'Farther Along' by Donald Harington

A Novel

Donald Harington

Toby Press: 226 pp., $24.95

GENE WOLFE, himself squarely among our great writers, once said that great writers don't simply do something better than others, they do something that no one else can do at all.

I look at this shelf of books beside my desk and almost expect the shelf, the floor, the foundation, perhaps even the fundament of Earth itself, to give beneath the weight of what is there: so many lives, so much history and anticipation, so many foreign and familiar worlds caught up in there. No, not caught -- suspended. Held lovingly. And truth to tell, I might just as well expect shelf, room and house to rise into the air, with these books so like clouds or bolls of cottony wind. For it's lightness, not weight, that Arkansas novelist Donald Harington catches up in his nets: the fragility of our lives, the fine lines we forever dodge between, the joy that breaks from our sorrow.

There are 13 of those books on the shelf, 13 Donald Haringtons, reissued by the Toby Press and now capped by a new novel, "Farther Along."

First, though, a disclaimer. I am a tremendous admirer of Harington's work, a fact you might well surmise from the cover of "Farther Along," whereupon squats a quote from one of my columns for the Boston Globe: "Harington's books are of a piece -- the quirkiest, most original body of work in contemporary U.S. letters." For many years now, I've eagerly read Harington, written about him, passed his books along, done everything but collar strangers on the street to tell them about him. "The Choiring of the Trees" is, quite simply, one of the finest novels I've ever read. "With," a personal favorite, begins with a child's sexual abduction, only to become one of the most world-embracing, life-affirming books I know.

Harington has worked at a remove both aesthetically and geographically from the literary establishment, in the nature of true genius giving little regard to mainstream, academic or commercial concerns, quietly pursuing his personal vision of an America singing through its many wounds. So when I collar that stranger on the street, when I bring up Harington's name even among avid readers, chances are there's little recognition. He is, as fellow novelist Fred Chappell has called him, "an undiscovered continent." Sadly -- for us all.