Customer Reviews

Please Don't Come Back from the Moon

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

As the economy worsens in Michigan, sixteen year-old Michael Smolij watches as father after father leaves town, the men unable to face their families with no jobs, dignity evaporating with every passing day. One by one, fathers spend directionless days in the local tavern before quietly disappearing forever. So many men leave the blue-collar neighborhood outside Detroit that everyone points to the disappeared as having "gone to the moon", wives left to carry the burdens of children and part time jobs, exhausted physically and emotionally by the dual role of mother and father.

Ultimately the loss of their fathers breeds a twisted violence in the hearts of the sons left behind. With the abdication of the men, the boys are forced to become men prematurely and put away their childhoods; thus is born a smothering anger and an incalculable sadness that resides deep in their hearts.

As Michael gets older, he tries to look out for his younger brother, Kolya, but acting tough has set Michael and his cousin Nick apart from kids with fathers, incipient "bad boys", distorting both Michael and Nick's views of the world and what it has to offer to fatherless sons. Drifting into a cursory education, Michael's curiosity is partially fueled by the young women in his life, who are attracted to the brooding sensitivity of the unhappy young man.

This novel lays bare the broken hearts of desolate young men. Bakopoulos is unstintingly honest, unabashedly free with the emotional territory of abandonment, allowing a poignant view of a loss that is permanent, a tattoo on the psyche. Always they think of their fathers, remembering, wondering how they might have changed, if they are happy on the moon, if they have forgotten their sons.

The prose is beautifully rendered, tender, innocent, bruised by reality, tinged occasionally with the angry bravado of something-to-prove. In the very city where their fathers worked on assembly lines for Ford and General Motors, the only employment for Michael, Nick and their contemporaries is found at the local shopping mall, as a failing economy grinds up any opportunity for a decent life of hard work like past generations.

Please Don't Come Back from the Moon portrays the gradual unfurling of hidden promise in a life once destined for failure, haunted by the losses of the past. Yet fate intervenes for Michael Smolij. In a world where fathers, in their own distress, leave and take up residence on the moon, the sons fend for themselves, many lost along the way, casualties of society's neglect and disinterest. But Michael finds his voice, buried beneath the rage that has simmered since childhood. In sensitive and lyrical prose, with a surfeit of desolate images of towns and people forgotten, Bakoploulos delivers a thought-provoking and soulful novel on the pains of growing up fatherless, where dreams may still surface.

Along with helpless anger lodges a seed of doubt, the potential of being like their fathers. And as adolescent boys become young men, marry and start families, they cannot bear to acknowledge their unspoken fears, the legacy of their fathers...a silent call to the moon: "Like an eye, the moon follows us wherever we go." Luan Gaines/2005.

This book grabs the reader's attention with a powerful first chapter and then slides into a captivating rhythm that carries you through to the end. The story reveals a working class life that unfolds into what we realize is *our* reality, no matter what our social class, where we live, or how solid our family structure. We follow the life of the main character, Michael, a boy whose life is displaced when his father (and in fact all the men in town) leaves.

We learn about the hardship of a post-industrial, service based economy, where passions and dreams disappear in the haze of obligation, bills, and the comfort of the social networks, spaces, and places we consider "home". Mr. Bakopoulos gently, and brilliantly, conveys his ideas through his characters while commenting on the plight of men and society in a post-industrial economy, without being overtly political.

This book is thoughtful, well written, funny in parts and sad - you know the sad where you get a choking pit in your throat when you read - in others. Wow. Buy this book.

The crumbling of America's manufacturing sector is more than just a segment on the nightly business report as Dean Bakopolus records in this beautifully written and moving first novel. Narrator Michael Smolij's family is part of a close-knit blue collar Detroit suburb, where nearly all the fathers work in local factories. As these jobs vanish through downsizing and outsourcing, so do the dads also begin to disappear. One leaves a note: "Gone to the moon." The parish priest joins the exodus. The local bar starts serving the fourteen-year-olds who've had to step into their fathers' shoes. Mothers start working two or three jobs. Instead of growing into the good-paying factory positions their fathers' held, the kids take the only jobs available; working at the mall for $6 an hour.

