In a debut novel from Green Writers Press by Jonathan Howland, the austere beauty and high exposure of mountain adventure provide the context and the measure for what it means to be alive for climbing partners Joe Holland and Pete Hunter – until one of them isn’t.
When the book opens, it’s the mid-80s. Joe Holland, the novel’s narrator, is a climber and a seeker, but mostly he’s Pete Hunter’s shadow. The two meet in college and spend the next ten years living at the base of any rock that appears scalable, most of them near Yosemite and California’s High Sierra.
The joys and strains of their friendship comprise the novel’s first half. In the second, the bare bones–obsession, grief, love, and repair—come into stark relief when Pete’s grown son Will calls Joe back into climbing, into the past, and into breathless vitality.
Native Air is itself a climb, tracing physical acts in a vertical domain as well as the life events stitched between adventures that yoke them. When Will summons Joe back to the mountains, it’s Joe’s chance to recover something true, to mourn his friend, and to fall in love with wonders nearer to heaven than any steeple. The past and present press upon each other like a folded clock.
Readers of this book are doers as well as fans of those who entertain risk and nurse obsession. They get lost and found in Muir essays and Knausgaard. They admire Annie Proulx, Norman Maclean, and Russell Banks. According to climber-author Dan Duane, “Native Air belongs on the bookshelf of anyone whose heart registers the beauty and danger of exposure.”
Awards
Native Air a debut novel by Jonathan Howland, published in April 2022 by Green Writers Press, was the Grand Prize winner of the 2022 Banff Mountain Book Competition. The book competition is an internationally recognized literary competition that celebrates mountain literature in all its forms. Over $20,000 in cash is awarded annually with eight awards: mountain literature (non-fiction), mountain fiction and poetry, environmental literature, adventure travel, mountain image, guidebook, mountain article, and climbing literature. Native Air won the Mountain Fiction & Poetry Category and went on to win the Grand Prize, the winner from the seven categories. The Grand Prize winner and eight category award winners are selected by our international jury from a longlist of 28 finalists (chosen from a total of 166 book submissions, from authors across 11 countries).
FROM THE JUDGES:
“From the very first page to the very last, Jonathan Howland’s Native Air — a debut novel — distinguished itself as a serious contender for this year’s Grand Prize. It was a unanimous feeling among the jurors that no other work in this year’s festival elevated its genre more than this one. In the storied tradition of mountain fiction, Native Air is nothing short of a revelation; as Daniel Duane said, ‘the novel that we American climbers and readers of serious fiction have been waiting for.’ This book is very much written for core climbers—you’ll find no explanations of lingo or terminology here (save a glossary in the back). But the writing is so elegantly rendered, and the plot lines are so intricately woven, that readers of any background will inevitably gravitate to the human drama central to this suspenseful story. As a devotee of both climbing fiction and the granite of the High Sierra where much of the novel takes place, I cannot help but marvel at the massiveness of Howland’s achievement. The bar has officially been raised. Bravo!”
– Chris Kalman, 2022 Book Competition Jury
“I think of a classic climb as one where, after topping out, I immediately want to climb it again. I’ve read this novel, a story about two best friends who are also climbing partners, twice so far. The first time I became lost in the complexity of the relationships, the heartbreak, the full love, and the bid for repair. The second time I read it for the technical precision, the tension of incomplete ambitions, and the unbearably elegant structure. This novel is a classic. It will be read and loved again and again.”
– Claire Cameron, 2022 Book Competition Jury
Native Air is a finalist for First Fiction for the prestigious California Book Award
92ND ANNUAL CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARDS FINALISTS
The Commonwealth Club of California’s California Book Awards has selected this year’s finalists for its 2022 awards. One of the oldest and most distinguished literary award programs in the nation has chosen 26 outstanding books in six categories, out of hundreds of titles submitted. From these finalists, the book award jury will choose Gold and Silver Medal award winners to be announced in May. (Link)
Finalists: FIRST FICTION
The Red Arrow, by William Brewer, Alfred A. Knopf
Out There, by Kate Folk, Random House
The Rabbit Hutch, by Tess Gunty, Alfred A. Knopf
Native Air, by Jonathan Howland, Green Writers Press
Nightcrawling, by Leila Mottley, Alfred A. Knopf
Praise
“You know there are people whose obsession is big-wall climbing. You may have seen the documentaries, read the articles, perhaps even read a memoir. But you’ve never read anything that takes you so deep inside the anchoritic psyche of helpless, abject cliff worship. The narrator is ambivalent and supremely observant, his partner the absolutist. See Ishmael and Ahab, Sal Paradiso and Dean Moriarty. This is literary fiction of a high order, with a physical immediacy and specificity that never let up, and then a riveting next-generation denouement. The final top-out will destroy you. Climb on.”
—William Finnegan, The New Yorker; author of Barbarian Days
“As a lifelong climber, climbing writer, and student of mountaineering literature, I want the world to know: Jonathan Howland’s Native Air is the novel that we American climbers and readers of serious fiction have been waiting for. This book is the first true literary deep dive into the austere beauty, deep friendships, and high emotional cost of the lives we’ve all led in America’s great empty spaces, tilting at mysterious windmills, chasing truths and dreams we can never quite name. Howland is the real deal—as a climber, a writer, and a deep thinker about the human condition. Native Air belongs on the bookshelf of not just every climber but anyone whose heart registers the beauty and danger of exposure.”
