Ivan Doig.
Riverhead Books: 2012: $16.
I’d given up on fiction about a year ago. Too much of what I’d been reading left
me empty as if I’d just watched back-to-back-to-back hours of 80s era cop shows
on TV, and rose from the couch feeling as if I’d wasted a perfectly good
evening. Prior to going cold
turkey, I’d been caught up in either glitzy assembly-line novels where
understory folks write for the James Pattersons and Clive Custlers of the
world, or formulaic stuff that, into the third or fourth installment, I
realized I’d read before.
Enter Ivan Doig.
I’d never read any of his work previously, but in July, a friend had
mentioned this one. Timid about
getting burned for sixteen bucks and several hours of time, I didn’t bite. Then, a week or so ago, “The Bartenders
Tale” was displayed prominently on the “New in Paperback” table of the
independent in Calistoga. “Well, what the hell,” I must have said aloud,
because an older woman raised an eyebrow from behind the cash register.
Set in Montana in 1960, Doig’s novel lets me reenter that
time through the eyes of narrator Rusty, a kid who was about my age in that
year. Within pages, I am sharing
the curiosity, wonder, questions and angst of one exploring a barroom’s
backroom stuffed with pawned treasures, experiencing our childhoods fade into the
rearview mirror and the future unfold one overheard conversation at a
time. I laugh with the Twain-like oddities
and incidents Doig creates and shudder at the truths – some real, some imagined
– as divined by Rusty. We’ve all
been there.
In this story steeped in nostalgia and wisdom, Rusty, in
need of his own place-in-the-world foundation, struggles to grasp his
single-father’s past. Immersed in
the story, I am twelve again, right there with him and I don’t want twelve to
end. When it does, I find I must
take ten minutes and a walk around the block to allow the mist to clear from my
eyes.
Mr. Doig has renewed my interest in fiction as, perhaps, a
most-viable vehicle for delivering truth.
Now I want more.
© 2013
Church of the Open Road Press
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