Michael's family is a little better educated than some of the neighbors and he aspires to college, taking community college classes while working in the mall bookstore. His cousin and best friend move into their twenties working at mall food court jobs meant for high school kids, trying their hands at any kind of entrepreneurial enterprise that will bring in a little money. They forge new families, but as they struggle to realize a slice of the American dream they always expected to be theirs, the sons of the vanished fathers are overcome by a strange restlessness, and Michael fears that they, too, will abandon their families, leaving their own children with even less to hope for than they had.

Bakopolus infuses a touch of magic into the grit of the story with excellent effect. Where did the fathers go? No amount of detective work turns up any of them. Realizing that there was no dignified place for them in the post-industrial economy, perhaps they really did go to the moon. This is an auspicious debut from a writer who has a great deal to say and the skill to tell it well. I look forward to his next novel.

When Michael Smolij is 16, his father (and all the other men in his town) begin to disappear, one by one. The only clue about where they might have gone is a single note one of the men leaves, literally on his way out the door: "I'm going to the moon." Although I was captivated by the opening chapter, I was worried about where I thought the story was headed -- I figured I was reading "The Mystery of the Missing Lunar Fathers," and I had a hard time seeing how these fragile magical and metaphorical elements could support the weight of a 300-page novel. Happily, I was wrong; almost as soon as he establishes this "mystery," the author does something unexpected and (to me) borderline brilliant: He pretty much leaves it alone. The moon and the missing men are referenced only occasionally (but never forgotten) through the bulk of the novel, and yet they hang over and influence the entire narrative, much like (to clumsily appropriate the metaphor) the moon itself. Bakopoulos never beats you over the head with the story's mystical aspects, but never quite lets you forget them, either (nor should you, since they play an important role in the book's moving and equally ambiguous conclusion). This frees Bakopoulos to make this Michael's story, not his father's. The reader comes to know Michael as fundamentally thoughtful and decent, although understandably damaged by his father's seemingly incomprehensible abandonment. The story achieves its greatest poignency when Michael and his friends have children of their own, and suddenly find themselves facing many of the same issues and temptations that presumably lured their own fathers away many years before.

For those who appreciate a strong sense of place, Bakopoulos manages to portray the Detroit area -- a once-proud industrial metropolis slowly growing old and tired and irrelevant in this post-industrial service economy -- so effectively that it becomes an integral character. Like any good character, its changes over the course of the story significantly impact and influence the other (flesh-and-blood) characters. Even in the face of obvious decline, Michael and his friends find virtue in remaining in a place everyone else wants to flee. It's left to the reader to decide whether those choices are due to nostalgia, or loyalty, or a sense that their fathers need them to look after their homes while they're gone.

So why should you buy this book? Well, for starters, Bakopoulos writes extremely well. He creates interesting characters and places them in interesting settings and has them do interesting things. But shouldn't every published novel accomplish at least that (even if most don't)? Why did I give this book five stars? I guess because it's just ... different. I never knew what to expect from page to page, or even sentence to sentence. Even though the mood and tone remain consistent, the book swirls moments of humor, tragedy, mystery, and grace together so easily and so rapidly I couldn't quite get my bearings until it was over. By then these characters (Michael most of all) had earned my affection and respect, and I was sad to see them go.