—Daniel Duane, author of Lighting Out, A Golden Year in Yosemite and the West, and A Mouth Like Yours
“Jonathan Howland’s characters are so real to those of us who live on the edge of big mountains and wild spaces that it reads more like a memoir by one of my Alaskan former ‘dirtbag climber’ neighbors than a novel. You may read Native Air for the climbing details and its big authentic western heart, but it’s the love stories that made me wish it didn’t end. This is a novel full of people I know—and care about.”
—Heather Lende, Alaska State Writer Laureate, author of Find the Good, If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name, Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs, and most recently Of Bears and Ballots
“In Native Air, I was drawn in by the human story—rich, tragic, compelling—and the vivid portrayal of the climbing itself. Both elements felt real and raw and true. For me, it all works.”
—Michael Kennedy, climber, photographer, essay writer, and past editor of Climbing and Alpinist
Media & Interviews with the Author
Climbing Magazine: A feature by senior editor, Alison Osius, former president of the American Alpine Club.
Native Air Looks at the Bond of Climbing—and the Void of Disaster: Upcoming novel explores a great climbing partnership, a calamity, and the effects of loss on two different people. (Link)
Interview with Jonathan Howland, featuring his answers to the five questions via Authors Answer.
(Link)
“O
n Episode 241, I connect with climber and author, Jonathan Howland. Jonathan started climbing in the early 70s and spent much of that decade obsessed with the pursuit. Then a 20-year hiatus ensued, but Jonathan returned to the climbing fold with a similar passion but a new outlook. Then tragedy hit, and as can often be the case, so did a dark muse. The result is Jonathan’s first published novel, Native Air. The narrative in Native Air is based on characters living and climbing on the East Side of the Sierra in the 80s. However, the themes in Native Air are endowed with loss, friendship, family, and whether or not climbing can stand up to the weight of meaning we frequently heap upon it. Jonathan’s insight into the heart of why we climb is riveting.” —Chris Kalous, host of Enormocast (Link)
Necessary Fiction: Research Notes (May 6, 2022)
Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Jonathan Howland writes about Native Air, published by Green Writers Press. “. . . I’m drawn to novels that spiral around a single, cataclysmic event, typically a reverberant loss or grief. In life and in literature, I abide the Faulknerian premise that “nothing ever happens once and is finished.” As in Faulkner’s “The Bear” (and Absalom, Absalom!, where he coins the phrase), or Toni Morrison’s Beloved, or Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, Native Air continually circles back to revisit, recover, and savor — both to understand the past and to animate and invigorate the present . . .” (Link)
Listen to Jonathan Howland
on Climbing and His New Novel, NATIVE AIR
at https://www.buzzsprout.com/1606522/11051500-jonathan-howland-on-climbing-and-his-new-novel-native-air
“On Friendship: Men in Love Who Aren’t (in Most Cases) Lovers”
Jonathan Howland Explores “Gravitational” Male Relationships, April 2022 (Link)
Jonathan Howland: Book Launch for Native Air at Green Apple Books in San Fransisco
About the Author
Jonathan Howland lives in San Francisco. After 36 years teaching and working in independent schools, he now alternates between climbing trips in western states and writing, gardening, and playing with two grandchildren at home. Also: cooking, yoga-ing, and coyote-sighting in the Presidio of San Francisco, which he frequents with Courtney and their dog Ike. His favorite writers include Melville and Morrison and Marlon James, Faulkner and Woolf and Chekhov, though if limited to just one, Emily Dickinson. Visit: jonathanhowland.org.
Author photo by Erin Neff.
Author climbing photos by Chris McElheny.
About the Cover Artist & Designer
Hughen/Starkweather is the collaboration of San Francisco artists Jennifer Starkweather and Amanda Hughen. Their site-specific, research-based artworks reinterpret complex narratives about a place using new and unexpected forms. Recent work involves investigating the past, present, and possible futures of places where water meets land through the lens of climate change.
Exhibitions include the Asian Art Museum, the Public Policy Institute of California, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, and the University of San Francisco. Residencies include the DeYoung Museum, Headlands, Recology, Skowhegan, Ucross, and Yaddo. Recent large-scale art commissions have included SFMOMA for Chase Center and the San Francisco Central Subway Station at Union Square. Starkweather received an MFA from Tyler School of Art; Hughen received an MFA from the University of California, Berkeley. This is their first book cover.
SPECS
FICTION
380 pages; 6 x 9 / Softcover
$24.95 print / $9.99 e-book
ISBN: 978-1-950584-90-1 (print)
ISBN: 978-1-950584-89-5 (e-book)
ISBN: 9798989178438 (softcover)
Publication Date: May 21, 2024
Distributor: IPG / Chicago
Rights sold: All rights available.
Rights contact: Dede Cummings
dede@greenwriterspress.com
Distributor: IPG; also available through Ingram, Follett/Baker & Taylor, and other wholesalers.
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