Anyone who grew up poor in rural America will be familiar with some aspects of Ian Henry’s life in Kenneth Cadow’s young adult novel, Gather (Candlewick, 2024). They will understand the sixteen-year-old’s bias toward the wealthy and his desire to live his life as he pleases, in his case, ensconced in nature. They may also have had experienced school as irrelevant in the face of daily struggles and impositions.
What some readers may not know, or may not have experienced, is the generational trauma that shapes Ian’s understanding of the larger world and his experiences of it. Although in our times, with the accumulative effect of years of rural neglect and economic stagnation, the trauma born of poor government policy and intellectual prejudice is for all practical purposes synonymous with rural poverty. They often go hand in hand, and they all exist alongside a poverty of the mind, that is, the minds of outsiders.
Case in point, even today, well into the second act of the Trump administration, in our red and blue, urban and rural, political divide, few nonrural folks understand the MAGA appeal to rural folks. Gather provides the imaginative insight needed to help us understand without being sentimental, simplistic, or solipsistic. No one is left free of Ian’s teenage scrutiny that one moment cuts like a knife at those close and distant to him and in the next plumbs the depth of teenager immaturity.
Gather is Ian’s story, told by him in the way we might expect a sixteen old who has a lot to say would tell it. Like the stories we tell ourselves about our lives, Ian’s draws from disparate experiences and churns them into a rich narrative mix. His tale is neither linear nor ascending, at least not in the first 140 or so pages. It’s cumulative, layered with narrative patchwork that recursively fills in the holes of earlier, incomplete narratives. For example, we meet The Sharp early on but only discover fifteen pages and a few stories later, her relationship to Ian as teacher. Then she all but disappears until the last third of the book. Similarly, the novel begins with Ian’s mom returning home from drug rehab. After the opening image of her return, forty-five pages pass before we return to the scene and get a fuller understanding of what happened.
This patchworking of stories to create a richer narrative rings true, a choral repetition of imagery that lets the reader know not only that The Sharp and Ian’s mothers are important in his life (and the story he is telling) but that our memories are fragmented and evolving. The significance of those memories often rising or descending with time and retelling. The richness of our lives hinges on the continual reclaiming of experiences through evolving memories.
The one constant from beginning to end in Ian’s weaving of experiences is his connection to the natural world and his family’s past, notably to his grandfather’s. Resonating in Ian’s pursuit of nature and the memories of his grandfather are the sociopolitical conditions that cast these connections as tenuous and dying. When he finally does lose what remains of the family homestead due to back taxes and his mother’s death, the rhythmic weaving of Ian’s experiences that defined the first two-thirds of the novel take a dire linear direction. It is as if the mold has been cast—taxes and death come calling—and there is no hope for Ian.
The rest of the story is, as they say, foretold (although because it is Ian telling his own story we know that’s not the case). As he says, “So your gramps dies, your father leaves, your gram leaves and can’t come back, and your mom dies, and still they’re not done with you yet” (p. 251). He is left orphaned, pulled from his home and land, and given over to the worst elements of his life—a father who has shucked his familial responsibilities and the land and history on which they rested. For those looking on from the outside, that’s the end of the story. Bad luck and bad decisions. For those living it, it’s much more complicated, especially when you’ll have none it.
There are no easy answers for what is happening to Ian. And Cadow doesn’t overburdened the reader with political red herrings to suggest Ian needs to look for fault or answers elsewhere. In our current political climate, it’s easy to notice that immigration, gender, and race aren’t fore fronted in Gather. If we are to believe the media and much of the political discourse today, these identity markers are core issues, supposedly heavy on the mind of rural folks and driving our sociopolitical divide. On the national stage, with these issues trumped up by politicians and right-wing pontificators as bogeymen, immigration, gender, and race are cast as existential threats that bring out people’s worst instincts. In Gather, Ian and the people around him don’t have time for these bugaboos not because they’re ignorant of them nor haven’t experienced them but because in their day-to-day lives they are too abstract in the binary—us versus them is hard to maintain when one of your neighbors or a teacher is the other and, well, you like them. In real life, the other lives among us and is typically the least of our problems.
Gather not only rejects binary conservative-speak; it also has low tolerance for generalized or theorized progressive-speak. Ian lives in real-time, from moment to moment, relying on his wits and senses. He feels his way through life and doesn’t buy-in to theorizing the other as either-or or seeing things as too relativistic to take a stand.
A third into the novel, in the chapter titled, “The Species of Dorian Gray,” Cadow offers theoretical grounding for Ian’s relationship with nature. Fittingly, the theory is the creation of Mr. Paersons, a former university professor. It is, however, deconstructed and told in recall by Ian. His depiction is notable not for the theory itself—Ian hardly gets it and doesn’t buy into it even as he intuitively is living it—but for the use of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray as an analogy for humans’ relationship with nature. Although it has affinity with Ian’s experience of the natural world, the theory doesn’t carry much weight. At best, it’s interesting for what it says about how university’s work and the absurdity of what happened to Mr. Paersons.
Ian gives Mr. Paersons his due though, probably because he likes Sylvia, his daughter. He listens and finds the experience worth repeating, although what he repeats is his experience of being told the theory. The theory doesn’t explain who Ian is and how he lives and thinks. After all, Ian’s knowledge of thermostats is, to Mr. Paersons, a wonder along the lines of an oddity, a complete surprise, which clearly Mr. Paersons will never understand. The conundrum in all this is how disconnected from the functioning of the world can someone be yet still think they can theorizing about how it works. Mr. Paersons’s and Ian’s relationship and Dorian Gray theory capture the gulf between rural America and academia to show they really are talking past each, even when they’re talking to each other. But the talk is still worth it for the interpersonal understanding it engenders between Ian and Mr. Paersons.
Even allies, though, fall short of understanding rural folks’ sensibilities. The Sharp, Ian’s closest ally, admonishes him for using profane language and failing to embrace his educational opportunities. Her words, while heard by Ian (after all, he’s repeating them in retelling), barely make an inroad in his thinking. Her actions, however, rescue him from the failed attempt to deliver him to his father after his mother dies. She also creates the opportunity for Ian to tell his story. By novel end, we know Ian wrote his story in the writing class The Sharp convinced the school to let her offer a select group of students. We know, too, that otherwise there would be no story and that would be one more injustice on top of a mountain of them.
There’s an inevitability to poverty that promises failure even amid minor victories. The odds are stacked against the poor, whether urban or rural. Gather takes up the cause of the rural and asks the perennial question of who you can turn to for help. For those suffering generational poverty and trauma there often literally is no one. And when you’re left to care for those who should be caring for you, and you’re keeping secret their trauma, it can eat away at you every breathing moment of the day. As Ian said near the end, “How do you tell somebody what’s going on when it’s everything, going back a hundred years, maybe longer?” There might be a teacher, or a neighbor, a coach, or a friend, but if it’s only words they offer that will never be enough. After all, nothing anyone says to Ian has much influence on what happens to him. What counts are people’s actions, and sometimes the crafting of one’s story, a powerful act in and of itself. It may not be enough but it’s a start, and that’s what Cadow gives us.