Raft of Stars by Andrew Graff (ISBN-13: 978-0063063143) will be published by Ecco (HarperCollins) this spring. $21.59. Pre-order here or from Andrew Graff’s website.
There is a really wonderful interview of Lidia Yuknavitch, conducted by Marissa Korbel, in The Rumpus, from last February. Among other things, these two writers discuss the need for new types of stories for and about men. In order to dismantle and overcome patriarchal power structures, we need to aim stories at boys that show them different ways of existing in the world than what they’ve traditionally been shown. As a male-identifying writer and former high school teacher, I deeply relate to this. I’ve struggled to find ways to express a positive masculinity in writing, and I’ve seen how reluctant so many of our boys are to dig into reading at all.
And it is this idea that I had in my mind throughout reading Raft of Stars, the debut novel by Andrew J. Graff, out this spring from Ecco (HarperCollins). Because this is a book, at its core, about the inner lives of boys and men.
Graff grew up in Northern Wisconsin and served in Afghanistan before earning his MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. He now lives in Ohio. His knowledge of the midwest suffuses Raft of Stars. The story centers around the journey of two boys, Fischer Branson (“Fish”) and Dale Breadwin (“Bread”), as they struggle together through the woods during a Northern Wisconsin summer, and of the adults in their orbit. The boys flee into the woods after Fish shoots Dale’s abusive father with a revolver, and are pursued by four adults: Fish’s grandfather Teddy and the new Sheriff, Cal, and separately by Fish’s mother Miranda and Tiffany, a young woman in town. (The shooting takes place in the prologue, so this is not a spoiler. If I were on Twitter, I would say “don’t @ me.”) What follows is part adventure story in the Huck Finn tradition (there’s even a raft!), part coming-of-age tale, and part generational family portrait.
The book does many things well. The setting, in the deep woods up in northern Wisconsin, is exceptionally well-rendered and true, as well as providing some of the primary obstacles facing the boys and their pursuers. Many of my favorite passages are such descriptions of the terse beauty of the north woods. The pacing of the book is tight and maintains a strong forward momentum. The prose is often lovely, and the characters are flawed but Graff is generous with them. There is much to recommend in the novel.
Where the book is most successful to me is the tenderness in the male relationships and the way the characters’ inner lives are treated. This is a book that is not afraid of sentiment. It does not hide its emotional core, and that emotional core is deep and genuine male friendship. The men may not always know what to say to each other, but as readers we understand the depths of their feelings. This is important. And by placing vital emotional resonance in these traditional masculine areas, it opens that emotion to a potentially wider audience. The former high school teacher in me can tell you: we are in desperate need of books that a) boys will potentially like, and b) books that show them it's okay to feel things. I think this book can do these things while also appealing to adults. It is a book about young adults and that can appeal to young adults but that does not feel limited to the “YA” category. I could see people of all ages enjoying this, and young readers in particular feeling a connection to the protagonists.
While I don’t think this novel breaks all the way through into the territory of “new stories for men,” it takes important steps in that direction. Much of the activity in the book is traditionally masculine: surviving in the woods, for instance. And the characters are “typical” American boys. Fish’s father was military, as was his grandfather, Teddy. Teddy loves Fish, but is distant. Bread’s father is an alcoholic. And Cal is in law enforcement, though he is deeply ambivalent about it. I mean, gender-bending it ain’t, but the book resists easy answers about what it means to “be a man,” even for cops and former soldiers. And even out in the woods. This is important, and Graff handles these ideas elegantly and tenderly.
The female characters are a more mixed bag, in my opinion. Miranda, Fish’s mother, is a complex, fully-formed character, though her motivation is fully focused on retrieving her son. This is believable and natural, given the main thrust of the plot, and though I found it a little frustrating to see her defined so fully by motherhood, that motherhood is fierce, wild, consuming, and ultimately compelling. She is complicated by grief and by faith. On the whole, I found Miranda to be convincingly fleshed out.
It is Tiffany, the young woman in the story, whose character arc most disappointed me. Graff takes care to make her a developed character with an interesting backstory and actual hobbies and pursuits. But where she winds up toward the end of the story just didn’t fully resonate with me, and her interests were subsumed by a more stereotypical type of female fulfillment: romantic partnership. Her personal arc is driven by her love interest in Sherrif Cal. And while it’s not to say such choices aren’t important and valid for any character to make, it was disappointing not to have Tiffany’s arc include advancements in her own creative enterprises. She is, after all, a poet, and her work is a motivating factor for her. But what ultimately drives her story arc is her interest in Cal. Since she is the one female character who’s motivation could be less focused on the male characters (given Miranda’s understandable hyper-focus on her son’s safety), on the whole I think Graff missed an opportunity with Tiffany. It’s a significant flaw in my view. There was a chance for the book to be deeply about men but also show that not everything in the characters’ lives is centered around these men.
I appreciated the nuanced versions of masculinity that Graff depicts with tenderness and care, though, and in a novel so clearly about men, that is important. And I hope the book’s core words echo for any boys who read this book. I hope they take them in and live them out: “You are strong and you are good, and you are not alone.”
