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Okay. You can go ahead and believe the hype. This thing is pretty great. Initially, based on a few hot steaming barely-legal facials this book has been given on this very website, I was all ready to step up on Hard Rain Falling, throw my hands up in the air, and say, 'What you got, bitch? I di'n't think so.' Or, alternately, serve up the ever-effective 'You ain't bad! You ain't nothin'! You ain't nothin'!' -- in which scenario Hard Rain Falling is played by Wesley Snipes, and my black combat jumpsuit is really, really zippery and buckly. In other words, I served this book a challenge, and it answered accordingly.

I usually don't have high hopes for novels about angry young toughguys because, c'mon, hasn't the angry young toughguy schtick been done to death? When you read another one of these authors going on about another drunken or drugged-out lout who's 'livin' the life' (that's my code-phrase for an authentic®, antibourgeois, antisocial, antiauthoritarian life), you are really tempted -- if you're me -- to fiddle with your hangnail, sigh fortissimo, and let fly something semi-snide like: 'Oh goodie. I'm glad the grossly underrepresented angry young white male demographic finally gets its say in the vagicentric world of 20th-century American literary.' But then, if you read (or don't read) on the basis of these prejudices, the terrorists have won. And you, more importantly, have lost.

Hard Rain Falling is about this kid named Jack Levitt who's really mean and despicable, mostly. Sometimes he just gets a craving to go out and beat the shit out of some random stranger, so he hopes a passerby looks at him funny or brushes up against him on the street so he'll have a reason to unleash the beast. It's really horrifying in a way because it reminds you that there really are Jack Levitts out there in the world, and the only thing that's really protecting you from them is the statistical probability that you probably won't run into one of them.

As a prologue, Carpenter includes a short chapter, set in the 1920s, about Jack's parents who -- if we wanted to be flippant and elitist (which, of course, we do) -- would be described in contemporary culture as paragons of Wal-Mart Culture. I almost think it would have been better if Carpenter would have left out this seedy little prelude because it seems to want to provide some justification or impetus for Jack's later delinquency. But since both his parents died young and Jack grew up in an orphanage, it either appears to suggest (intentionally or not) a biological basis for his badassness or to point at some kind of degenerative contagion infecting and spreading through society in general. At any rate, the prologue (six-and-a-half pages) is not nearly as unfortunate as the epilogue (three-and-a-half pages), which makes an awkward, unsatisfying leap from gritty toughmindedness to a gauzy, sun-dappled coda borrowed from Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night. I really, really despised the epilogue to this book, but because I loved the rest of it so much, I am willing to selectively forget that it ever existed, just as I refuse to believe that the Star Wars prequels were anything but the product of a fever-dream. They were never in fact made. I have to believe that. The religion of my youth depends upon it.

What is truly remarkable about Hard Rain Falling is that it feels refreshingly honest. So many midcentury contenders for 'the great American novel' seem so artificial and burnished to me. It's like when you watch one of those Merchant-Ivory adaptations of an E.M. Forster novel... Life was never really like that. I'm sorry. It just wasn't. This is reality refracted through Forster's concept of 'polite literature' and Merchant-Ivory's concept of 'tasteful filmmaking.' A double refraction, my friends. But yes, even in the rarified halls of Howards End, life was never quite so neat and tidy. How do I know this? I'm a human being, that's how. Ruth Wilcox farted. And Margaret Schlegel queefed. And when people 'only connected' sometimes it was just for a second-rate blowjob. (But -- to rephrase Woody Allen -- even a second-rate blowjob is a-okay in my book.) What I am saying is that there is a messiness in life that literature and art (necessarily) tidies up. We would be frustrated by a novel that was as pointless, random, unstructured, meandering, and unintelligible as real life.

But I think Hard Rain Falling contends with this messiness to a greater extent than do most novels of its era. You won't find anything approaching ethical simplicity in this novel, so if you crave high-contrast moralism, avoid this. Don Carpenter does something fairly noteworthy here. He creates a character (Jack Levitt) who is reasonably unlikeable in an abstract sense; if I listed off his traits, attitudes, and behaviors from most of the novel, you'd be left with a mental image of the bastard offspring of Courtney Love and Dick Cheney. In a word, unsympathetic. And yet... and yet... Carpenter does not trick you into condoning Jack's behavior by providing cheap rationalizations, but he nevertheless creates a real, complex character whom you, the reader, wants to see better himself, on many levels. Carpenter makes you care. And let me tell you... that's hard work! It's hard to make people care about (mostly) uncaring characters.

Carpenter's treatment of race and homosexuality is also worthy of mention here. We can not, with any degree of sincerity, deny that racism and homophobia were significant components of mainstream American culture in the 1950s and 1960s. Hell, we can't deny that they're still fucking things up in a major way even today... not just in America, of course, but everywhere; perhaps the categories of 'otherness' are different in other cultures, but they're almost always there. But when an average black man lives his life, I feel confident saying that racism is a 'mere' fact; now it may be a fact to be combatted or acquiesced to, but there are always other facts. An average black man's life isn't structured like a novel about racism (as an issue to be foregrounded), and Carpenter recognizes that. Ditto for homosexuality. These realities may be more significant and influential to the individual's life, but they never express the totality of experience. I think that many authors tend to fetishize social injustice. It might seem as though I am saying that they overstate it -- which is far from the case; I actually believe that by rendering it so extraordinary, they understate it. I mean, racism is depressing, yes, but racism standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the banal miseries of everyday life is almost unbearable. But this is real life, and I think Don Carpenter does an admirable job of approaching it in a way no author of his generation did.