JANUARY 2021 - AudioFile
Narrator Robert Petkoff performs this imagining of what Nick Carraway’s life was like before he moved to Long Island, next door to the “great” Jay Gatsby. Longing to have a life fuller than working for his father in Minnesota, Nick leaves home to attend Yale and later enlists in the army, serving in the trenches during WWI. Petkoff’s strong and affecting delivery highlights Nick’s maturation from innocent Midwesterner to war-scarred veteran who is trying to rediscover some good in the world. His downplayed portrayals maintain the atmosphere of the novel, allowing the dialogue to flow seamlessly with the narrative. The audiobook ends just where THE GREAT GATSBY begins, as Nick spots the green light at the end of the dock across from his cottage. C.B.L. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
From the Publisher
Praise for Nick Entertainment Weekly's Top Reads to Start 2021 Barnes & Noble Bookseller FavoritesO Magazine's Best Books of the New YearTown & Country 27 Books to Sink Your Teeth IntoGarden & Gun Top-of-2021 Reading List for Southerners
Nick is an exemplary novel. Smith delivers a moving, full-bodied depiction of a man who has been knocked loose from his moorings and is trying to claw back into his own life. —Ben Fountain, New York Times
“Smith, the author of several Southern Gothic novels, is a talented writer who approaches Fitzgerald’s work with reverence and close attention to detail. Anyone who knows The Great Gatsby will hear echoes of that book’s luxurious melancholy… in [its] style that gracefully reflects the rhythms of Fitzgerald’s prose.”—Ron Charles, Washington Post
“A haunting read that will linger long after the last page is read.” —Kate Whitman, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"An evocative glimpse into life amidst World War I...with scenes on wartime battlefields and in New Orleans speakeasies creating more captivating backdrops throughout."—Perri Ormont Blumberg, Southern Living
"Michael Farris Smith paints a smart, vivid picture of a shady, messy world that birthed one of literature's best known characters and has written a must-read for Gatsby fans and newcomers alike.”—Town & Country
“Its impact is profound, its resonance subterranean…Once you dive into NICK, you’ll be held captive. Once you attune yourself to the rhythm of Farris Smith’s voice, you’ll follow him anywhere.”)—Claire Fullerton, NY Journal of Books
“A dark and often gripping story that imagines the narrator of The Great Gatsby in the years before that book began…Smith is a talented writer known mainly for his gritty evocations of violence, struggle, and loss…The new Nick is a man fully realized, with a mind tormented by the war and by a first love that waned too fast to a fingernail moon of bitter memory…A compelling character study and a thoroughly unconventional prequel.”—Kirkus
"Noir is as adaptable as a writer dares to make it, which Smith shows in this compelling prequel to The Great Gatsby."—Bill Ott, Booklist
“It is a brave and ambitious project to write the backstory of Nick Carraway, the narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s American classic, The Great Gatsby, but that is what Michael Farris Smith does in his sixth novel, Nick…Smith’s descriptions of warfare are cinematic, chilling and unforgettable…In style and theme, this Nick will remind readers of another Nick: the character Nick Adams of Ernest Hemingway’s best short stories.”—Alden Mudge, BookPage
“Anybody who believes that the war is over when the enemy surrenders and the troops come home needs to read Michael Farris Smith’s masterful new novel NICK. Its stark, unvarnished truth will haunt you.”—Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of EMPIRE FALLS and CHANCES ARE…
"With precise yet lyrically striking prose, Michael Farris Smith weaves a tale of love, loss, the lasting trauma of war, that deeply inhabits the damaged psyches of an array of people. The title figure of Nick offers a soul for the ages, one that finally and deftly slips into the canon."—Jeffrey Lent, author of the bestselling In the Fall and Before We Sleep
“Nick is, sentence by sentence, scene by scene, an atmospheric masterpiece of imagination and prose. With scenes that take your breath away and forget to give it back, Smith takes us on an immersive and redemptive journey that travels from the trenches of the Great War, to Paris, to New Orleans and beyond.”—Patti Callahan, New York Times bestselling author of Becoming Mrs. Lewis
“Stylish, evocative, haunting and wholly original, Michael Farris Smith has paid tribute to a classic and made it his own. A remarkable achievement that should sit at the very top of everyone’s must-read list.”—Chris Whitaker, author of We Begin at the End
"Every once in a while an author comes along who's in love with art and the written language and image and literary experiment and the complexity of his characters and the great mysteries that lie just on the other side of the physical world, writers like William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx. You can add Michael Farris Smith's name to the list."—James Lee Burke, New York Times bestselling author and two-time Edgar Award winner
Praise for Blackwood
"Mr. Smith is a gifted writer whose lean, mean, prose underscores an extraordinary talent for creating atmospheric, vividly described scenes and characters....atmospheric and riveting." —Susan Pearlstein, Pittsburg Post Gazette
"Miraculously beautiful...Smith's prose is both raw and poetic, like opera sung at a honky-tonk. His books are tinged with reverence, an intangible and nearly religious grace that watches over the often brutal events he describes, hinting at the possibility for redemption even in the most debased." —Ivy Pochoda, LA Review of Books
"Smith's eye lingers on those elements of the Southern experience most people look right past...In the South of Smith's fiction, no portion of our landscape is too humble or hardscrabble to warrant study." —Matthew Guinn, Mississippi Clarion Ledger
Praise for The Fighter
"One of those wonderful and rare books that's both a page-turner and a novel of great depth and emotion. The Fighter is Southern noir at its finest."— Ace Atkins, New York Times bestselling author of The Fallen and The Sinners
"Michael Farris Smith is so good, I might actually hate him a little bit. The Fighter is a book I wish I'd written but am deeply grateful I got to read. It is a masterful portrait of place and character and how one influences the other, with language that is both brutal and tender at once. Smith loves Jack Boucher and the Mississippi Delta to the bone."— Attica Locke, author of Bluebird, Bluebird
