"Water from My Heart" by Charles Martin

It says something about author Charles Martin that he could successfully turn the character of a drug runner into a sympathetic hero. 

But that’s what he does in Water from My Heart, first published in 2015. And that’s what Charlie Finn is – a drug runner. Finn is a crackerjack poker player, holding an MBA from Harvard, with experience at high-flying hedge fund, and he’s making a living from running drugs for his friend Colin. If all those wealthy marks in Miami want to snort white powder up their noses, someone’s got to do it, right?

 

And it works, until it doesn’t. Colin’s 18-year-old son takes his little sister for a ride, shadowing Uncle Charlie and helping himself to the drop-off – and the suppliers come looking, with a pit bull. The sister ends up in the hospital, and the 18-year-old takes off for Central America, unable to face his parents, his sister, or Charlie.

 

Charles Martin

Charlie follows, and all of Charlie’s sins will soon find him. Because Charlie has a history in Central America, especially Nicaragua, where years before he helped destroy a thriving coffee plantation employing thousands of people – all because the hedge fund owner wanted it, and the plantation owner refused to sell. Charlie’s looking for his friend’s son, but he finds his own past in the process.

 

Water from My Heart has all of the classic Charles Martin hallmarks – a broken hero, complications with the people he loves most, a bit of low-key romance, a dash of violence, facing past sins, and the discovery redemption even when the hero’s not really looking for it. In the afterword, Martin explains there the story is based upon some actual events.

 

Martin, who lives with his family in Florida, has published numerous novels, and if he’s written a bad or mediocre one, no one can find it. He tells an enthralling story every time, and Water from My Heart is no exception. 

 

Related:

 

River Road by Charles Martin.

 

Charles Martin talks about River Road.

 

Send Down the Rain by Charles Martin

 

Unwritten by Charles Martin

 

Charles Martin’s Where the River Ends

 

Charles Martin’s The Mountain Between Us

 

Charles Martin’s Wrapped in Rain

 

Crying with Them Crickets

“River Road” by Charles Martin

It’s a common question asked of authors, and especially authors of fiction: Where do you get your story ideas from? Charles Martin partially answered that question by publishing River Road, a collection of stories from his childhood, teen, and college years.

River Road is the neighborhood where he grew up in the 1970s and 1980s. It is not unlike the neighborhood where a lot of us grew up in the 1950s, 1960s, and later. His experiences are more than familiar; his childhood was much like my own and like millions of other boys growing up in America, and especially the American South.

Martin wrote a few of these stories in high school and most of them in college. What emerges from them now is one writer’s beginnings. If you’ve read Martin’s novels, you can find the man in the child by reading these stories.

He writes of playing with a friend in a sandbox and digging a hole intended to each China; how he was caught stealing and the experience of terror while expecting a neighbor to call his mother; his career objective to be a cowboy; how a bully (himself) got unforgettably bullied; the laugh-out-loud experience of a full bladder while your mother is trying on clothes; when a fishing expedition goes awry and a man who doesn’t know how to swim saves a boy who doesn’t know how to swim; the fine art of stealing tangerines from a neighbor’s tree; what chewing tobacco can do to a boy’s stomach; ordering books from the monthly reading club at school, not to actually read the books but to have the most number of books with sports heroes; fishing with his grandfather and how his grandfather cut his hair; when your father is your football game referee and he calls penalties fairly; the theft of his favorite bicycle; and more.

Charles Martin

These stories all describe the commonplace, not unusual experiences of boyhood, with its joys and sorrows, and triumphs and humiliations. They describe growing up and all the stories we live (or live down) to survive to adulthood.

Martin includes “An Open Letter to My Boys,” which should be required reading for all of us, and “Random Rules for Writers,” which includes such advice as “Don’t use eight words when two will do.”

If you read River Road, you will smile and laugh, occasionally cringe in recognition, and shed a tear in memory. In those things, it is much like a Charles Martin novel, an experience to be grateful for.

