Long Way Gone

Cooper O'Connor, a reclusive musician in the Colorado mountains near Buena Vista, narrates this story of estrangement, loss, and return. Scarred by burns on his chest, back, neck, and right ear, with a damaged right hand and a raspy whisper of a voice, he carries the physical evidence of a catastrophe in Nashville twenty years earlier.

The novel opens with Cooper beside an elderly street musician named Jube in Leadville, playing licks that transform the old man's performance and draw a crowd. Cooper places his guitar in Jube's case as a gift. Later, he finds a woman collapsed against a parking meter in Buena Vista, bleeding from a head wound. Only after carrying her to his Jeep does he recognize her as Daley Cross, his former musical partner and fiancée.

Their reunion is tender and halting. Once a rising star, Daley now hitchhikes toward a casino gig in Biloxi, Mississippi. Cooper asks her to sing; every song was made famous by a dead artist, and she does not sing one of her own. Cooper introduces Daley to Mary, a resident at an assisted living center who has severe cerebral palsy, and to Big Ivory "Big-Big" Johnson, Cooper's father's closest friend. Daley joins the center's hymn sing and moves the room to tears. That evening, they perform at the Lariat Bar, a venue Cooper secretly owns, drawing a large crowd. Daley sings her old hit "Let It Out" for the first time in years and pulls Cooper onstage for his first public singing in two decades.

Cooper takes Daley to his mountain cabin, where she sleeps for four days. When she wakes, she insists on leaving. Cooper gives her a guitar and slips three notebooks of songs into her bag, all written for her voice over twenty years. At the bus station, he hints that neither of their former producer Sam Casey's stories about the Nashville fire was true. Sam told the public he heroically rescued Cooper while telling Daley that Cooper had been robbing his safe. Daley responds that if a truth existed, he should have loved her enough to tell her. They kiss before the bus departs. Cooper watches it go, convinced his silence protects her from falling in love with a dying man.

After Daley departs, Cooper experiences an episode of bleeding esophageal varices, swollen veins in his esophagus that can rupture fatally. The condition results from liver damage caused by a bullet wound, and Cooper has managed it for twenty years by plunging into subfreezing creek water. Big-Big pulls him out, rebukes him for letting Daley leave, and hands him his father's letter, a three-page document re-signed on five anniversaries of Cooper's departure.

Part II traces Cooper's backstory. His mother died when he was four, and his father, a tent preacher, raised him with Big-Big's help. The family's most prized possession was a Martin D-28 guitar named Jimmy. His father taught him that songs are "a light we shine on others, not a light we shine on us." He secured a revival venue called the Falls by diverting snowmelt to a rancher's land, creating a waterfall and amphitheater. During Cooper's first performance there at age eight, a storm scattered the crowd. His father pulled him from under the piano bench and told him to let it out. The boy played through the storm. From that night, Cooper could see a figure he calls Blondie, a being visible only to him. His father gave him a black notebook to record the songs he heard.

By his teens, Cooper performed before crowds of thousands while record companies circled. His father refused them all. Cooper's resentment grew. At eighteen, he punched his father during a service at the Falls, stole Jimmy and roughly $12,800, and drove to Nashville. Inside the cash he found his father's note: "No gone is too far gone. Son, you can always come home."

Nashville humbled him. The money was stolen, and Jimmy was taken when Cooper was mugged on a street corner. He nearly jumped from a bridge. Riggs Graves, owner of a guitar repair shop, hired him and gave him an apartment overlooking the Ryman Auditorium, Nashville's legendary concert hall. For two years Cooper performed alone on its stage after lockup.

Daley sneaked into the Ryman before her debut and heard Cooper playing a song from his notebook. He gave her the page. The next night, a power failure forced them to perform it unamplified, and the broadcast via radio microphones made them sensations. Daley's producer, Sam Casey, hired Cooper. They toured the world, Cooper won Songwriter of the Year, and they fell in love. He proposed and sent his father $50,000 in apology, but he distrusted Sam, sensing the producer exploited Daley's absent father to control her.

The catastrophe came when Cooper found Jimmy locked in Sam's office, proof Sam orchestrated its theft years earlier. Cooper tried to retrieve it, but Sam shot him; the bullet lodged in his liver and a fire followed. Unable to speak in the hospital, Cooper learned his injuries were permanent and his liver would hemorrhage unpredictably. Sam, who wanted Daley for himself, whispered his triumph. Cooper concluded Sam's stolen notebook would sustain Daley's career better than a dying man could. Believing Sam's lies, Daley returned the ring and walked out. Cooper drifted west.

Years later, Cooper returned to learn from Big-Big that his father had died. He read the letter in the aspen grove between his parents' graves.

Part III returns to the present. Cooper learns Daley is performing at the Falls, her career revived by the songs he slipped into her bag. He puts his affairs in order. While driving, he begins hemorrhaging and crashes into a creek. Daley, returned early, drags him to shore and demands the truth. Cooper tells her everything: Sam shot him, stole his songs, set the fire, and fabricated both stories. Daley, who has worn his engagement ring on a necklace for twenty years, refuses to leave. "The fear of what might be will not rob me of the promise of what can," she tells him (243).

Big-Big delivers a final letter, revealing that Cooper's father drove to Nashville the night of the fire, carried his son from the burning building, and died from the resulting burns and pneumonia. Taped to the letter is the oak ring Cooper threw into the river as a teenager; his father searched three days to find it.

At the concert, with Daley's band stranded by a snowstorm, Cooper fills in on guitar. He reads his father's letter aloud and confesses that he struck his father, stole from him, and never saw him alive again. He performs the new song "Long Way Gone" and leads the crowd in "Come Thou Fount." During the final verse, the hemorrhage ruptures. Big-Big carries Cooper's body into the waterfall pool where his father's body was found. In an out-of-body experience, Blondie breathes life into him. He wakes on the ground, healed.

The epilogue, set on Christmas Eve, shows Cooper and Daley married and recording an album at the restored Ptarmigan Theatre. Twelve-year-old Jubal Tyre, grandson of the street musician Jube, freezes with stage fright backstage. Cooper tells him music is something you "get to do," not "have to do." When Jubal reveals he can see Blondie playing onstage, Cooper hands him the black notebook, passing the gift to the next generation.