I am not the kind of reader who naturally gravitates toward slice-of-life Americana. I’m an enthusiast for the sort of American fiction where cowboys make dolent pronouncements while staring into fires, sure – but less the kind where people are generally nice, and go to places called things like “Fink’s Drugstore” to drink “root beer floats”.
So when Buckeye – the new novel from American author Patrick Ryan, whose collections of short fiction have garnered comparisons to William Faulkner and JD Salinger – clunked obstreperously on to my doorstep, I thought “you’ve got to respect a 440-pager”, 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.
Opening in the first decades of the 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 these 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: “The day you were born and one of your legs came up short,” his father, Everett, tells him, “right then I thought, well, that’s it. If we get into another big one, he’ll never be in it.” The delights of prolepsis!
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 young woman with a dark bob and a loveably whimsical way about her, sees Cal married by the end of the first chapter. After all, Bonhomie is a small town, “hers was the first beret he’d ever seen that wasn’t on someone in a movie”, and we’ve got 50-odd years of American history to get through.
On 8 May 1945, Cal is working a shift at the hardware store owned by Becky’s father when a gorgeous, confused redhead stumbles in. Together, they listen to President Truman announce allied victory in Europe over the wireless – and then she kisses him. The gorgeous, confused redhead is Margaret Salt. Her own equally gorgeous and strangely aloof husband is away on a cargo ship in the Pacific. From here, the novel takes off at full thrust, and, as one of Ryan’s characters summarises it: “people get laid, babies get made, everybody lies to their kids”.
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 “throwing a blanket over a birdcage”; a newborn baby peering up at his father “in a single-brow-lifting, James Cagney kind of way”; a Japanese submarine, recovered from Pearl Harbor and taken on tour through the snowbound midwestern winter, “ringing dull and hollow under the pummel of mittens”. Across this intimidatingly weighty novel, I encountered only one duff simile (and it would feel churlish to retype it here).
For all its quotidian charm, a deep melancholy prevents Buckeye from ever tipping into saccharine nostalgia. I’d probably not go quite so far as to bring Faulkner into it – this is accessible, amicable and more-or-less conventional literary fiction – 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. “Life chewed you up and spat you out,” Cal thinks, when he turns his mind to his home town’s many eccentric veterans, whose company he has been fatefully excluded from, “but it didn’t often spit the same way twice”. “Women had the babies, and men … began to distance themselves the moment they pulled out,” Margaret thinks, “because 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.” Ryan’s 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 – and prolepsis becomes a crueller mistress.
So much for Norman Rockwell, who is invoked almost as the artistic antithesis of Buckeye’s project. “[Rockwell] was always capturing the perfect moments then putting them under a microscope to find the cute parts … nothing was like those paintings.” Ryan, unlike Rockwell, is not interested in cute. With Buckeye, he strips away the Bakelite glaze of the American dream to expose the raw flesh beneath.
• Buckeye by Patrick Ryan is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
