The Vanishing Moon - Tapa dura

'Memory is all, ' says the narrator at the end of The Vanishing Moon. Yes, it is. This novel captures the collective memory of an American working-class family, with all its pain and poetry. In its dramatic sweep, the book becomes nothing less than a history of the twentieth century in the United States. Joseph Coulson is what we used to call (with apologies to the vegetarians) a meat and potatoes storyteller: clear, vivid, big-hearted. So many unheard voices speak and sing through his voice. Listen. --Martín Espada

Joseph Coulson chronicles the American family with enormous intensity. His sense of history is vast, his sense of detail fine, Coulson is the ferryman to that America just beyond - tragic and wondrous. --John Reed

Vanishing Moon is the lyrical account of the Tollman family's demise, but it is so beautifully crafted that one keeps turning the pages rapidly; that is, when one isn't stopping to ponder its poignantly poetic phrases depicting the scenery and dynamic characters. --The Historical Novels Review

The Vanishing Moon...explores human frailty with the simplicity and directness of haiku...at times achieves the quiet beauty of William Maxwell's finest work--generous, episodic, elegiac but not sentimental...Coulson seems to want to bring Faulkner to Ohio. --The Nation

In the Vanishing Moon, Joseph Coulson writes about the American working-class, about the strength and strain of family bonds, and about tragic incidents that haunt the human psyche over a lifetime. Set in Cleveland and Detroit, the novel chronicles two generations of the Tollman family, opening at the start of the Great Depression and moving forward through five decades to the Vietnam War.
The first narrator, Stephen Tollman, looks back on his early adventures with his older brother, as both boys try to shield their siblings from the confusion and vulnerability of financial ruin. Later, as World War II approaches, Katherine Lennox, musician and political activist, offers an outsider's view of the Tollmans, mesmerizing both Stephen and his brother with her energy and ambition.
James Tollman comes of age in the 1960s, and as the youngest son in the family's second generation, he strives to understand his father and mother amidst a summer of assassinations and civil unrest. Stephen returns to finish the story, struggling to hold his own against the currents of memory and abandoned dreams.