Arlene McKanic

FictionDebut Fiction

A year inside a creative haven

Review by Arlene McKanic

For folks who were there, the New City York of 1980 was the best of times and the worst of times. The city was a cauldron of energy, creativity and wonderful freakishness. It was the city of Basquiat and Keith Haring’s hit-and-run works of art—and even a place where rents were cheap if you lived in Greenwich Village or Alphabet City. AIDS had not yet ravaged the city like a daikaiju from outer space. It was a place where a girl from Ketchum, Idaho, or an orphan from Argentina could come and dream big, make it big and yes, fail big.

Molly Prentiss’ Tuesday Nights in 1980 follows several linked characters during the year in question. There’s Lucy, the innocent girl from Ketchum and her lover, Engales, the ambitious painter from Argentina, who has escaped that country’s encroaching fascism as well as a quasi-incestuous relationship with his sister. James is an art critic noted for incorporating his synesthesia into his reviews. To him art, people and things are jumbles of vibrant sensations and colors. He is drawn to Lucy because she’s as fluorescent yellow as a squash blossom. Engales, who he meets after the artist suffers a disfiguring accident, fascinates him with his blueness. James’ wife, Marge, is red.

Because James knows all these people with varying degrees of intense intimacy, everything in the book will get very, very complicated. How can it not? It was 1980.

The book is such an accomplished and surefooted work that it’s amazing to learn that it’s a debut. Prentiss’ descriptions of New York and its fractious art scene will make those who were there almost nostalgic, and her deep empathy for her characters, messed up as some of them are, is moving. She pulls off the difficult feat of making dialogue sound like conversations overheard in the next room. Tuesday Nights in 1980 is a discerning, passionate and humane work.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

For folks who were there, the New City York of 1980 was the best of times and the worst of times. The city was a cauldron of energy, creativity and wonderful freakishness. It was the city of Basquiat and Keith Haring’s hit-and-run works of art—and even a place where rents were cheap if you lived in Greenwich Village or Alphabet City. AIDS had not yet ravaged the city like a daikaiju from outer space. It was a place where a girl from Ketchum, Idaho, or an orphan from Argentina could come and dream big, make it big and yes, fail big.
FictionPopular Fiction

An old-fashioned heroine takes on NYC

Review by Arlene McKanic

A reader of fashion writer and editor William Norwich’s latest novel, My Mrs. Brown, could be forgiven for thinking its titular heroine is living in the 1950s, like Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge. The lady described is in late middle age. Mrs. Brown is modest, fair-minded and dutiful, and lives in a quiet Rhode Island town. The highlight of her year is being asked to help with an inventory of the estate of a philanthropic widow. Only then does it becomes clear that the story takes place in the present day. Are there still people like this?

Norwich’s answer is an enthusiastic “Yes!” There are ladies who wear twinsets and sensible shoes, bake morning glory muffins and still write letters in the age of Facebook and endless texting. You’ll be surprised how shocked you are when you encounter the first F-bomb in this book. No, it does not come from Mrs. Brown.

During the inventory, Mrs. Brown sorts through Mrs. Groton’s sumptuous dresses, and she finds one whose twin she simply must have. She’s a good seamstress but she could never sew such a glorious garment. No, Mrs. Brown has to go to New York to find such a dress, and the prospect fills her with the terror and excitement of a recruit waiting to storm a beachhead.

Even if you find Mrs. Brown anachronistic, with the gentle conservatism of an age long-gone, you come to like and respect her. Then, you come to love her. For along with her belief in decency and humility comes tenacity. She is determined to overcome her fear of New York—its crazy transit system and good/bad smells and confusing street signs and all the rich and sophisticated people who still manage to be kind when they meet her—because she must have that Oscar de la Renta dress, which she has painstakingly saved for. She does not want the dress to entice a man, or to flatter her figure or even because she thinks she’s as good as Mrs. Groton, although she is. The reviewer will leave it to the reader to find out the reason why.

