Hawk, William Wallis’s debut novel, pays homage to that most mystifying and seductive of preludes, that archetypal cocoon—childhood. Survive those years without too much damage in the nest and one may, perhaps, wish to fly—soar—into the rest of life.

Perhaps not.

Wallis chronicles the growing pains of one Will Falke, a seven-year-old who awakens to the world mostly in Monticello, Arkansas, in the early 1950s. That state, of course, is encircled by a half dozen other southern states, just as the characters in this narrative entwine one another.

The American South. Our Southern writers speak keenly of one of the region’s chief preoccupations—survival. One of them, receiving the Nobel Prize at the close of that pasteboard-mask decade, predicted that humankind would not just endure but prevail.

Wallis’s protagonist is a child of the Fifties. Both cursed and blessed, both enduring and prevailing. Will endures: he is cursed

by the loss of an eye,

by the stinging pain of a ferocious father’s punishing hand,

by the taunts and humiliations from schoolmates,

by a mother who almost abandons him—and his family—because nature almost causes her to abandon herself.

Blessed? On his family’s farm, nature invites him to learn her ways:

the same bristling father trains the boy in choring and fortitude,

one neighbor—a Black—teaches him chess and friendship,

another—a Jew—bestows upon him the lyricism of classical music,

he is nursed—anointed—with love by women, and, finally,

the bird of the title shows the boy what freedom looks—feels—like.

Wallis shreds the politically generic phrase “family values”; instead, he renders in hard-edged gem-like scenes the value of a family.

Poet Mary Oliver, in her poem “Hawk,” describes its flight: “into the wind, belly first” . . . “all the time its eyes fastened harder than love,” as “it turned into a white blade, which fell.”

Wallis, himself a poet, offers the reader a world seen through a seven-year-old’s eyes, “harder than love.” If you happened to survive—and cherish a childhood of your own, you’ll want to read Hawk. You don’t have to scan the clear blue sky for this red-tailed beauty—it’s at your fingertips.

–John Zounes

 

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