“I was locked up for a while. Full of the empty darkness, if that makes sense to you. The sort of nothing that fills up everything. Spent the whole time running down the “what if” crap to fill up my soul. What if I hadn’t dropped then? What if they’d buckled up? What if this and that? You can go crazy with that. And maybe I did. And maybe when I got out and was all of a sudden an adult and alone, yeah, maybe I did some things I shouldn’t have. And maybe those were my fault. But that’s the old me. That’s not who I am now.”

Book Review:

Review by Chuck Barksdale  (DEC 21, 2013)

First, let me say that this book has excellent writing and stories and provides a true sense of life in the rural area of Columbus County, Arkansas. I’ve decided to give this a top rating despite having some misgivings about that rating because of my occasional confusion while reading the book. However, after thinking about it especially after waiting a week or so to write this review, I’m convinced that the writing is just too good to not warrant the top rating.

The book starts out almost immediately giving the gloomy darkness that will permeate throughout the novel’s stories. The book starts with Champion Tatum and his son still trying to get over the death of Champion’s wife:

Eleanor Tatum had come home from the mill late that Saturday night last June, skipped church the next morning, and walked into the front yard to put a bullet through her temple.
“Never seen a woman do that,” Champion had overheard one of the deputies saying.
“Must have been pretty messed up, do something like that,” a tall man Champion hadn’t seen before said. “Women usually take pills. You know when they cash in.”
“Damned shame,” another deputy said, shaking his head, scratching into this notepad.
They all shook their heads and agreed it was a damned shame.

In the second section of the book, the main character , Roy Allison is introduced and it is in these sections that the book is told in the first person. As you learn, Roy is returning from spending time in juvenile detention and although he now has a job with the county he is not always welcomed when trying to do his job.

“Mr. Greer, my name’s Roy Allsion.” I pulled some papers out of my back pocket.
“I know who you are, shitface.” He raised the barrels of the shotgun to my face. “Everybody knows who you are. You’re the piece of shit who killed his parents.”
That stopped me. I guess I’ll never get used to that. Never get away from it. Which is fine. I did kill my parents.

Roy’s life became difficult after accidentally killing his parents at 16-years-old in a car accident while taking them to the hospital. He’s hoping to improve now upon his return to the area but that’s not being easy.

One of the themes that Roy and others in the book have is around life choices as in this excerpt:

You get far enough down one trail, doesn’t matter much which way you go from there – they’re all the wrong choices. Some days you just do what you learned to do, what you’ve lived your life doing. A body tumbling down a hill, into a ravine.

Roy doesn’t always make the right choices and he continues to struggle with his life as do others in the other stories of county residents. The reader can make his or her own decision about whether the choices are the right ones or if Roy and others really had a choice.

I’m a big baseball fan (in addition to being a crime fiction fan) and this book certainly has a subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) baseball theme that is often present through the various stories. Characters will be watching or listening to baseball and some of the characters will know or even play baseball (look for it). You don’t have to be a baseball fan to appreciate how this is being presented but as a baseball fan you will really enjoy the baseball presence and will as a result get more out of this great book.

In the published description of this book it is described as a “A novel-in-stories in the tradition of Bonnie Jo Campbell, Donald Ray Pollock, Denis Johnson, and Alan Heathcock.” Well, unfortunately, I haven’t read any of those authors, but the book is definitely told in a series of interlocking stories. It was an approach that I enjoyed but at times found a bit confusing. Although reading and keeping notes on an electronic reader has its advantages, in this case, I would have liked being able to flip back and forth through the pages of a real book. For me though, I immediately felt I was reading a style similar to Daniel Woodrell. Again, that’s probably my ignorance in not reading more in today’s “country noir” style then in the more traditional noir style of authors such as David Goodis and Scott Phillips.

This book is the first novel published by Steve Weddle. Steve has had a few of his stories published, but I’ve known him more as a publisher and editor of the Needle books of mostly noir short stories. I actually met Steve in 2010 at Noircon in Philadelphia and after that bought a couple of the Needle books, but I’ve not talked to him since and certainly our brief meeting had no influence on anything I’ve written here. Although I’ve enjoyed the Needle books, here’s hoping Steve spends more time writing novels and hopefully I’ll get to meet him again at Noircon in 2014.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 24 readers
PUBLISHER:	Tyrus Books (November 18, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Chuck Barksdale
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Steve Weddle
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More “country noir:” The Devil All The Time by Donald Ray Pollack American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell The Bayou Trilogy by Daniel Woodrell

Bibliography:

• Country Hardball (October 2013)