Goodness really is its own reward, says Norwich’s gentle-hearted book. Better yet, sometimes goodness is rewarded.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A reader of fashion writer and editor William Norwich’s latest novel, My Mrs. Brown, could be forgiven for thinking its titular heroine is living in the 1950s, like Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge. The lady described is in late middle age. Mrs. Brown is modest, fair-minded and dutiful, and lives in a quiet Rhode Island town. The highlight of her year is being asked to help with an inventory of the estate of a philanthropic widow. Only then does it becomes clear that the story takes place in the present day. Are there still people like this?
Fiction

The tide of time

Review by Arlene McKanic

Elizabeth Poliner, author of Mutual Life & Casualty, gets the central tragedy of her latest novel out of the way on page one: the beloved youngest child in a close-knit Jewish family dies. The action revolves around the before, during and after of this catastrophe, in the summer of 1948.

The story is narrated by Molly, the daughter of one of the three sisters who jointly own the Connecticut beach house they and their kids flee to in the summers. The rest of the family includes Molly’s charming and aggravating older brother, Howard; their bookish cousin, Nina; their aunts, Vivie and Bec; father Mort and uncles Leo and Nelson. All of their lives take unexpected detours after the death of Davy. Yet the detours aren’t terrible; the family may have been changed by tragedy, but they weren’t destroyed by it.

Poliner’s characters are memorable. There’s Molly’s mother, Ada, in all her bigoted, extravagantly loving prickliness. Molly’s father, Mort, takes his roles as husband, father, businessman and Jew with supreme seriousness; when Howard fails to show up one morning for the weekly minyan, Mort can’t let it go. Uncle Nelson, overweight and unlucky in love, keeps stashes of Tootsie rolls in his pockets and pops them at moments of high tension, even at the Shabbos meal. Vivie, Nina’s mother, is still a little sore from Ada having stolen Mort away when they were girls. Her husband, Leo, is neurasthenic. Bec is the most independent; she knows her affair with a married Catholic man will almost certainly make her an outcast. The Syrkins are as close as breathing indeed, and Bec sometimes needs to take long walks just to breathe some fresh air. Yet she always returns.

Since everyone in the novel is good, if not always nice, it’s tempting to think of As Close to Us as Breathing as lacking a villain. This isn’t quite true; the villain is inattention. Inattention by her husband and the world in general has left Ada melodramatic and bitter and her sisters frustrated. A mere moment of inattention leads to Davy’s death. The book is Molly’s attempt, finally, to give her ordinary, grief-stricken family the attention they deserve.

Elizabeth Poliner, author of Mutual Life & Casualty, gets the central tragedy of her latest novel out of the way on page one: the beloved youngest child in a close-knit Jewish family dies. The action revolves around the before, during and after of this catastrophe, in the summer of 1948.
FictionDebut Fiction

The remains of the day

Review by Arlene McKanic

Wendell and Frank, the elderly lovers of Matthew Griffin’s debut novel, are an annoying pair of hairpins. When the reader meets them, they are crotchety old guys living in some moribund little town in North Carolina. Soon, you learn the two of them were sort of curmudgeonly even when they were young.

Wendell, the narrator of the tale, would also probably object to him and Frank being called “lovers.” Though the action takes place in the waning years of the 20th century, Wendell pretends to be Frank’s brother when he’s taken to the hospital for a stroke. He also disapproves of the way younger gay men flaunt themselves; the sight of Nate Berkus on the cover of Architectural Digest with his husband and baby would have given him the vapors. The book isn’t called Hide for nothing; Frank and Wendell are comfortable in their closet. He and Frank have chosen to live in a place just far enough from town so they can do their shopping but discourage busybodies. 

Still, after a while the two begin to grow on you. Wendell, rejected by his family, is a misanthrope. A taxidermist, his relationship with Frank begins while Wendell prepares a deer—surely one of the squickiest getting-to-know-you scenes in modern literature. Frank, who comes from a loving family, ultimately rejects them to be with Wendell. They are each other’s entire world. Why else would Wendell spend hours baking complicated cakes or buying up every last fruitcake in town because they’re the only food that appeals to Frank after his stroke? The reader understands, with an anticipatory grief, that the stroke has not only taken Frank’s appetite but has left him weak and confused. Wendell will simply not be able to take care of him for long.

