Book Review/Along Comes a Stranger
Along Comes A Stranger
By Dorie McCullough Lawson
A debut novel
HarperCollins Publishers
Hardback $24.95
By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review
To be truthful, while this review is about a debut novel, it is not just off the press. In fact, it was published in the spring of 2007. I received a review copy from the publishers at that time, but I had been inundated with first novels and just added it to a stack of possible book reviews on my bedroom nightstand. The stack grew higher with new arrivals.
Perhaps, it would have gone unread, except my wife was scheduled for shoulder surgery on her right arm, requiring us to switch bedsides to accommodate her arm sling. I was forced to clean out my stack. I uncovered the stunning first novel, “Along Comes A Stranger,” by Doirie McCullough Lawson. I read it in hospital corridors while visiting my wife who had a week’s stay at Sacred Heart’s River Bend Hospital in Eugene after her surgery.
I got more than one surprise out of the book. I should have picked up on the author’s listed middle name, “McCullough,” which is her maiden name. She is the daughter of America’s premier historian, David McCullough.
That is not to take away the gift of writing shown in this her debut novel. It is her second published book, the first being an edited anthology, “Posterity: Letters of Great Americans to Their Children,” a non-fiction book. Oddly, according to Lawson, the idea for the novel came from a phone call while she was living in Sheridan, Wyoming. Her sister was calling to warn her there was a fugitive who had been traced to Sheridan.
“I thought, just my luck,” she said. “I’m going to meet him and like him and I’m going to be he only person who knows who he is. It was a funny idea, and scary, but it was a story that hit me quickly, thinking about how you often really don’t know the identity or the past of people you meet or come in contact.”
She took that idea, created a character, much like herself, Kate Colter, a displaced New Englander who moved with her husband, George, to Hayden, Wyoming, his hometown. George, a paleontologist, spends most of his time at digs, leaving Kate to care for their seven-year-old daughter, Clara. They had lived there 15 years, but she still had trouble relating to the people whose greatest adventure was going to Wal-Mart, about the most exciting thing that happens in town.
That is until her party-giving mother-in-law, Lorraine, invited her to an Omaha Steak party, and introduces her to Tom Baxter, 60ish, Lorraine’s new boyfriend, “because he is another New Englander and he might have something in common” to talk about with Kate. He is rugged, charming and well-read. The chemistry between the two is immediate. There is no hint of anything improper going on here, the relationship is purely platonic, but Kate enjoys the thoughtfulness and conversations she has with Tom.
She wants to know more about him and starts digging into his past like her husband, George searches digs for relics of the past. What she finds is the suspense within the story and she takes the reader along on the investigation in this darkly humorous novel that has more action and excitement in Hayden than going to Wal-Mart.
Lawson lived only a short time in Wyoming, but was able to gather enough of its flavor to place the reader squarely in a small-town atmosphere and provide a new twist on the classic stranger-in-town plot. The story is told in a simple first person narrative style, a style similar to that of David McCullough, her famous father, who incidentally is currently working on a book about Americans in Paris due to be published by Simon & Schuster in 2010,
Lawson now lives in Rockport, Maine with her artist husband, Allen and their four children. Indications are this is not the last we will hear from this talented daughter of David McCullough.
(Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)