A Novel by Kathryn Kramer
Knopf, 1992. $25
from the dustjacket:
The author of the greatly acclaimed A Handbook From Visitors from Outer Spacenow gives us an equally astonishing work of fiction, a novel about original sin (complete with serpent) and redemption, through three generations of an American family.
Large, fascinating, at once realistic and magical, the novel opens as the central figure, twenty-six-year-old Zoë Carver, arrives in a Southwestern city to spend Christmas with her brother, who conducts biochemical research with snake venom.
Zoë does not speak. Though she can laugh and cry and sign, she has been mute since the time, ten years before, when her high school boyfriend Rob claimed to have intentionally caused his father's death. Now, just as Rob is released from the mental hospital in which he has been confined, Zoë's own father vanishes, and this fateful coincidence triggers in her an urgent need to find out the truth of Rob's long-ago confession. And, she is secretly in search of a father for the baby she wants to have.
Zoë's story, with its excursions into her family's past -- a family descended from the "last witch tried in America," a family abounding in secrets -- culminates in the discovery (with the help of her brother's snakes) of a brilliant solution to her problems ... and a way to start history all over again.
Rattlesnake Farmingis rich, crowded, and exciting -- a novel that explores in fresh and invigorating ways the possibility of the miraculous in all our lives.
Front of jacket photograph by Tina West/Jacket background photograph by Mark Hill/Jacket design by Archie Ferguson
"Kathryn Kramer has written a novel with a better claim than most to our serious attention. Rattlesnake Farmingis an absorbing and unusual work by a writer of extensive abilities and elaborate imagination. Read it slowly to savor its many convincing surprises and daring range of haunted characters."
--Joseph Heller
"A huge, sprawling book teeming with imagination....carries the reader relentlessly...."
-- Laurie Muchnick, Newsday
"Rattlesnake Farming a terrific book! I remember Steinbeck saying in the dedication of East of Eden that his editor Pat Covici told him he must put everything into a book, 'fill the box.' Kathryn Kramer sure does fill the box."
-- Oakley Hall
"A feat that attests to Kramer's creativity and immense skill."
-- Booklist
"Like all good storytellers, Kathryn Kramer luxuriates in the texture of her narrative and in flashes of surprise that both delight and illuminate."
-- Robert Boyd, St Louis Post-Dispatch
"...Kramer's achievement is to inspire contemplation of a very cryptic and intricate universe, in which the role of human will is scarcely understood. We are forced, Kramer seems to say, to act and to reason even though 'nothing can be predicted, least of all the consequences of one's actions.' Small wonder, then, that her haunting characters exemplify the many different paths to salvation and destruction."
-- Gale Harris, Belles Lettres
"A remarkable novel, at once hilarious and serious, mingling elements of realism and fantasy, inhabited by people we recognize and care about."
-- Jo Ann Baldinger, The New Mexican
"One of the most ambitious, subtle novels produced by an American in the last twenty years.
-- Irving Mailin, Review of Contemporary Fiction