Frank and Wendell’s tragedy is that they’ve been forced, by law and then by habit, to forswear those networks that would have made the vulnerabilities of old age more bearable. There are no friends, no babies, no grandbabies. Even pets don’t fare very well. So, though Griffin fills his story with prickly humor and wit, and a dash or two of gruesomeness, in the end Hide is a book that breaks your heart.

Wendell and Frank, the elderly lovers of Matthew Griffin’s debut novel, are an annoying pair of hairpins. When the reader meets them, they are crotchety old guys living in some moribund little town in North Carolina. Soon, you learn the two of them were sort of curmudgeonly even when they were young.
Science Fiction & FantasyFictionScience Fiction

A new lease on life

Review by Arlene McKanic

It’s best to get the main conceit of Jessica Chiarella’s debut novel, And Again, out of the way: four people with terminal conditions win a lottery that entitles them to participate in what’s called the SUB program. This is a program where their bodies are cloned and when they reach the biological age of the participants—which happens after a few months—their memories are transplanted wholesale into the new bodies. Think of Jake in Avatar getting his consciousness uploaded into his Na'vi body, except for these people, the body is wholly theirs, made from their own cells. Yet, the new body, bereft of the dings, dents and scars that even healthy people accumulate, is not quite theirs at all. 

The transplants—Connie, Linda, Hannah and David—wake up to a world where sounds, smells, tastes and colors are almost unbearably intense, for their senses are as acute as those of young children. They have to be taught to coordinate their arms and legs, to walk, to write again. For some, the reprieve from mortality makes them humble; for others, it makes them cruel and reckless. The loved ones who expected them to die are as confounded as if they had indeed come back, whole and impossibly healthy, from the dead.

Chiarella doesn’t linger over the technical details of the SUB program, even though the reader is curious. These folks remember absolutely everything about their lives—you can’t even really call them past lives, since the transfer from the old body to the new clone seems to be as easy as putting on a new suit. What sort of gruesome research went into this medical procedure? As for the old, damaged bodies—is there nothing left of the person? Do the patients, even for a moment, have the ghastly feeling of being two places at once? It is actually to the author’s credit that she doesn’t answer these questions; they’d only gum up the narrative.

It’s Chiarella’s laser-like focus on her characters as they fight to pick up the threads of their old lives that makes And Again the unsettling, thought-provoking book that it is.

It’s best to get the main conceit of Jessica Chiarella’s debut novel, And Again, out of the way: four people with terminal conditions win a lottery that entitles them to participate in what’s called the SUB program. This is a program where their bodies are cloned and when they reach the biological age of the participants—which happens after a few months—their memories are transplanted wholesale into the new bodies.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The struggles of sisters on the homefront

Review by Arlene McKanic

It’s difficult to overstate the disastrous impact World War II had on civilians caught in its many war zones. These stories are often overshadowed by tales from the front, but these days the more unusual contributions of civilians to the war effort are being recognized more and more, as in movies like The Imitation Game. Kristin Hannah’s moving The Nightingale joins these ranks to take a look at the experiences of ordinary people and the great reserves of courage and innovation the fighting called forth from them.

The heroines of this story are two sisters, the somewhat matronly Viann and the younger and wilder Isabelle. Having lost their mother as children, with a father who is too torn up with grief and the effects of the last world war, the two are not close. Besides, Viann, who married young, is happy to concentrate on her pretty little daughter, Sophie, and her loving husband, the town postmaster. 

Then comes the war. Viann’s husband is mobilized, but since France capitulated to Germany with hardly a shot being fired, things in their town are not too bad at first. But when the Nazis start billeting their soldiers among the townsfolk, life deteriorates. Jewish friends and colleagues are humiliated, then rounded up. Food and fuel become scarce.

