cover image The Pull

The Pull

Bobby Jack Nelson. St. Martin's Press, $15.95 (227pp) ISBN 978-0-312-65572-3

During the storm that opens Nelson's third novel, 13-year-old Bud is knocked out by a lightning bolt. He wakes to find his face badly singed and his beloved mule team gone. For ten years Bud and his truculent father Sailor have been living in the woods cutting timber. Now they go to town to buy new mules, and town is where Bud completes his coming of age. As his face heals, he falls in love, has his first sexual experience, and observes his father with increasingly independent eyes. In a Faulknerian finish, Bud and Sailor, with the recovered mules, triumph in a hard-won wagon-pulling contest, leaving Bud aware of his independence from Sailor and also his debts to him. This brutal, unsentimental story is told with a fierce and graceful honesty. Nelson's other books are The Last Station and Brothers. (March 5)