Red Sky at Morning, Richard Bradford (Lippincott, 1968) *****

 

This has always been one of my personal favorites.  I discovered it many years ago by way of the movie of the same title, starring Richard Thomas (his first major role), Richard Crenna and Claire Bloom.  One of my closest friends, GCCCD retiree Don Shannon had told me about it.  He said I’d like it because it paralleled that part of my own life in WWII when my dad left for the Pacific and our family went to stay with relatives in northern New Mexico.  It turned out there were other parallels.  I learned just recently that the author, Richard Bradford, who died last year, was almost the same age as me.  Not only was his father away in the Navy during  WWII (as mine was) but Richard was in the Marines from 1952-55 (as I was), grew up in the South as well as northern New Mexico and consequently fell in love with that country and it’s special enchantment (as I did). 

 

That is essentially the setting of the novel.  It is a coming of age story about a boy, Josh, in his final year of high school, who has been raised in the genteel ways of Mobile, Alabama, and is now attending classes with students in a small town in northern New Mexico whose customs and speech are as alien to him as if he were in a foreign country.  He is, however, fascinated by the Hispanic and Native American culture and manages to blend in pretty well, even though he is the real ‘foreigner’ to his classmates and friends.  His mother, however, has difficulty adapting, even though the family had vacationed there from time to time over the years because Josh’s father loved the area for its beauty and its people for their unpretentiousness.

 

The first part of the novel includes some laugh-out-loud sections describing Josh’s reactions to adult thinking and life in general.  He experiences the usual problems of adolescence in the hilarious and sometimes adventurous company of two high school chums, the outspoken, cynical son of an obstetrician, and a rector’s tom-boy daughter whose uninhibited pronouncements are quite the opposite of the way girls spoke in Mobile.  There are other characters who enrich the story; the family’s handyman, the town sheriff, a high school tough (and his sister who wants to be a nun), a bohemian artist friend of his father, and a house guest whose free-loading ways eventually lead to a show down.  They are much like people we all have known in our years of growing up.  They take you back to your own bittersweet years of adolescence when curiosity and compulsion coexisted so precariously.  This book has become a modern classic in the coming-of-age genre, sometimes referred to as a western version of Catcher in the Rye.  It’s a wonderful novel.  Read it.