Meanwhile, Isabelle enters the resistance. Her task is to find downed British then American airmen and guide them over the Pyrenees into Spain, a trip so grueling that it made this reviewer's feet hurt just to read it. Her code name is Nightingale, the English version of her real last name: Rossignol. Having saved hundreds of Allied airmen, she becomes one of the Nazis' most wanted.

The book is narrated by an omniscient narrator and a woman, now elderly and ill, who decides to return to France to accept honors for her bravery and sacrifice during the war. If nothing else made you cry during this book, this part, with its gentle twists and surprises, should do it.

 

It’s difficult to overstate the disastrous impact World War II had on civilians caught in its many war zones. These stories are often overshadowed by tales from the front, but these days the more unusual contributions of civilians to the war effort are being recognized more and more, as in movies like The Imitation Game. Kristin Hannah’s moving The Nightingale joins these ranks.
FictionPopular Fiction

A bachelor party fantasy turned nightmare

Review by Arlene McKanic

Once in a while, a reader needs to dive into a book that makes her feel just a bit unclean. The book doesn’t have to be trashy—and Chris Bohjalian’s latest, The Guest Room, is much too well-written and psychologically astute to be close to trashy—but the author must have no compunction about dropping the reader into the muck and leaving her there. This Bohjalian certainly does, with glee.

The bad stuff comes early. Richard Chapman, a mild-mannered investment banker, allows his sleazy brother, Philip, to throw a bachelor party at Richard’s house in a tony New York City suburb. This predictably sordid affair takes a nightmarish turn when the bodyguards of the barely legal strippers are murdered in view of the guests. Because, see, these strippers aren’t strippers at all, but Armenian sex slaves—and the cue-ball-headed, no-neck bodyguards are their Russian overseers.

The point of view alternates, and Richard; his wife, Kristin; their daughter, Melissa; and an enslaved girl dubbed Alexandra by her captors all get a chance to tell the story. Richard has no idea what to do with himself. Kristin is freaked out—not so much because people were slaughtered in her house, but because her husband almost had sex with a girl half their age. Melissa is frightened and bewildered, which is perfectly OK because she’s 9. This, the book says, is how people who thought they had it made come unmade.

But consider what Bohjalian, author of the bestseller Midwives, does with the hapless Alexandra. She is the conscience in this conscienceless world, a girl who manages to hold on to her innocence and compassion despite the horror of her life. Her voice, with its sometimes uncertain, quirky English, is rendered with such perfection that it’s easy to forget that the author is male. This, the book tells us, is what happens to the innocent. It’s all very dark and greasy—and enjoyable.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Once in a while, a reader needs to dive into a book that makes her feel just a bit unclean. The book doesn’t have to be trashy—and Chris Bohjalian’s latest, The Guest Room, is much too well-written and psychologically astute to be close to trashy—but the author must have no compunction about dropping the reader into the muck and leaving her there. This Bohjalian certainly does, with glee.
Mystery & SuspenseFictionMystery

The ripples of a cold-case on the Cornish coast

Review by Arlene McKanic

One of the joys of reading a good mystery is feeling like a dope at the end, knowing that the answer was there in front of you from early on but the writer cleverly hid every single clue. Kate Morton’s The Lake House isn’t one of those books. This reviewer figured it all out by chapter 32, and even the book acknowledges that there are a few too many coincidences. Still, the story Morton tells is engaging.

The mystery involves a disappearance from a stately old home on the Cornish coast. But instead of a wayward wife, we have a little boy barely into toddlerhood. Theo, the much longed for son of Eleanor and Anthony Edevane, born after a trio of girls, vanishes during raucous Midsummer celebrations in 1933. For 70 years no one seems to have the foggiest idea what happened to him. Was he spirited away by gypsies? Was he murdered and his body buried somewhere on the grounds of Loeanneth, the ancestral estate? If the story were set in New Zealand, the reader might be tempted to think a dingo got him.

The timeline swings, mostly, between Theo’s disappearance and 2003. By then, Alice Edevane, the second of the sisters, reigns as an octogenarian author of best-selling mysteries and Sadie Sparrow, a young detective, has been relieved of duty for overzealousness. With time on her hands, Sparrow takes up the cold case that involves the long abandoned manse close to the home of her beloved grandfather. Alice, prodded by guilt and curiosity, helps her out.

