I am not the kind of reader who naturally gravitates toward slice-of-life Americana. I\u2019m an enthusiast for the sort of American fiction where cowboys make dolent pronouncements while staring into fires, sure \u2013 but less the kind where people are generally nice, and go to places called things like \u201cFink\u2019s Drugstore\u201d to drink \u201croot beer floats\u201d.<\/p>\n
So when Buckeye \u2013 the new novel from American author Patrick Ryan, whose collections of short fiction have garnered comparisons to William Faulkner and JD Salinger \u2013 clunked obstreperously on to my doorstep, I thought \u201cyou\u2019ve got to respect a 440-pager\u201d, and somewhat reluctantly pulled my little socks up for some Norman Rockwell-type business. And you know what? I now think slice-of-life Americana is good, actually.<\/p>\n
Opening in the first decades of\u00a0the 20th century, this luminous and tender novel follows, for most of its stately length, the interwoven lives of two married couples in the fictional town of Bonhomie, Ohio. One half of the first of\u00a0these couples is Cal Jenkins, the sweet-tempered son of a traumatised first world war veteran, born in the spring of 1920 with (to use the parlance of the era) a mild deformity: \u201cThe day you were born and one of your legs came up short,\u201d his father, Everett, tells him, \u201cright then I thought, well, that\u2019s it. If we get into another big one, he\u2019ll never be in it.\u201d The delights of prolepsis!<\/p>\n
The US gets into another big one in quite short order, of course. Cal, just as his father predicted, is turned away from the recruitment office and ends up spending his days in drudgery at the local concrete factory instead. A chance meeting with Becky Hanover, a\u00a0young woman with a dark bob and a\u00a0loveably whimsical way about her, sees Cal married by the end of the first chapter. After all, Bonhomie is a small town, \u201chers was the first beret he\u2019d ever seen that wasn\u2019t on someone in a\u00a0movie\u201d, and we\u2019ve got 50-odd years of American history to get through.<\/p>\n
As one of Ryan\u2019s characters summarises it: \u2018people get laid, babies get made, everybody lies to their kids\u2019<\/p>\n
On 8 May 1945, Cal is working a shift at the hardware store owned by Becky\u2019s father when a gorgeous, confused redhead stumbles in. Together, they listen to President Truman announce allied victory in Europe over the wireless \u2013 and then she kisses him. The gorgeous, confused redhead is Margaret Salt. Her own equally gorgeous and strangely aloof husband is away on a\u00a0cargo ship in the Pacific. From here, the novel takes off at full thrust, and, as one of Ryan\u2019s characters summarises it: \u201cpeople get laid, babies get made, everybody lies to their kids\u201d.<\/p>\n
It is no surprise that Ryan cut his teeth writing short fiction: Buckeye is elevated throughout by the precision with which he captures the tiny, haunting glories of everyday suburban life. We have a mother-in-law with a singing voice so beautiful it silences the room, like \u201cthrowing a blanket over\u00a0a birdcage\u201d; a newborn baby peering up at his father \u201cin a single-brow-lifting, James Cagney kind of way\u201d; a\u00a0Japanese submarine, recovered from\u00a0Pearl Harbor and taken on tour through the snowbound midwestern winter, \u201cringing dull and hollow under the pummel of mittens\u201d. Across this intimidatingly weighty novel, I encountered only one\u00a0duff simile (and it would feel churlish\u00a0to\u00a0retype it here).<\/p>\n
For all its quotidian charm, a deep melancholy prevents Buckeye from ever tipping into saccharine nostalgia. I\u2019d probably not go quite so far as to bring Faulkner into it \u2013 this is accessible, amicable and more-or-less conventional literary fiction \u2013 but nonetheless, Ryan writes his wounded souls with the same exactitude as his dusty vinyl diner booths. His Bonhomie is peopled by men almost universally traumatised by their experiences of war. \u201cLife chewed you up and spat you out,\u201d Cal thinks, when he turns his mind to his home town\u2019s many eccentric veterans, whose\u00a0company he has been fatefully excluded from, \u201cbut it didn\u2019t often spit the same way twice\u201d. \u201cWomen had the babies, and men \u2026 began to distance themselves the moment they pulled out,\u201d Margaret thinks, \u201cbecause they had to go to a wife, or to work, or to war, or to that secret place of stoic brooding all men are given the key to at birth.\u201d Ryan\u2019s characters are universally nuanced and finely wrought, their gently interpolated inner monologues giving the lie to the pleasant respectability they strive to project. As the years tick by and we enter the 60s, Cal is a father \u2013 and prolepsis becomes a crueller mistress.<\/p>\n
So much for Norman Rockwell, who\u00a0is invoked almost as the artistic antithesis of Buckeye\u2019s project. \u201c[Rockwell] was always capturing the\u00a0perfect moments then putting them under a microscope to find the cute parts \u2026 nothing was like those paintings.\u201d Ryan, unlike Rockwell, is not interested in cute. With Buckeye, he strips away the Bakelite glaze of\u00a0the\u00a0American dream to expose\u00a0the\u00a0raw\u00a0flesh beneath.<\/p>\n
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