Please Don't Come Back from the Moon has one of the more endearing starts to a novel that I can recall in quite some time. It is an early-80's summer in a dying suburb of Detroit and the sixteen-year-old narrator, Michael Smolij, watches helplessly as one by one all the fathers (including his own) slowly disappear. The only clue to their whereabouts is a scrawled note from one that he went "to the moon", a declaration that somehow contains enough of a whiff of truth that it retains its hold on the boys they left behind, as well as the reader. The premise manages to be both wonderfully magical and sadly disturbing all at once.
The fathers are just one more disappearance in a long list: disappearing jobs, dignity, family ties, ambitions. Disappearing hope. And once they are gone, add to the list disappearing childhood, as Michael and his friends take over the roles from their fathers--drinking in the taverns at 13, getting jobs, having bar brawls sleeping with the older, abandoned women. Soon they are fighting the same desperate battles of bitterness, anger, and despair. One of the nice small touches is that the sons aren't the only ones to step into the fathers' places. The mothers too become more foul-mouthed, have run-ins with the police, beat up boys taking advantage of their daughters.
At first, there is speculation over where their fathers have gone. One night Michael and his friends search out a hunting camp they're "sure" they must be, but eventually they care less and less as their responsibilities and their anger grow.
The story focuses on Michael and his cousin Nick during the ensuing 12 years of their lives. Both are more ambitious than most of their other friends, both influenced by the women in their lives. While with Sunny, his high school girlfriend, Michael begins his own reading program, tackling Homer several hours a night. When she heads off to Ann Arbor, Bakopoulos does a nice job conveying the painful separation that ensues not just between high school sweethearts but two people going in different directions.
Michael continues his gradual movement toward a better life, however, taking courses here and there, going to community college, getting a mall job then taking an internship at the local radio station where he eventually becomes a writer and then a reporter. Along the way he stumbles sullenly and awkwardly through the changes in his family: his mother's line of boyfriends culminating with Father Mack, the local priest; his younger brother Kolya's growing up; the eventual move of his family to a better suburb when he has to decide to abandon the old neighborhood or not.
The same awkward progression, full of fits and starts and small regressions occurs in his two major relationships, both with older women, both mothers. Just when he finally seems to have settled down and the reader can heave a sigh of relief, the book takes a darker, more ambiguous turn as the moon's tidal pull begins exerting its influence over Michael and all the sons of the former disappeared. The close, without going into details, returns to the same sense of magic and ambiguity with the same sad tone (though leavened a bit more with hope) that the book began with.
Stylistically, the book is well-written throughout. The world of the Maple Rock community is vividly created, detailed in its depiction of physical setting, of culture, of voice and atmosphere. The dialogue rings true throughout the entire novel, authentic through the range of ages, not just Michael's twelve years from his teens to his late 20's but also the older voices, usually women. And if the narrator at times waxes a bit lyrical, it's easily explained away by his love of literature and his desire to be a writer.
Admittedly, the book's second half isn't as strong as its first. A small subplot with Nick and his attempts to organize the workers didn't seem a complete success and the book seems to flag a bit past the two-thirds point, losing somewhat its sense of energy or drive as it too literally mirrors the narrator's depression/ambivalence, his own lack of energy. Fortunately, it finds its voice again in the conclusion. All in all, the lapses are minor in comparison to the strengths of the book. Strongly recommended.

I thought this was a haunting powerful book. I was afraid to turn the pages at the end for fear of what would happen to Mikey and his friends when they realized they were men and no longer boys with some dreams of possibilites at least ahead of them. I cheered for the mothers and worried about the young wives and new mothers. I ached for Detroit.

As soon as I finished this book, I checked to see if Dean Bakopoulos had written another one. He is now on my list of authors to follow.

I started out immediately liking this book and it's easy reading style. The more I read and became involved in the characters and the life of the town of Maple Rock, the more I was impressed by Dean Bakopoulos' style of writing. His writing merges great storytelling, elements of historical fiction and magic realism.

As Michael Smlij turns 17 the small town where he lives sees the exit of many of the "dads", disillusioned and despairing of lost jobs and the shift away from industrial jobs, they are thought to have "gone to the moon". Some of the sons grow up to believe that just maybe there really is a place on the moon, so hard is it for them to believe that all of their fathers abandoned their families. We follow several characters as they grow older, become involved in relationships. Some get an education and change their paths while other seem destined to continue in their father's footsteps.