“Baseball was an art but to excel at it you had to become a machine. It did not matter how beautifully you performed sometimes, what you did on your best day, how many spectacular plays you made. […] What mattered, as for any machine, was repeatability.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (SEP 7, 2011)

Set in the world of college baseball, this is a book about aspiration, failure, and recovery. There are many good things in it, both about baseball and college, but not enough of them for me to recommend the novel wholeheartedly. Harbach captures the baseball world (as in the quotation above) with convincing authenticity; more of this in a moment. He also has some spot-on observations of academe, as in this remark by an English Professor opening a class:

“In lieu of our usual business, I hope you’ll be so indulgent as to listen with me to a recording of the dear dead anti-Semite Thomas Stearns Eliot reading aloud his longish poemlike creation THE WASTELAND, and meanwhile to meditate on the ways in which modernism rejects, retains, or possibly even transforms the traditional elements of orality we’ve been discussing throughout the semester.”

Nice! The shadow of English Departments, here and elsewhere, hangs over the book throughout, though generally lightly. Guert Affenlight, the President of Westish College, is a former football jock from the same college who has built an entire career on a chance discovery of notes made by Herman Melville for a lecture at the college late in his life, and parlayed this into a seminal book on 19th-century literature and academic stardom at Harvard. He is a likeable character, and the only significant non-student in the novel. In one of his smaller epiphanies, he reflects on the downside of literature: “It could teach you to treat real people the way you did characters, as instruments of your own intellectual pleasure, cadavers on which to practice your own critical faculties.” Nice again, but ouch! As a reader myself looking in the mirror, this is a little too true. But turn it around: does Harbach think it permissible to treat fictional characters as cadavers for his intellectual pleasure? He might have done well to glance into his own mirror too.

Three of the other major characters are students on the college baseball team. Henry Skrimshander is a phenom, a shortstop with the accuracy of a laser and grace of an angel. Mike Schwartz, as huge is Henry is light, is the team captain, the man who first spotted Henry and recruited him, and remains his personal coach, mentor, and guru throughout his student career. The third is Owen Dunne, Henry’s roommate, brilliant, beautiful, and gay; he plays baseball almost as an afterthought, spending most of his time in the dugout reading until called in as a pinch-hitter. Add to these Guert Affenlight’s beautiful daughter Pella, in flight from an early marriage, who will become involved with each of the other three in different ways.

The crux of the story, as described in the excellent back-cover summary, comes during a crucial game in Henry’s junior year. Now the most famous player on the team and already being scouted by the major leagues, he makes a single disastrous throw, the first error of his college career. His world falls apart, and the lives of his friends with it. This is certainly a worthy theme for a novel, both literally as it applies to baseball, and as a parallel for life. Baseball players (whom I have observed only at a distance, like other fans) are indeed expected to be artists with the predictability of a machine, as Harbach says. The same is true of actors and musicians, the subjects of my professional work. And we surely have all come into contact with the devastating effect of failure that comes about, not through incompetence, but fear of success. With such a subject, and his obvious knowledge of the game, Harbach could have written a book that went as far beyond baseball as Joseph O’Neill in Netherland went beyond cricket.

So why didn’t he? Largely because of a certain frivolity that leads him to treat his characters as personal playthings rather than rounded human beings — the very thing that Guert Affenlight condemns in himself. There is a clue in many of the names: Westish itself; Chef Spirodocus; players called Loondorf, Arsch, and Quentin Quisp; and the title of Affenlight’s seminal (yes) book, The Sperm-Squeezers. Was the book intended as satire, I wondered? But the humor is not consistent. Harbach writes well for the most part, but now and again you see him reaching a little too hard, such as “his daughter ducked her beautiful port-colored head” and “As he twisted his combination lock in its casing, right left right, he could sense a gentle depression, like the hollow of a girl’s neck, each time he reached the right number.” Then there are the implausibilities, starting with Westish accepting Henry solely on the word of a sophomore, and ending with a sequence of bizarre events that serve no useful purpose other than to bring the novel to a close. But what finally sunk the book for me were the sexual relationships, none of which I could believe: a case of true love at first grope, the cliché of a tense young man getting (almost) cured by the simple fact of getting laid, and an entanglement central to the plot which no reader would accept in a straight context, but which we are asked to swallow simply because it is gay.

Harbach’s themes are valuable, but he will not succeed in making the most of them until he can create rounded characters and let himself be led by them.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 900 readers
PUBLISHER:	Little, Brown and Company (September 7, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Chad Harbach
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Netherland by Joseph O’Neill The Brothers K by David James Duncan

Bibliography:

• The Art of Fielding (2011)

As Editor:

• MFA vs. NYC: Two Cultures of American Fiction (February 2014)