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This is a 2025 reread, my first Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ review.

"Look, all I'm good for is fighting"- Jack Levitt from "Hard Rain Falling".

I originally read this book in 2010.

I do not recall how I discovered it. All I know is that having read it, it was a gut-wrenching, emotional read. I was truly haunted by what Don Carpenter had achieved.

Now that over a decade has passed since having first read "Hard Rain Falling", I was startled to find myself emotionally drawn to this gorgeous, gritty novel of unrequited queer love between petty criminals: Jack Levitt and Billy Lancing.

Jack is cynical handsome, rough, impenetrable.

Billy Lancing, is also tough, a pool player who's a great shot, plucky and biracial.

According to George Pelecanos� introduction, this novel is one of the greatest underrated products of 60s American fiction. I definitely agree.

Well crafted, and somber, their gorgeously executed tale begins when they meet as youths in Portland, Oregon only to reunite some years later as adults in the San Quentin penitentiary.

Before imprisoned, in San Francisco, Jack finds himself hanging out with the wrong crowd: Denny Mellon, and two underaged girls, Mona and Sue.

Jack is arrested after an attempt to a rob a bank goes awry, and tricked into confessing that he molested Mona. Though the sex between Mona and Sue is consensual, he should’ve known better. Billy is imprisoned for passing bad checks.

The point is both men are so numb from their bleak outlook on life that it seems that they don’t care about anything else but the next drink, or any way out of a feeling of constant boredom and loneliness.

Finding themselves in terrifying depths of despair, it’s one of the loneliest portraits I’ve ever read of rage, and being othered, "this was more important than reading all those books about the white world that were such lies even he could see through them" (Carpenter 39).

Their relationship and unlikely love story has been one of the most haunting, sad, and bittersweet relationships I have read in fiction in a very long time.

Billy's loneliness is moving and incredibly palpable through Carpenter's seamless and matter of fact prose, "he was alone, unwanted, un-searched for" (Carpenter 60).

As for Jack, it is identical in his desire to find something bigger in the world, someone to love him, though he won't admit it, "you move from one dream to another and there is no reason for the change" (Carpenter 78).

When Billy tells Jack he loves him, "you and me, we're the connection. You live and I live, and we love each other. Do you know that?" (Carpenter 209), Jack acknowledges this, but is too afraid to admit it in an unforgiving society, "it was awful because he did love Billy, and so he could not speak" (Carpenter 210).

After this declaration of love happens, one of the most haunting moments I have ever read in literature happens, and it has stayed with me.

As Jack muddles on through life after prison- he marries the mercurial Sally, the ex wife of a Hollywood actor in San Francisco. Carpenter then weaves the setting from San Francisco to Las Vegas, and finally Paris and San Tropez where Jack wants to do the right thing: stay off liquor, hold down a job parking cars, and to be honest with his parole officer.

He is not the hedonist he once was. He's come of age, and his character and turnaround complete.

Haunted by Billy's love for him, he and Sally have a son that he names after his lost love, trying to keep his name and memory alive, "he was too busy trying to draw the world into himself" (Carpenter 154).

Carpenter coldly brings the reader back into harsh reality by clinically reminding the reader that love seems to be fleeting, "a penis squirts, and I am doomed to a life of death" (Carpenter 184).

Later when Sally marries her friend Bronson and is now raising little Billy Levitt, it is up to Bronson to try and bring father and son back together- if it were ever to happen.

Ultimately, Jack and Billy's love story has stayed with me. The clean, nonchalant prose is deceptively effective in capturing our attention and in drawing us in a world of bleak motels, poolhalls, and even San Francisco seems bleaker than usual.

The hardness of grey and rain falling pervades each page as if it were both life and blood struggling against the odds, trying to find a way for both these boys to find true happiness. Carpenter's book shows that you can only keep trying.