Another pleasure of the book is Morton’s take on the aftermath of the First World War, which wiped out countless thousands of young men and left survivors like Anthony Edevane traumatized shells. Her other theme is family relations, particularly some characters’ experiences of motherhood. For Eleanor Edevane, motherhood is the fulfillment of her life. Alice Edevane is childless. Other women have had to give up their children, while others will do anything to have one. Anything at all.

Such contemplation of maternity gives this mystery novel a rare tenderheartedness. Whether you figure the puzzle out late or early, it is Morton’s compassion for her characters that keeps you reading.

One of the joys of reading a good mystery is feeling like a dope at the end, knowing that the answer was there in front of you from early on but the writer cleverly hid every single clue. Kate Morton’s The Lake House isn’t one of those books. This reviewer figured it all out by chapter 32, and even the book acknowledges that there are a few too many coincidences. Still, the story Morton tells is engaging.
FictionPopular FictionHistorical Fiction

Trigiani’s latest is a star-studded story

Review by Arlene McKanic

A warning to the reader before picking up Adriana Trigiani’s All the Stars in the Heavens: do not Google Loretta Young if you don’t want major spoilers!

That out of the way, this is a fun book that goes down as smoothly and sweetly as the gelatos of its heroine Alda Ducci’s native Italy. This is surprising, as the story should be a bit painful—the reviewer kept bracing herself for the bad part, but the bad part never came. Trigiani, author of The Shoemaker’s Wife, is also a good enough writer to overcome the weirdness of putting fictional, Preston Sturges-worthy dialogue into the mouths of people who actually lived. She does this through an unselfconscious immersion in her subject matter. In this case, it’s the golden age of Hollywood, the splendor and otherworldliness of movie stars and the lengths they and their studios went to to keep scandal out of the headlines back in the day.

Much of the story is seen through the eyes of Alda, a former nun who comes to work as Loretta Young’s secretary. Alda, whom we follow from her insecure 20s to her matriarchal 10th decade, gets the hang of Hollywood very quickly as she sees to her boss’s needs and keeps her confidences. She even falls in love with the Brooklyn-born scenic painter on Call of the Wild, a movie starring Young, Clark Gable and a dog.

Speaking of dogs, the top dog in Trigiani’s tale has to be Gable himself. He reminds the reader of that charming mutt in Lady and the Tramp, with Loretta Young in the role of the lovely and pampered cocker spaniel who falls for him. When we meet Clark, he’s working on his second—or is it his third?—marriage. But why shouldn’t he fall for Loretta Young? In the book, she is a good woman, devoutly Catholic, beautiful, compassionate, hardworking and immensely forgiving. As for Clark Gable, well, he’s Clark Gable. He can do what he wants. Indeed, all of the movie stars in Trigiani’s novel are good people, deep down. They also do what they want. That’s what makes then irresistible, both on the screen and in this starstruck, warm-hearted book.

 

A warning to the reader before picking up Adriana Trigiani’s All the Stars in the Heavens: do not Google Loretta Young if you don’t want major spoilers!

FictionHistorical Fiction

A worthy addition to the ranks of the British society novel

Review by Arlene McKanic

Clare Clark’s novel of the dislocations that befall an aristocratic English family during and right after World War I is beautifully written and enjoyable, but the reader has to wonder if it would have been published had we not been living in the age of “Downton Abbey.” Of course it might have, as the popular TV show has plenty of collateral ancestors of its own: Think Brideshead Revisited and those nice books by Nancy Mitford. Still, the full name of one of the characters of We That Are Left includes the name Crawford. It’s not Crawley, but it’s close enough for jazz, as they say.

