Vows is apt: “Beings are numberless, I vow to save them all....Enlightenment is unattainable, I vow to attain it fully.”Polarity and paradox are, in fact, embodied in each character. We feel compassion for Katherine when she is pathetically consumed by self pity because she is aging and feels written off, as if “the universe has said thank you for your service.” And again when she cries for her young colleague Kylie Newman who has not yet experienced anything like the profound suffering she herself is living with the loss of her son Nicholas. Katherine knows that inevitably similar devastation is surely “coming for” Kylie, too.Each character experiences simultaneous longing for connection and embrace of separateness as each of those is a conduit of both joy and pain. Tammy’s thoughts one night during her lonely cross country drive to Jack’s home in the Blue Ridge Mountains elucidate this. “We’re none of us going to the same place - that was what the car represented. Isolation and separateness...the valley below populated with tiny lights of so many separate lives, lives that would never really know one another, lives as distant as galaxies, separated by light years.”The final devastating chapter is narrated by Nicholas between midnight and 6 AM as he is dying on a rainy, cold spring night: he is the epitome T.S. Eliot’s “infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.” Its impossible not to deeply love him, this 21st century man so reminiscent of Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. The prologue from The True Dharma Eye, Case 81 asks, “How is it being in the midst of illumination?” And as Nicholas is wracked with unthinkable pain, his answer seems to be recollections of his and April’s quest to “live off the grid,” to be their best selves and to live with “immediacy.” He, in turn, questions whether this was mere delusion, but instead comes to understand that life and death are part of each other. That he is afraid to die but grateful for the marvelous experience of living. And finally that his love for Jack is his essence. The prose is poetic as he conjures thumbnails of his sons’ future: “ Jack forgetting them, Jack becoming Jack, Jack’s life moving in a slow bloom outward like a flower opening and all the people doing exactly as he and April had done...trying to be there for him.” And in the end, “fear and awe and foolishness and gratitude.... the first flashing blue lights lighted the treetops.” Illumination.Mountain Road Late at Night “grieves on the universal bones” William Faulkner spoke of in his Nobel Prize speech. It is easily among the five best books I’ve ever read, what Faulkner would call a story of the human “spirit capable of compassion, sacrifice, and endurance.”