Customer Reviews

How All This Started: A Novel

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
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Pete Fromm is above all else a compelling story teller. A brother and a sister are stuck in the middle of Texas on a ranch that their parents got as a good deal. Both children, Abilene and Austin, were named after the town where they were conceived. They are love children, but they don't quite understand the love their parents have for them. Dad is a bit of a bore, and Mom is a bit over concerned.

The story hinges around baseball. The two are bonded together against their parents by their love of baseball. Abilene is going to get Austin to the big leagues. Their hero is Nolan Ryan. Problems arise when Abilene exhibits manic depressive behavior. The "fireballers" can pitch. Abilene would have been a good pitcher for the Pecos Eagles, but her teammates wouldn't play with her. She wants to make sure that Austin makes it.

Austin demonstrates confusion about proper brother/sister relationship, and has difficulty understanding her bipolar illness. What happens when the hero proves to be fallible? How do you tell right from wrong when your hero just might be wrong?

As a first novel, Fromm continues his good writing from his collections of short stories in "Dry Rain," "The Tall Uncut," and "Blood Knot." At times perhaps, the book appears to be an extended short story, but Fromm neatly wraps the parts together into the novel. If you have not read any of his short stories perhaps you should read one first. The book was a gripper. Once I got started, I had to continue reading until finished.

Watching the relationship between Austin and Abilene is a little like looking down from a high tower watching two cars race toward a deadly collision. You desperately want to prevent the collision, but the movement of the cars is too beautiful, too graceful, and you don't dare intervene.

The beauty and grace are supplied by Pete Fromm, whose novel is filled with insights and surprises from the first page. What makes it the more remarkable is that the story is told by Austin, a high school sophomore in middle-of-nowhere, Texas, whose world view has been shaped entirely by his bipolar older sister, Abilene.

This is a fine novel on so many levels. It's a love story, a tragic love story set in the vast emptiness of West Texas, where everything is simple except for the people. It's a sports story, with an ambitious coach (Abilene) with an ax to grind jealously guarding her young phenom (Austin) out of love, hope and desperation, all of which are as twisted as a mesquite trunk. It's a story of a family whose love is under a blistering attack by mental illness, obsession and misunderstanding.

Most importantly, it's written with compassion, empathy and a delicacy of language that makes us hope that Fromm will keep producing for a long, long time. Put him in the ranks of Annie Proulx and Larry McMurtry. Come again, soon, Pete.

How This All Started tells the story of a brother and sister locked in a dangerous world of their own making, based on the delusions about baseball greatness that emerge from the bipolar disorder of the older sister.

Austin is profoundly loyal to Abilene's mental illness, because he's mistaken her sickness for her identity. During treatment, the identity she is trying to develop outside her sickness doesn't offer same dangerously passionate bond with him. This is the stuff of heartbreak, but the "tests" that Abilene puts him through when she's manic are so damaging, dangerous and disgusting that the book lost me as a reader.

There was plenty to admire in the writing and characterization of this book, and plenty of realism and truth. Families do tend to arrange themselves in orbit around the dying star of the sickest member, and sometimes loyalty is stronger then the instinct towards self-protection. But all the stuff with the guns, the swallows, the self-mutilation and the endless pitching; it was too much to believe Austin would still be hanging in there, especially after Abilene's forcing of his arm. It just didn't ring true.

From page 2 I was hooked. Perhaps it was because I could relate to the Texas surroundings, or the brother/sister relationship, or even the family struggle with Bipolar Disorder. But whatever it was I was engaged in this story from the "get-go". (See, I told you I could relate to the Texas stuff!) Don't think you have to share their passion for baseball, or know anything about mentall illness. You will live it! Pete Fromm had me crying--a heartfelt, hopeful cry. I wish I could visit these characters 10 years later and see How All This Ends Up.

A very strange novel! If you don't like baseball, better abstain. But it is a lot more than just baseball. It is the dramatic story of a family and their two children, a daughter and a son, lost in the forest of parental phantasms.

The two kids were raised on a fable about a honeymoon, that should have lasted more than six years if not at least seven, explaining the strange names of the daughter, Abilene, and of the son, Austin, that should represent the two cities in which the two children were conceived during that honeymoon, but six years apart. That myth created a bond between the daughter and the son that was unhealthy because too much bound to a sexual act.

The father tried to develop in his son a taste for baseball and he succeeded, but by the age the boy was able to become autonomous in his game, around five or six, his sister had taken over and pushed the father out of the picture. She became an obsessive compulsive coach that made the son an obsessive compulsive player totally dependent on his coach, his sister.

But the book goes even farther and further.

It shows how this obsessive compulsive disorder, intertwined as it is in the two children, finding its root in the phantasm of the parents about the conception of the two kids and their names, develops in the two children something completely different, dominant in the daughter and submissive in the son.

The daughter develops a father transference that becomes perverse. She transfers onto herself the father she would have liked to have, in fact a father that could have made her a baseball pitcher. But since she became better than her father who had been an average baseball pitcher in high school, and probably college, she identifies completely with that idealized reconstructed image of her father.

