An intellectually adventurous young man chafes against the constraints of modern life in Reeves’ coming-of-age novel.
Young Bill doesn’t seem destined for greatness. His father is an alcoholic who’s been committed to an asylum; he looks after his aging, cancer-stricken mother (who also has MS) while working at a factory in Fort Wayne, Indiana, overseen by a testy and temperamental foreman. When he returns home each night, he lingers outside to delay the ordeal of having to help his mom onto the toilet and clean her soiled sheets. His one joy is studying literature at an extension of Indiana University, where he gains a reputation for being “well informed and witty” and acquires one friend, a fellow student named Susie. After leaving the factory, Bill takes on odd jobs, including a brief stint loading and unloading containers for Petunia’s Packing. As he works, he reflects on his early life: He left the basketball team after he failed to grow above six foot two, and his father lost his position as head of the high school business department by drinking at work. At one point Bill is obliged to leave his mother for several days and drive to Ontario to clean out some cabins that are owned by the family. When he returns, he finds his mother’s lifeless body sprawled on the kitchen floor. Her death comes as something of a relief, but when his two dogs die not long after, he weeps for their loss. Still grappling with the slow death of his dreams (“a once comfortable middle class financial life…broken down and shattered”), he continues to apply himself at school. Intrinsically motivated by a delight in literature, he “aces” a correspondence course on Dickens, graduates magna cum laude, and is soon on his way to a doctorate.
Although the premise doesn’t sound promising at first, the great strength of Reeves’ novel is its dazzling, experimental prose style; he writes with a ragged, lyrical fervor reminiscent of Jack Kerouac. Sentences roll steadily onward, frequently eschewing conventional spelling and punctuation, slipping into archaisms and poetic cadences that evoke Defoe and Blake: “For years the mothers ailment had drained the family coffers. But that had been slow, even tho ever downward, this latest blow had come hammer fast.” Reeves’ uniquely fantastical vision makes 1962 Indiana (with its “blistered road” and “crummy factories”) resemble the world of Mervyn Peake’s mid-century fantasy trilogy Gormenghast. He dubs Fort Wayne “the city of dreadful night,” a nod to James Thomson’s visionary poem. There are echoes of Holden Caulfield in Bill’s disdain for the hypocrites and fools who fill his life; memorably, he silently rages at those who eulogize his mother at her memorial but never called or visited while she was living. The protagonist is, admirably, always eager to challenge himself: He seeks out essays on 14th-century poetry at the local library, animated by a thirst for knowledge despite struggling with some of the concepts and language. (Reeves adds, with a Salinger-esque flourish, “Hed like to do the good wife [of Bath] who was probably something.”) With his unflappable resolve in the face of relentless drudgery, Bill becomes a hero in the vein of Samuel Beckett’s Unnameable: “He’d made it through the initial day of toil…. He would not be defeated.”
A wonderfully inventive prose-poem, thrilling in its ambition.
kirkus