"I loved The Fighter. Michael Farris Smith is one of the most exciting new voices in American fiction. Just as I couldn't put down Desperation Road till I finished, I tore through this novel as well. I'm hooked." — Brad Watson, author of Miss Jane
Praise for Desperation Road
"Desperation Road is an elegantly written, perfectly paced novel about a man and woman indelibly marked by violence. Characters who would be mere stereotypes in a lesser writer's hands are fully realized, and we come to care deeply as they attempt to create a better life for themselves. An outstanding performance." — Ron Rash
"Michael Farris Smith is one of the best writers of his generation, and this very well may be his best work—taut, tense, and impossible to put down."— Tom Franklin, author of Crooked Letter
"Michael Farris Smith's Desperation Road reads as if it were forged in a fire stoked by the ghosts of Carson McCullers, Larry Brown, and William Gay. The result is a novel rife with violent beauty and incredible grace. Smith's terse, muscular prose encapsulates a heart that renders this novel as rich and alive and wounded as any you'll find in contemporary fiction." — Wiley Cash, New York Times bestselling author of A Land More Kind Than Home and This Dark Road to Mercy
Library Journal
11/01/2020
Nick Carraway is the narrator of The Great Gatsby, but very little is known of his life before he arrived on Long Island. This latest novel from Smith (Desperation Road; The Hands of Strangers) imagines his backstory. Serving as a soldier in World War I, Nick spends dark and lonely nights reminiscing about his childhood in Minnesota, the tragedy of his mother's illness, and the love of his life, Ella. Juxtaposing violent scenes of warfare and loss with his memories of love and family, Smith envisions Nick as an amalgamation of grief, empathy, and violence. Disillusioned after the war and wanting to avoid the dullness of his hometown, Nick heads to New Orleans, where he falls into alcoholism, destitution, and a convoluted arsonist plot. However, much as Fitzgerald wrote the character, Nick is merely witness to, never involved with, the stories and personalities constellating around him. VERDICT Those expecting a prequel to The Great Gatsby will be disappointed, but just as Fitzgerald dismantled the myth of American exceptionalism with The Great Gatsby, Smith punctuates the longing and despair that underlie the American dream with this work.—Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY
School Library Journal
08/01/2021
This eponymous novel introduces readers to Nick, an American soldier, so captivated by a woman in Paris that that he contemplates not returning to the horrors of the battlefield. This imagining of the life of The Great Gatsby's Nick Carraway includes flashbacks to a childhood with his deeply depressed mother leading to a difficult journey that includes numerous traumas, from events in the trenches and tunnels that would send him home with well-deserved and understandable PTSD, to the loss of his lover and their baby. Nick, initially presented as a young, educated man, commenting that his favorite books were written by Dostoyevsky and Turgenev, has a postwar life that is no easier. He finds himself in pre-Prohibition New Orleans, a world of drugs and violence. There, he becomes unwittingly involved in another doomed romance, through which he will be given a way to see his world and the part he has played in it, preparing him to start a new life. The text also grows more literary as Nick matures, beginning with large sections made up of short, choppy sentences and long, rambling run-on sentences that omit punctuation marks such as quotation marks, commas, and hyphens. VERDICT A book that libraries with and readers of The Great Gatsby will want to have in their collection.—Betsy Fraser, Calgary Public Library, Canada
JANUARY 2021 - AudioFile
Narrator Robert Petkoff performs this imagining of what Nick Carraway’s life was like before he moved to Long Island, next door to the “great” Jay Gatsby. Longing to have a life fuller than working for his father in Minnesota, Nick leaves home to attend Yale and later enlists in the army, serving in the trenches during WWI. Petkoff’s strong and affecting delivery highlights Nick’s maturation from innocent Midwesterner to war-scarred veteran who is trying to rediscover some good in the world. His downplayed portrayals maintain the atmosphere of the novel, allowing the dialogue to flow seamlessly with the narrative. The audiobook ends just where THE GREAT GATSBY begins, as Nick spots the green light at the end of the dock across from his cottage. C.B.L. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2020-07-29
A dark and often gripping story that imagines the narrator of The Great Gatsby in the years before that book began.
Nick grows up in a Minnesota “neighborhood of sidewalks and shade trees” and goes to Yale and then to war. On leave in Paris, he’s with a woman he loves for too short a time and loses her. He survives the trenches, the scuttling over no man’s land, the tunnels where a man alone listens for the sound of the enemy setting explosives. On his way home, he makes a detour to New Orleans and finds himself “privy to the secret griefs” (as he says in Gatsby) of a brothel owner and her estranged husband, a war veteran scarred by mustard gas and stifled love. Smith is a talented writer known mainly for his gritty evocations of violence, struggle, and loss in the U.S. South, such as those in Blackwood(2020). Here he creates, in the war and New Orleans, nightmarish worlds where Nick reckons with demons and maybe redemption. These are places far from the staid tension and off-stage deaths of Gatsby. Smith inevitably goes well beyond the sparse biographical details—Yale, the Midwest, the family hardware business, World War I, and bond trading—that F. Scott Fitzgerald provided for his narrator, who exists to bring other lives into view, not expose his own. The new Nick is a man fully realized, with a mind tormented by the war and by a first love that waned too fast to a fingernail moon of bitter memory. Whatever Smith had in mind when he began this project, he could have many readers wondering in some meta-anachronism how Fitzgerald’s Nick could fail to allude to any of the hell Smith puts him through.
A compelling character study and a thoroughly unconventional prequel.