Other parallels include the noble title and the great old estate that comes with it, both slated to be passed on to a distant cousin—though in this case there are very interesting twists. There’s the feckless head of the family who has, like his fathers before him, mismanaged the place to the point that the death duty taxation will make it unsustainable. There’s the sister who becomes a wartime nurse and the sister who may be good, but is not at all nice. One nod to Brideshead is that part of the story is seen through the eyes of an outsider. That would be Oskar, an Anglo-German math and science prodigy who’s in love first with one sibling, then the other.

But Clark’s novel does its forebears proud, for We That Are Left is engrossing. As in her acclaimed debut, The Great Stink, the characters are vivid and her feel for place is equally superb; the reader experiences the sourness of a London fog, the chill of English rain, the play of light on hair and skin and stone. Clark also seems to know every inch of Cambridge University as well as the arcana of the British system of higher learning. Her sense of humor is as dry as the Queen’s gin and tonic: Consider the banter between one of the sisters and her creepy, aging suitor/boss, or disenchanted Oskar’s fixation on the pimple growing on his former crush’s chin during a soirée.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a tale of the British upper crust without tangled, tormented, transgressive love affairs and buried family secrets. Clark joins a long line of writers who show us that the myth of the British stiff upper lip is indeed just that.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Clare Clark’s novel of the dislocations that befall an aristocratic English family during and right after World War I is beautifully written and enjoyable, but the reader has to wonder if it would have been published had we not been living in the age of “Downton Abbey.” Of course it might have, as the popular TV show has plenty of collateral ancestors of its own: Think Brideshead Revisited and those nice books by Nancy Mitford.
FictionDebut Fiction

Sad, but not hopeless

Review by Arlene McKanic

The challenge for an author who writes about a lonely character is to make that character interesting—and keep him that way. Happily, this is what Lori Ostlund has done in After the Parade, her sensitive and realistic tale of the excruciatingly lonely Aaron Englund. What’s intriguing about him is that he seems not to mind his loneliness. This may seem odd, for the difference between loneliness and solitude is that a person minds the former and doesn’t mind the latter. But Aaron holds his pain like a shield against a world that never had much use for him.

The story alternates between scenes of Aaron’s childhood and his early middle age, at a moment when he is contemplating just how life ended up this way. We start with his parents, who should have listened to Philip Larkin and never reproduced in the first place. Aaron’s dad was a brute who didn’t even bother to hide his hatred of his sensitive son. Aaron’s mother loved him for a time, but abandoned him when he was a teenager. Aaron, too gentle or maybe too passive to embrace his father’s brutality, learns much from this disastrous woman. When we meet Aaron, he is preparing to leave his partner of 20 years with a cold efficiency. At least Aaron tells him goodbye.

Still, Ostlund—a Flannery O’Connor Award winner who spent 15 years shaping this novel—gives us reason to hope for her troubled protagonist. Aaron is befriended by a detective whose childhood was as rotten as his, and a nice man he meets in a café seems interested in him. And he is loved—by his ESL students; by his ex-boyfriend, Walter, in spite of everything; and especially by Walter’s sister, whose support helps him do a hard thing near the book’s end. After the Parade is a sad book, but a hopeful one.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The challenge for an author who writes about a lonely character is to make that character interesting—and keep him that way. Happily, this is what Lori Ostlund has done in After the Parade, her sensitive and realistic tale of the excruciatingly lonely Aaron Englund. What’s intriguing about him is that he seems not to mind his loneliness. This may seem odd, for the difference between loneliness and solitude is that a person minds the former and doesn’t mind the latter. But Aaron holds his pain like a shield against a world that never had much use for him.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The joy of the journey

Review by Arlene McKanic

The passage that hooked this reviewer came early in Ivan Doig’s delightful sprawl of a novel. It was that song about “great green gobs of greasy, grimy gopher guts,” sung on a bus by obnoxious little boys off to summer camp. Having not heard that song in years and years, it simply warmed my heart. How could this book not be a keeper?

