Book Alert / Farther Along

Farther Along by Donald Harington, Toby Press '08, $24.95, 225 pages, ISBN #1592642179.

Just as William Faulkner based much of his best work on the life and times of Mississippi's Yoknapatawpha County, Donald Harington has spent his career exploring the ins and outs of the town of Stay More, based on the Ozark mountain hamlet of Drakes Creek, where he spent most of his early summers with his grandparents, who ran the local general store and post office. His immersion in life in this American backwater has earned him the dubious distinction from Entertainment Weekly as "America's Greatest Unknown Novelist."

In this, his 13th novel, Harington "wants to get away from it all. Despite a satisfying career as chief curator of a museum devoted to the vanished American past, he finds he himself wants to vanish. So with the help of a book on the life and culture of a vanished tribe of Indians known as Bluff-dwellers, he takes up residence in the wilderness of the Ozark Mountains, with only a dog for company and an atlatl -- a primitive spear thrower -- to provide him with his supper. But after six years of this life he realizes that what he is trying to get away from is himself."

The title of his latest novel, Harington tells us, derives from a folk hymn commonly sung at Ozark funerals: "Farther along we'll know all about it, farther along we'll understand why."