The Beaut'

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By KC Cronin

There is a particular kind of novel that knows exactly how much space it needs and refuses to take a single page more. The Beaut' is 123 pages long and feels complete in a way that books three times its length often don't. Brooks Hansen has been writing literary fiction of genuine distinction for over three decades, and this novella carries all of that craft in a form so lean it practically hums.

Reading it produces the specific quiet that good coming of age fiction earns when it earns it honestly. Eli Sams is not a dramatic protagonist. He is a junior in high school whose family has come apart and who has found the only thing that currently makes sense to him out in the woods, building something from nothing with his best friend. That premise sounds simple because it is, and Hansen understands that simplicity is not the same as smallness. The disc golf course Eli and Dukes have carved out of the trees is doing exactly the kind of work that good fiction lets physical spaces do: it is holding something fragile together while the world outside it continues to fracture.

The name they give the course carries the book's central idea in miniature. A beaut is unmapped territory, land that exists before anyone has decided what it is or what it should be. That is precisely where Eli lives, in the middle of something not yet named or settled, and the day he discovers he is not alone out there forces a reckoning that Hansen handles with the restraint and precision you would expect from a writer of his standing.

What stays with you is not plot but atmosphere, the particular texture of that woods, that friendship, that suspended moment between who Eli was before the pandemic quietly broke everything and who he is still in the process of becoming.

For readers who believe that brevity and depth are not opposites, this book is exactly the kind of proof they have been looking for.

About the Author 

Brooks Hansen

Brooks Hansen's novels - THE MONSTERS OF ST. HELENA, PERLMAN'S ORDEAL, THE CHESS GARDEN, and BOONE (co-authored with Nick Davis) were all New York Times Notable Books. THE CHESS GARDEN was also selected as a PW Best Book of the Year in 1995. He has written one book for Young Readers, CAESAR'S ANTLERS, which he also illustrated. In 2009 he released his first memoir, THE BROTHERHOOD OF JOSEPH, and in 2005 he received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for his most recent book, JOHN THE BAPTIZER, which was published in 2009 by W.W. Norton. More recently, his work has appeared in CENTRAL PARK: AN ANTHOLOGY (Bloomsbury USA,2012), and THE GOOD BOOK (Simon & Schuster, 2015)