Related:

Charles Martin talks about River Road.

Send Down the Rainby Charles Martin

Unwritten by Charles Martin

Charles Martin’s Where the River Ends

Charles Martin’s The Mountain Between Us

Charles Martin’s Wrapped in Rain

Crying with Them Crickets

Top photograph: a view from River Road, Jacksonville, Florida.

“Send Down the Rain” by Charles Martin

A new novel by Charles Martin is an event. He’s a grand storyteller, one of the nest writing today. He tells stories, and his characters tell stories. It doesn’t matter if it’s broken children trying to survive, or broken adults trying to survive a plane crash in winter mountains or the pain of life, or a husband still trying to show a dying wife how much he loves her. Charles Martin tells stories of the human heart, the broken human heart ultimately touched by grace.

Send Down the Rain, Martin’s latest published work, is a grand story, and then some. Joseph Burns is 62, a Vietnam veteran. He went to Vietnam as a teen, did two tours, and was involved in special operations all over Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. He doesn’t have to talk about those special ops; he still has nightmares in his sleep.

Joseph lives in a cabin with his dog Roscoe in the mountains of North Carolina. He hears a child’s scream and goes to investigate. A woman and her two children, all illegal immigrants, are trying to escape a Mexican drug lord, right there in North Carolina. Joseph tells them to wait in his cabin, while he leaves for a while. He comes back with the drug lord’s knife. The police later find his body tied in the back of a pickup truck.

He helps the woman find her brother in Florida, not far from where he and his brother Bobby grew up at Cape San Blas, a coastal peninsular in the Panhandle. He and his brother don’t see each other; they occasionally talk. Bobby is a U.S. Senator, a decorated war hero, living the stereotype of the powerful Southern U.S. Senator with connections all over Washington D.C. and the U.S. military. Someone else lives at Cape San Blas – Allie, the girl next door, the one Joseph loves and the one who loved Joseph. 

When Joseph came home from his first tour, he arrived just in time to see Allie and Bobby getting married. He considered killing his brother; instead, he returned for a second tour.

Charles Martin

Bobby and Allie have been long divorced, and Allie is remarried to a truckdriver, man who has just incinerated himself in a tractor-trailer explosion right at Cape San Blas. 

Joseph is still in love with Allie. First loves aren’t easily cast aside, at least for Joseph. But there are complications, a lot of complications. And Joseph Burns is going to confront the demons, real and imagined, pursuing him.

Charles Martin doesn’t write bad stories, or even mediocre ones. He writes about recognizable people, people we know or think we know. Send Down the Rain is filled with these recognizable people, broken and searching for grace, and possibly finding redemption.

Related:

Unwrittenby Charles Martin

Charles Martin’s Where the River Ends

Charles Martin’s The Mountain Between Us

Charles Martin’s Wrapped in Rain

Crying with Them Crickets

Top photograph: The shoreline at Cape San Blas, Florida.

“Unwritten” by Charles Martin

Katie Quinn is a star of stage and screen at the top of her profession. She demands, and gets, $25 million per movie. She has a stable of automobiles and houses on two continents.  She has a staff to command satisfaction of every whim and desire. She is in Miami, saying confession to the aging Father Steady Capris.

Katie Quinn is preparing to kill herself.

Following Katie at confession is a man whom we only know as Sunday. He has checked out from the world, and lives in and near the Everglades. His one engagement with the world is to disguise himself as a janitor, sneak into the children’s wing of a Jacksonville Hospital, and distribute toys and books to the children there.

We will come to know that Sunday has already tried to kill himself.

The only link between the two is the priest, who’s in the business of saving souls and healing brokenness. And he has his hands full with Katie and Sunday. And he will use both of them in what be a last attempt to heal.

Charles Martin

Unwritten by Charles Martin is the story of Katie and Sunday. Martin is the author of numerous books that plumb the depths of human emotion and experience. Some could be called romances, like The Mountain Between Us (soon to be a movie with Idris Alba and Kate Winslett).  If Unwritten is a romance, it’s the strangest romance you may ever read.