That will lead her to take over the "coaching" of her brother and to try to enter the baseball team of the high school when her brother was still around ten. The rejection she suffered, with apparently no negotiation from her father, led her to transferring her own father transference onto her brother, without seeing the sexual ambiguity it created in herself and all the more in her brother who became her "transference son" with a complicated transferred Oedipus complex against his real father, his real mother and entirely concentrated in his sister who was both the father figure he had to kill, and obey, but also the mother figure he desired and had to keep at a distance.

When you add to this their obsessive compulsive disorder you have the picture of a daughter that becomes sick, morbidly sick, destructively morbidly sick, both onto herself and onto people around her, brother and parents, but you also have a son who submits to that OCD of his sister's and rejects his own father by replacing him with his own sister as well as he replaces his own mother with his own sister.

You can imagine the damage done to the son by this situation: exclusive incestuous desire for his sister, absolute identification that makes that desire narcissistic, absolute submission to it that makes the son a slave of the OCD of his own sister. She could kill him with his consent, or even make him kill himself with her own gun.

Pete Fromm describes this ordeal for the daughter, the son and the parents, in so many details that you may just become sick at times with the sickening nature of the facts that are nevertheless never of any sexual nature. He just stops short before that line could be trespassed, though it could, should and would have been trespassed many times, due to the situation of the two kids.

But Pete Fromm after bringing us to the very brink of the drama, in about thirty pages, reforms the daughter and saves the son. It thus ends well and with plenty of sentimentality more than perverse sensuality. So the end will satisfy the readers who will have been able to cross the drama and come close to a real tragedy. They will feel reassured in chemotherapy and the possible reformation and salvation of such far gone OCD patients. Unluckily it is one more good intention that will pave hell, but it is rarely that pleasant.

The book is extremely poignant and powerful, provided you are not afraid of psychiatric horror and you can cope with the necessary personal empathy you have to feel for these characters, and this empathy can very will lead you to a stressed realization that we all live on transferences but that there is no institution or medical service that can deal with such phenomena that are universal, which does not mean we all reach that level of morbidity and intensity.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

I learned of this book through my interest in baseball and started reading it with out too many expectations. My experience with books with a baseball theme is that of disappointment from a literary standpoint. I was drawn in by the author's skill and craft as a writer and his development of the characters all the time expecting to be let down and disappointed. I spent my working life in mental health field and can say that the description of manic depression with the treatment and outcome is extremely realistic. From my knowledge of baseball from the point of view of a hobby and as a researcher I found that to be quite believable. I read the book through almost in one sitting and could not get over how good it was. I read a lot and this is the best I have come across in a long time.

I spent some kid years in Texas and Fromm's dirt-dry desert depictions are spot on. His characters are highly memorable, especially high-flyin' Abilene...made me grateful that I've only got the depressive side of "manic-depression". Whooo doggies. There were times when even I felt trapped in her careening beater of a truck (poor thing), times when I nearly said, stop this book, I gotta get out! If you've ever lived with a bi-polar, you'll know the feeling.

Life in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the desert..."but it's a dry heat", my tail. Sometimes I think folks in hell find themselves saying, "heck, it's hotter'n Texas in here!" Be sure to settle in to read with a tall glass of sweet tea...you'll feel parched and wind-blown by the end.

This is my favourite Fromm book. As an older sister with a close relationship to her younger brother, the bond that these kids had touched me deeply. The story is told with such warmth and compassion that it would be impossible to not feel for each and every characted.

One of Fromm's biggest strengths as a writer is his ability to make you feel as if you personally know each and every character, not just the central ones. I find it remarkable and adds dimensions to his stories that would otherwise fall by the wayside.

This book is an full novel of one of his short stories and I must say that although the short story is great, the novel is just hauntingly beautiful.

This is probably one of the more memorable stories I have read in the past few years. I was introduced to Fromm's writing through Nightswimming, and have gotten my hands on everything else he has written since then. His stories are compelling, his writing style is easy, and the characters have a great deal of depth and breadth to them. All of my friends who have read this book have been blown away by it, unable to put it down, consistently moved at the end.

I couldn't get over the fact that the whole premise for this book is wrong. Abilene was only nine years old when she decided to make Austin a baseball star. I won't pretend to be an expert in childhood (although I was nine once upon a time), but bipolar disorder and all, Abilene was awfully young to be so determined. Think about it: a nine-year-old tomboy girl is showing her four-year old brother to throw baseballs. Why is there no room for anything else, like climbing trees, skateboarding, bicycling? How can a nine-year old have such tremendous focus on her own? The book does not address the different levels of maturity that kids have considering that age difference, plus the innate gap that exists between male and female children. I couldn't bring in any amount of willing suspension of disbelief to get over this.

I could have understood the story better if Abilene's compulsion to train Austin had happened after her experience with her high-school team (she gets rejected, and her brother gets to potentially vindicate her humiliation, plus she gets to live vicariously through him). But the five-year difference is not enough to make Abilene behave like a pushy mother.

Austin has bratty moments, like any teenager. However, the disdain he feels towards his parents is compounded by his desire to please Abilene, who truly despises them. One of the most interesting moments in the book for me is when Austin comes to terms with who his parents are, and stops seeing them as pathetic individuals. At that moment he steps into maturity (although he had already breached his way into it when he realized that Abilene was not invincible).

Something I liked is that the key dramatic moment in the story (the guns episode) did not go where I thought it was going. I appreciate it when a writer keeps me on my toes. Still, my shortcomings as a reader kept me from giving this novel a higher score.