Product Description

An astonishing debut novel of love, lust and salvation in a fading prairie town.

When Johnny thinks about Loraine and her touch, it's as if the Holy Spirit is tickling his spine. But Johnny is more than tickled when he finds out Loraine is pregnant with his child. An almost-saved Christian, a not-quite-sober alcoholic and part-time lover of Loraine, Johnny is not sure where his wife Charlene fits into this complex love triangle of women, men, desires and truth.

A feed-supply salesman whose history extends only as far as he can remember, Johnny longs for a spiritual salvation, but finds beauty and truth in the soft, warm flesh of the women he loves.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carol Shields described David Bergen's writing as having "the randomness of authenticity... alert and fresh... complex and whole." Like Bonnie Burnard or Alice Munro, Bergen is a writer of effortless maturity, able to weave together the boundless themes of birth and death, fertility and sterility and the perennial cycle of the seasons.

Watch David Bergen: a brilliant new talent has arrived.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #466685 in Books
• Published on: 1996-03-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From Amazon.com
Lesser is the name of a fictional small town just outside of Winnepeg, and Johnny Fehr is the name of David Bergen's protagonist in his accomplished first novel, A Year of Lesser. Johnny is a drinker, a doper, a womanizer in a place small enough for everyone to know all about his sins. At the beginning of the novel, Johnny's father commits suicide; by the end, he has lost everything that ever mattered to him: wife, lover, and friends. But Bergen's novel is not really about the changes in Johnny's fortunes, but rather, the changes in his soul. Johnny, raised in the rigid strictures of the Mennonite faith, may be a sinner, but he's a sinner with a powerful yearning for grace.

How Johnny Fehr stumbles his way toward that state of grace despite the town's malice and his own weakness is at the heart of A Year of Lesser. In Johnny Fehr, David Bergen has created a flawed yet deeply human character, one of whom readers will acknowledge "there, but for the grace of God, go I."

Books in Canada
David Bergen, in A Year of Lesser, does an impressive job of dealing with the apparent spiritual vacuum in contemporary life. The book opens with a salvation: the "saving" by a local evangelist of the novel's central character, Johnny Fehr. Johnny, a feed supply salesman in the small Manitoba town of Lesser, is "despite his penchant for grasping faith and a desire to appear clean, a wanderer, a tumble weed who sticks to no one and no thing. He is easy, a likeable and gullible fool."

Johnny's major Achilles heel is that he is "a lover of women". He and his wife Charlene live in the house he inherited from his father when his father committed suicide a year ago. While he genuinely cares for Charlene, he is nonetheless engaged in an affair with Loraine, a widow who lives with her fourteen-year-old son on a chicken farm. Life starts to hammer at Johnny when Loraine becomes pregnant with his child and the chronically unhappy Charlene dies in an accidental house fire from which she is too drunk to escape.

Bergen is comfortable with his material and weaves scenes together smoothly. He explores the murky depths of the soul in which moral decisions are ultimately made and examines the quirks of his characters and the hazards of small-town life. His language is honed to a sharp edge, but in its directness it does not lack revealing details or meaningful dialogue. His perception embraces all his characters, both men and women, and he looks at them, warts and all, unflinchingly. Eva Tihanyi(Books in Canada)

From Kirkus Reviews
First-timer Bergen offers a strong, evocative, but ultimately rather unmoving representation of a small prairie town in Canada and of the dramas that it contains. Even if Lesser, Manitoba, were in New England, few would think of Norman Rockwell after a few days with the natives. Peyton Place would be more apt, given that sex and religion seem to be the prevailing obsessions that entangle nearly everyone. As one of the locals remarks, `` `It's a curious place, Lesser. There's this above-the-surface cordiality and kindness, like life is fine and good and clean, and evil is something others suffer from.' '' But no one is really fooled. Johnny Fehr, the town's feed-and-grain man, starts the ball rolling when he repents and converts on page one. Johnny was a wild man in his day, a drinker and a brawler and a pothead, and now that he's been born again he decides to open a community center for young people who might end up with the same hard problems that drove him to the waters of baptism. Johnny's drunken wife Charlene is intrigued by his about-face and is almost sympathetic--until it becomes clear that religion can't keep Johnny from carrying on with his old flame, Loraine. When Loraine becomes pregnant with Johnny's child, it takes very little time for word to get out, and the disaster that ensues drives Johnny deeper both into Jesus and into his relationship with Loraine--to the scandal and delight of every bystander. Although far from comic, most of the situations here contain a deep irony, an irony that Bergen puts to skillful use in drawing the jagged outline of a place at once recognizable and deeply unfamiliar. Moving, credible, and subtle, but long and shapeless overall. There's enough sensitivity and restraint in the narration to keep the proceedings from turning into soap opera, but at times it's a close call. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.