I was a running boy. That’s what our next door neighbour Ethel Sunman called me. I went from one place to another like a duck somebody was shooting at. I made beelines.
Smithson Ide is alone. Forty three years old, an alcoholic, overweight, chain smoker, with a dead end job in quality control, and a stomach full of bullet holes from a tour in Vietnam, he has just lost his parents in a car accident. They died without ever finding out what happened to Smithy’s sister Bethany, whose madness dragged her onto the streets years previously.
In her first sitting, Queenie got as far as the night after Mom and Pop’s funeral, and nearly didn’t pick up the book again. Not even when Smithy went off on one and cycled through Hope Valley and into the Wood River on his childhood Raleigh. The use of words like providence, hope and the inelegant dumping of the principal character into the dark wood (river) that presages all quests were a little clunky. And the overwhelming self-pity and guilt of Smithy were wearying.
However, she is glad she picked the book up again. Smithy’s Quest, as he cycles from Providence, Rhode Island to Los Angeles, first on his boyhood Raleigh bike, and then on a new Moto, bought for him in Providence, Indiana by a doctor who had him beaten up mistakenly, is one of the better American road trip novels she has read.
I think I’m on a Quest. My friend Norma says I’m on a Quest. I know it’s strange. I used to be fat. Smithy tells a man who picks him up one night in Arizona.
Smithy explains that he is on his way to be reunited with Bethany, whose remains have been identified by dental records sent by Pop before he died. The man responds by sharing his own tragedy with his strange passenger. The novel is peopled with interesting characters who help put Smithy back together again, from ‘old full and juicy’, the disillusioned priest who provisions him for his journey, to Carl, the terminally ill flower grower who knocks him down in Indiana.
Smithy’s Quest is also internal. The book flashes back and forth between Smithy’s past and his journey. The inevitability of Bethany’s disintegration hangs over Smithy’s childhood, his present, and over us the reader. Her bouts of madness are presaged by her Voice, who only manifests itself to the boy, too young to save his sister and too small to be listened to.
In addition to his grief over Bethany, Smithy’s guilt over how he treated Norma, his childhood friend re-emerges as he sobers up and gets fit. After an accident confined Norma to a wheelchair, the Ides, overwhelmed by their struggle with Bethany’s madness, ignored her presence in the house next door.
I knew that Norma watched too, behind those fluttering venetian blinds, watched the movement in the kitchen and the long shadows we threw. I thought about Norma that night and how we had all stopped going over, little by little, until for everybody it was too late.
Now Smithy’s isolation and loneliness opens the door of his shame to Norma. She uses this opportunity to reach out to him and help him on his Quest. Her presence, in a series of late night phone calls, drives him on.
This novel is about loss. It is primarily about the loss of the self, whether to madness or the cure for madness, to alcohol and obesity, or to grief and isolation. The overwhelming loss borne by so many ordinary decent folk is so thick at the beginning of the novel, it is almost impossible to wade through the opening chapters. It is only as Smithy finds his rhythm on the old Raleigh and starts to rebuild his relationship with Norma, and with himself, that Queenie could lift her head off the gutter and look at the stars. But that’s how loss is, a seemingly unending struggle with a new routine until finally it becomes manageable, then imperceptibly, something to rely on again.
And so we pick ourselves up and move ourselves along. Slowly at first, then gathering pace.
A very elegant and rhythmic account of how people can slowly unfold themselves, no matter how crushed, given a chance.
Ron McLarty is a well known character actor on American television and it shows in the many well drawn cameos in the book. Like so many novels these days, it is written with an eye to the screenplay. No crime in itself, and Queenie will spend many happy hours trying to cast this one in her head.
Sean Astin could rehabilitate himself in Queenie's eyes with the role of Smithy for a start (see review).
Mags – it’s winging its way to Birr as Queenie writes! Thanks!
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