See Nathaniel Purple in the Princeton Alumni Weekly. "Reeve '50 pens novella set in a Vermont village."

A grudge can go on for so long, it can be forgotten what birthed it. Nathaniel Purple is a story of small town life, its triumphs, its tragedies, and the grudges, alliances, and much more that spill out for decades upon decades within it all. With an excellent blend of poignancy, drama, and humor, Nathaniel Purple is a top pick that shouldn’t be overlooked for community library general fiction collections.

In his compelling novella, Nathaniel Purple, F.D. Reeve renders a small Vermont town where everyone knows everyone else and everyone’s life is part of a tapestry cross-stitched and woven with everyone else’s. As in all human communities, terrible things happen--betrayals, violence, conflagrations—but here each event belongs not just to individuals, but to the whole village. Nathaniel Purple, the town librarian, absorbs it all, responds when he can, looks on, but at the same time continues to savor such simple pleasures as a morning ride with his horse Crystal and picking violets for the woman in his life.   

In his poetry and in his fiction as well, the poet and translator F.D. Reeve’s descriptive powers amplify and illuminate the human drama: “…imagining flames leaping out of the cans with a roar like the wrath of Jehovah, the gas shining in rainbows and snaking under the doors, burning blue in the warm, wet places. Sparks would shoot skyward and the fire would thunder and burn and burn and burn until everything collapsed on itself.”  Nathaniel Purple, the objective, warm-spirited narrator, is to be trusted at every turn – in every sentence, especially the ones richly invested in pointed irony.

Where could you find, in a short novel, a bucolic Vermont village with adultery brought to life, a crazed husband fonder of his cows than of people, a murder, a barn-burning, told us by a librarian who is equally at home with, and has the language to evoke, the pastoral beauty of the place, drinking with rowdies in the village tavern, and bringing to life the sins and sinners whose “ambition, envy, fear, hatred” vivify the tale? It takes the poet F. D. Reeve to give intensity to these passions in Nathaniel Purple, a book one wants to read twice over.

Nathaniel Purple, librarian, lover, and volunteer fireman, is a man of many sources. He muses his way among Musil, Swendenborg, Balzac, Thoreau and Rabelais as easily as the Bible, Shakespeare and the town’s Chamber of Commerce brochure. F.D Reeve catalogs the different ways in which memories of things read and things lived intrude on familiar conversations. Here is a love story of man and woman growing up together, of man and horse in silent appreciation of nature, of man and dog getting drunk together, of man reigning over and tending his cows. This Vermont Grade A Medium Amber eclogue is full of flavor, and not only the sweetness of long love and living close to nature. In juxtapositions of the events of a small town and the classics from its library we discover the bawdy, the bucolic and the tragic. Parts of the story are almost pure dialog, thrusting us into the local diner and pub where we remain outsiders, ignorant of the village’s complex history but immersed in its voices. We recognize the village vices: land greed, sexual envy, blind rage, spite; and are a bit surprised, along with Nathaniel, to meet its virtues of tolerance, kindness, and humor. Reeve’s poetic powers of description convey the transition from the freshness of something seen anew, like “scarlet, mandarin and translucent canary maple leaves” to those same leaves gone sour after a flash of anger, “curled brown, red and yellow.” He gives us the town’s odors: sacks of grain in the general store are “astringent, not sour, as if sunlight were being released.” “The morning’s fresh manure still gave off a hint of molasses.” Our narrator slides through the seasons from funeral to dancehall, from ruffians and fisticuffs to a kind of divine retribution, vividly colored and scored, in an astonishing eight page scene of a barn burning. Nathaniel Purple speaks of his library as an observatory and, finally, as a treasury, as is this book.