Sunday will have save Katie from suicide. And he will help her escape her life by successfully faking her death. Katie will gradually come to know who Sunday is, and she will learn that his pain is as intense as her own. Each will teach the other how to heal, and the healing means “unwriting” the lives written for them.

Unwritten is an engaging novel of brokenness and redemption.

Related:

Charles Martin’s Where the River Ends

Charles Martin’s The Mountain Between Us

Charles Martin’s Wrapped in Rain

Crying with Them Crickets

Top photograph of a sunset in the Everglades by Jean Beaufort via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Tumbling at the Nightstand

So I read a story about West Texas

that I didn’t think I’d like at first,

dusty and dry and tumbleweed gray,

but I did, and behind stood, waiting,

a poet’s Abyss, tumbling into darkness,

followed by a Spanish poet,

the Spanish poet, finding New York

before he tumbled in civil war

back home, but he wrote his poem

in two languages side by side which

makes the book shorter if you skip

the Spanish side, but it didn’t

because I read a few of them aloud

anyway, tumbling into hard consonants

and flamenco music and the tragedy

of life cut short, and I read another one

in Spanish and realized without benefit

of translation that it was a romance.

In case you’re wondering, the three books cited here are Thunder and Rain by Charles Martin, My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman, and Poet in New York by Federico Garcia Lorca.

Photograph via The Quantum Biologist. 

Charles Martin’s “The Mountain Between Us”

Orthopedic surgeon Ben Payne is in Salt Like City, trying to fly to Denver before a big snowstorm hits. He meets a writer, Ashley Knox, who’s trying to get home to Atlanta for her wedding. At the last minute, the flight is cancelled. But Ben is able to find a charter pilot who will fly him to Denver, and he invites Ashley to come along.

Over the Uinta Mountains, the pilot has a heart attack, but manages to crash-land the plane before he dies. When Ben regains consciousness, he knows he has broken ribs. Ashley’s leg is broken. The snow has closed in and largely buried them.

Neither Ben nor Ashley told anyone they were taking a charter flight. The pilot didn’t tell the tower he had passengers. No one will know to look for them or a plane crash. They are out of cell phone range, and far, far from anything even suggesting human activity. From the crashed plane, Ben fashions a sled to pull Ashley, and they set out into the unknown.

Charles Martin has written a number of remarkable novels that connect place and relationship – novels like Chasing Fireflies, The Dead Don’t Dance, Maggie, Wrapped in Rain, When Crickets Cry, and Where the River Ends. Martin is as much a storyteller of landscape as he is of people and brokenness. All of his previous works have been based in the southeastern United States – Georgia, northern Florida and South Carolina, a familiar landscape for Martin. With The Mountain Between Us (published in 2010), while part of the story is based in the Jacksonville area, Martin sets most of his story in the Utah wilderness.

It’s a riveting story of survival, stripping away all the facades constructed by two people who come to depend upon each other for their very lives.

Ben is married to Rachel, with two children. Ashley is engaged to marry with two days time. They will spend the next four weeks together fighting snow, fending off mountain lions, trying to find food and shelter and somehow find civilization. And tend to their injuries.

Along the way Ashley will learn that Ben is separated from his wife, and Ben will learn that Ashley isn’t entirely convinced she should be marrying Vince. Yet each remains faithful, even as they are forced into a personal proximity to each other that most married couples don’t have. And Ashley begins to sense that Ben is carrying some deep personal pain that he won’t let go of.

Martin’s usual attention to detail – a trademark of his writing – is fully employed here, so much so that the reader is walking and crawling with them, hunting rabbits and moose, desperately trying to stay alive. It’s an unforgiving landscape, it’s winter, and the cold is felt on every page.

It’s a captivating story, written with the skill I’ve come to expect from Charles Martin.