By the end of the book I was certain that I was reading a first class, wonderfully described debut novel. I think this will be a sure hit for book clubs with lots of divergent characters to talk about and regional interest here in Wisconsin. Very well done.
5*

I fell in love with this novel within the first few pages and found that I couldn't put it down. Bakopoulos writes with such an understanding of the boys' minds and their understanding of what happened to their missing fathers, it's almost heart-breaking. Throughout the novel, I found wishing for the fathers to stay away because it would be too much of an emotional overload if they returned to Maple Rock. Through the end of the novel, I found myself wishing that Michael would stay and not turn into his father, however through Michael's eyes, the reader understands what drove the fathers away in the first place. It gives the story of the father's disappearances certain closure so that the reader isn't left wondering, "Why did it happen?" This is a story about heart-break and loss; it's the story of absent fathers and what happens to boys who grow up without them but with good, caring mothers who are left to pick up the pieces of the father's disappearance.

Dean Bakopoulos should be commended for writing such an energetic, articulate, and perceptive first novel. With a terrific sense of time and place, Bakopoulos transports the reader to the depressed and miserable Maple Rock, a poor inner city suburb tacked onto the South side of Detroit, Michigan. Maple Rock, a once staid bastion for leftist politics and middle class life, has been hit hard by the loss of so many blue-collar jobs. Told in the first person by Michael Smolij, Please Don't Come Back From The Moon's reluctant protagonist, the story encompasses approximately twelve years in the lives of Michael and his friends, as they battle with romance, job loss, overdue bills, and the strange disappearance of their fathers.

This inventive allegorical premise sets the scene for a story that is full of frustration, heartache and loss, as Michael's family and friends are left to shoulder the emotional burden and remake their lives against a background of limited opportunity and endless financial constraints. The story begins when Michael is sixteen years old. One day, all the men in Maple Rock miraculously disappear - rumour has it that they have gone to the moon. Downsizing has become commonplace, factories seem to just vaporize, and many of the men have found themselves out of work. The disappeared all knew each other from the local church, the Black Lantern Bar, and even the bowling league.

Michael, his cousin Nick, his younger brother Kolya, and his best buddy Tom step readily into the disconsolate drunkenness of their fathers. Angry, young, and pumped up with adrenaline and booze they wonder the local neighborhood with violence and resentment in their hearts. They take on awful jobs at the local shopping mall just to get by, and party with the college girls in Ann Arbor while entertaining a half-baked fantasy that one day their fathers will return and be proud of them. Growing up is a struggle, as they "trample over things, and tear things down." Even the mothers have to learn how to cope and they eventually find their feet - first in jobs and drinking, then in new men, whom they will marry and then leave with for better suburbs.

But even though it's a struggle, life goes on and Michael eventually goes to community college. Through part luck and a kind of doggedly persistence, he gradually works his way towards a degree and a career in local journalism. Along the way he experiences the joys and heartache of true love with a sexy older woman, and finds the comfort of marriage and family life with a colleague from the local bookstore. Like his father, he begins to take little steps towards the moon, but when thrown back into the arms of his friends, he finds with a certain regret, that Maple Rock is his world. And it's a world where there's no difference between our deepest wishes and our deepest fears, as "they all merge together eventually."

Bakopoulos' sure-footed prose is infused with a gritty realism, as the day-to-day struggles of those who survive on the breadline are dramatically laid bare. But Please Don't Come Back from the Moon is also a story of hope, promise, and of young boys eventually becoming grown men. We witness their marriages and divorces, their births and their deaths, their baptisms and their sins. Bakopoulos has rendered a world where loneliness sends us into dark places with a day-to-day sadness and where courageousness and heroism is fully grounded in concrete experience. Mike Leonard February 05.

The writing is in general very smooth and captivating.
The subject is interesting but the development of the story is far from earthshaking.
The disapperance of the fathers to the moon is indeed very inventive but it sticks out form the rest of the book - perhaps it overpromises to the reader.
I do not think I lost by reading it - it has its strong moments but it is not a masterpiece. He is a young writer, I hope he has more to offer in the future. I will not hesitate to pick up his second book when it comes out...