Last Bus to Wisdom is told by an orphan. He’s Donal Cameron, a Montana boy who is 11 years old in 1951. The flinty grandmother who raised him after his parents were killed needs an operation. This means Donny needs to go live with Gram’s somewhat estranged sister in Wisconsin. To do this he has to go Greyhound or, as they said back in the day, ride the dog bus. Having ridden the dog bus fairly frequently over the years, this reviewer braced herself for a horror story. Instead, Doig treats the reader to a panoply of folk who may or may not be down on their luck, but are still decent—most of them—for all that. Donny even runs into the not-yet-famous Jack Kerouac at one point. But that comes later.

Donny’s stay with his aunt Kate and her German-born husband, Herman, is a mixed blessing. Kate, so sweet of voice and broad of girth that the boy believes for a time that she’s the singer Kate Smith, is actually a muumuu-wearing termagant. But he’s saved by Herman, or, more precisely, the two save each other. Herman is just as put upon by “the Kate” as Donny; a man-child and a child-man, they end up on the lam together, eventually arriving in Wisdom, Montana. On the way, there are hobos and pow-wows and rodeos, the sights and sounds of the West and all kinds of good and bad luck.

Doig, the author of 16 books about the West, died earlier this year. In his final novel, he has great fun with both his characters and their slangy, inventive and often ribald ways of speech: “Holy wow!” is one of Donny’s favorite phrases. The other one can’t be repeated in a family publication. Last Bus to Wisdom is a big-hearted, joyfully meandering work by a master.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Last Bus to Wisdom is told by an orphan. He’s Donal Cameron, a Montana boy who is 11 years old in 1951. The flinty grandmother who raised him after his parents were killed needs an operation. This means Donny needs to go live with Gram’s somewhat estranged sister in Wisconsin. To do this he has to go Greyhound or, as they said back in the day, ride the dog bus. Having ridden the dog bus fairly frequently over the years, this reviewer braced herself for a horror story.
FictionComing of Age

When a runner’s high trumps the real world

Review by Arlene McKanic

It’s sometimes amazing to realize how an obsession for sports can take over a life. In John L. Parker Jr.’s amiable new work, a prequel to his 1978 bestseller Once a Runner, Quenton Cassidy, teenage native of Citrus City, Florida, is so wrapped up in his athletic pursuits that the great upheavals of his era—the Cuban missile crisis, the assassination of JFK, civil rights and the arrival of the Beatles for goodness’ sake!—stick in his mind the way anything sticks to Teflon. 

Torn between track and basketball, for which he’s just a bit shorter than he should be, Cassidy (as he’s called) frets over his running time, his technique, rankings, 220s, 440s and 880s. He does so even as his classmates brace themselves for the end of the world as delivered by a barrage of Russian nukes. When one of his friends is implicated in a murder, Cassidy does think of skipping a meet for a hot minute—but only for a hot minute. 

Still, for all his tunnel vision, Cassidy is a lovely young man. He is popular even among his athletic rivals. He is a good and dutiful son, and would be a sweet boyfriend if he were interested in dating. He attempts to be thorough even in his non-sporting activities and calls everyone “sir.” The only reason his “ma’ams” are few and far between is because there are about four women in the book who have brief speaking roles. This is a man’s man’s man’s world.

To his credit, Parker surrounds his hero with some mighty interesting men, some of whom are not what they ought to be (see above). The most interesting of these is the gigantic Trapper Nelson, animal lover and sometime poacher who lives rough in the swamp; he’s south Florida’s answer to Hagrid. The boys Cassidy plays with and against are also stout fellows. The one sour note is a coach so convinced of his own rightness that he’s willing to cut the athletically brilliant Cassidy from his team for even respectfully disagreeing with him.

Racing the Rain is a cornucopia for folks who are as track-and-field crazy as Cassidy. It’s also a good-hearted, good-natured book for the rest of us.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It’s sometimes amazing to realize how an obsession for sports can take over a life. In John L. Parker Jr.’s amiable new work, a prequel to his 1978 bestseller Once a Runner, Quenton Cassidy, teenage native of Citrus City, Florida, is so wrapped up in his athletic pursuits that the great upheavals of his era—the Cuban missile crisis, the assassination of JFK, civil rights and the arrival of the Beatles for goodness’ sake!—stick in his mind the way anything sticks to Teflon.

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