Charles Martin's "Wrapped in Rain"

Charles Martin’s novel Wrapped in Rain was first published in 2005, with a new edition published in 2006. If anything, the story has gotten better with time.

Tucker Mason, a globetrotting photographer who works under the name of Tucker Rain, has come home to Clopton, Alabama, exhausted after seven years of work after attempting to keep the demons of childhood at bay. Home is Waverly Hall, the edifice his father built to himself, a huge sprawling place filled for Tucker with the memories of human extremes – from the violence and [physical abuse of his wealthy, entrepreneurial, vicious, nasty father Rex Mason to the unconditional love of Miss Ella Rain, the black maid hired by his father to care first for him and later for his half-brother Matthew, known as Mutt.

Rex is now in an Alzheimer’s care facility, Mutt is confined in an institution trying to deal with his array of psychological disorders, including schizophrenia, and Miss Ella has not been dead for seven years from cancer.

Miss Ella may be dead, but she still talks to and with Tucker.

Mutt escapes the institutional home; Tucker runs across his childhood girlfriend, fleeing her own demon of a former husband who physically abused both her and their five-year-old son. Tucker now has to confront what happened to Mutt, what his own relationship with Katie is, and the weight of his own past.

It’s a remarkable story, skillfully woven together in what is one of Martin’s best novels – and that’s saying something because he hasn’t written a bad or mediocre one yet. The reader comes to know Tucker and Mutt, as both men strive to deal with all of what happened to them at the hands of their father.

And there is Miss Ella, one of the most memorable “dead” characters I’ve come across. The reader hears her voice and recognizes its authenticity while at the same time reaching toward her core message for Tucker and Mutt – love trumps all. An it is there that this story largely set in rural Alabama and Jacksonville, Florida becomes both real and universal.

Wrapped in Rain is one powerful novel of love and forgiveness.

Charles Martin's "Where the River Ends"

In Charles Martin’s novels, place is as much a character as any person in the story. Place is often the story. The southeastern United States, the relatively short stretch from Charleston, S.C., to the Georgia-Florida border, has played a significant role in six of Martin’s seven novels.

In Where the River Ends, published in 2008, the St. Mary’s River on the Georgia-Florida border is the setting, the narrative structure and indeed one of the main characters of the story. The plot is deceptively simple: Doss Michaels takes his wife Abbie on a canoe trip from the St. Mary’s headwaters all the way to where the river empties in the Atlantic Ocean. The trip is on Abbie’s list of 10 things she wants to do, and it has some urgency about it. Abbie is dying of metastatic breast cancer.

Doss is determined to give Abbie this gift of a trip. He just hopes they can complete it before she dies.

The trip is anything but idyllic. Doss has to steal a considerable supply of cancer and pain medications to take along. Abbie’s father, a powerful U.S. Senator, has hated his son-in-law from the beginning, and sets in motion a massive law enforcement search to find the couple. In a page from Deliverance, four no-account rednecks intend to steal everything Doss and Abbie have, and do even worse violence.

But along the way, they find help from people who go out of their way, often at great personal risk, to help them. A gun-toting grandma gives them food. A defrocked priest saves their lives. They discover kindness from strangers. They discover grace.

And the reader comes to see what this story and this river are really all about. Each scene of the trip is followed by a scene from Doss’s early life, how he and Abby meet and fall in love, and the story of their life together before cancer changes everything. This is a story about life, and we come to embrace it as our story, too.

If you haven’t a novel by Charles Martin, you’ve got some fine reading ahead of you. Simply put, he’s one of the best storytellers writing today. I deliberately didn’t read Where the River Ends  for two years after I bought it – and anticipation was part of the reading experience. I wasn’t disappointed. And he published the The Mountains Between Us in July – another book I’m enjoying the anticipation of reading.

Related:

My review of Martin’s When Crickets Cry.

Charles Martin talks about the St. Mary’s River and the origin of Where the River Ends:

Where the River Ends - Charles Martin -