Customer Reviews

Rides of the Midway: A Novel

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I really loved this book--it's kind of a ghost story, murder mystery, and bildungsroman all wrapped into one. It's refreshing to read a book by a Southern writer who doesn't sugar-coat the South with too much reverence and nostalgia; Durkee's portrait is realistic and unsentimental. In one passage, Noel, the book's narrator, says, "Okay, say some guy spends his whole life murdering people, like Hitler, where does he go after he dies?" "That's easy," Tim [Noel's friend and one of the few Jewish kids in town] replied. "Mississippi." Durkee renders his story with compassion and truth. It's a funny, smart, well-crafted novel.

Despite its title, Lee Durkee's first novel visits the State Fair (in this case the Great Mississippi State Fair) only once. But the book is ultimately suffused in and propelled along by the feelings and emotions perhaps suggested by the title: the spinning, speeding rides that leave you dizzy, disoriented and (fortunately for readers) deliriously giddy. The book is ultimately a coming-of-age story about a young Mississippi boy named Noel Weatherspoon, who's haunted by the ghost of his long-lost father (MIA in Vietnam), dealing with a fervently religious stepfather and coping with his own guilt about a young boy left in a coma after a baseball accident. Noel lusts for girls his own age and for older women -- the mother of a boyhood friend and later a married teacher at his college, with whom he has a brief but impactful affair. He dabbles in drugs and in both photography and pornography. And along the way, he tries to come to terms with both himself and the increasingly unpredictable world he lives in. As with a ride on the midway, the plot's twists seem both fun and frightening, harrowing and, at baser levels, humorous. And an almost carnivalesque atmosphere pervades throughout, as the novel twists, dips and careens through a variety of moods and styles, including gothicism, psychedelia and magical realism. But though the story at points doesn't hold together as well as it might (haven't we all at some time been afraid of the stability of that ride at the fair?), Durkee's novel is still generally a success. To keep the metaphor going, he's like a master carny himself, promising any and all takers an unforgettable ride -- and then delivering the goods.

Lee Durkee is a brilliant storyteller. I laughed with recognition at his hip, harried, 1970's mothers. I cried at the incredibly detailed, pitch-perfect tension Durkee reveals between blood brothers and ideas about prayer in this Mississippi town. Rides of the Midway transcends geography in its dreamy interludes, breadth of expression, and quality of language. I love how often the most reckless characters are also unexpectedly thoughtful. Noel Weatherspoon is drawn with the red-achey squint of every charming pothead, and moral burdens ascribed more often to soldiers than to kids. The beauty of this book is in the depth of attention paid to the smallest moments of joy and danger in the lives of children and their parents, the moments in which peace of mind vanishes and revelation comes too fast, or just soon enough to offer up a welcome surprise.

First let me first dispense with all the clichéd praise. The voice is absolutely pitch-perfect. The sentences are miracles. The characters - all of them - are honest and fully realized. And Durkee nails the era and the place. The book is funny, sad, sexy and scary, seamlessly.

What I kept thinking while reading it was this: HOW...DID HE WRITE THIS BOOK? It is SO self-assured, so rock-solid and balls-out RIGHT, that I was sort of flabberghasted by it. Every 30 or so pages, I'd think - this is great, but how can the author possible keep this up? But he did, right to the end. Lee Durkee rang the bell with this one. Buy it and read it, then tell your best friend to do the same.

Lee Durkee's excellent book shows that American life can still be changed into a mythic journey, a deep exploration of life, and not the meer sheen of cosmetic consurmist angst. In what the author describes as a cautionary tale, we see a web of sorrow nearly trap Noel Witherspoon. He has been gifted with some supernatural powers, but has no clue as how to use them, he is attractive to women, but he can't consumate, he loves his youngest brother, but is at fault for his death. Like, his mis-placed friend Tim, Noel is too big for the town to contain, and his energy spills onto everyone he meets. An apocalytic vision of dysfunction, a withering look at American, and not just southern ideas of goodness, an expose of the ignorance and superstition that still drives us like catnip entralls a cat, Rides of the Midway moves like a juggernaut, until Noel Witherspoon, Great American Sinner, is free of his past, his town, and himself.

Hats off to Lee Durkee for giving us a completely enjoyable first novel. Rides of the Midway is a delightfullly entertaining novel which I must admit surprised me. For some reason, I was expecting something different, something more along the lines of what I expect to be "Southern" fiction. In Rides of the Midway, the focus is primarily on Noel Weatherspoon as he grows up, and not on the place he grows up in. The turning point in his life comes when he slides into home plate during a peewee baseball game, trying to stretch a triple into a home run. He crashes into the catcher, who is later hospitalized in an irreversible coma brought on by a pre-existing condition. Sounds serious, but it really isn't. The young boy's ghost, and many others, periodically haunt Noel. He sleep walks, can't live without his asthma puffer, discovers girls, photography, sex, drugs, all with a sort of bemused disassociation that is endearing. Durkee captures the surrealistic quality of growing up. I am sure we can all remember incidents when we said to ourselves "What am I doing here?" That's the essence of Noel's life. He is a likeable protagonist and this is an enjoyable novel. Have fun.

If you are the reader who avoids first time novelists for fear you'll like them too much and then have to wait too long for their next book if there ever is one to follow, then you will certainly be depriving yourself of a wonderful "southern lit" classic-to-be written by first-time novelist Lee Durkee. His writing is as haunting as Tennessee Williams, but as comical as Flannery O'Connor. I was constantly reminded of the young male character, Joel Knox, created by the one and only Truman Capote in Tru's first novel (Other Voices, Other Rooms). Durkee writes with the same sense of almost supernatural intensity and audacious foray that Capote shows in his earlier writings. I was also reminded of several other first novels, including the hard-to-find Pryor Rendering written by Gary Reed. Like Reed, Durkee uses the southern setting to its full potential. His teen character, Noel Weatherspoon, is a complex individual that will haunt the reader far after they've reached the last page. Much like novelist Brian Pera's character, Earl, in Troublemaker, Durkee has created a character that does more than lift himself off the page with life. Noel is a complex individual that exists in all of us in some way. His adventures, thoughts, fears, and dreams will all become part of the reader if they are not already. I have nothing but praise for Lee Durkee and his first novel, Rides of the Midway. If not on its way to being a bestseller, it will be a southern lit classic that should be required reading everywhere.

Rides of the Midway is a dizzying spectacle. In the course of a chapter you'll be shrieking with delight, getting a bit queasy, or feeling confused and wondering which way is up.

You could expect nothing less following early years of Noel Weatherspoon, a.k.a. Moon Man, Mongo, Spoon, or (his favorite) Wasted as he grows up in rural Mississippi.

He's a former promising baseball player, until an overaggressive charge home left another boy in a living state of death, an accident from which Noel is never quite able to recover. But did accident leave him with something else? He may be touched by the divine; is he pre-cognizant and can he heal as well as destroy?

Throughout his teen years he becomes a wanna-be pornographer, a drug-dealer, a boy-toy, and in one LSD hazed night, the catalyst for a town's plunge into paranoia about Satanic cults. Noel is never a fully innocent or sympathetic character, yet you'll probably find yourself pulling for him.

Durkee proves that he has a deft hand with comedy as well as tragedy, sharing a gift for describing rural southern life with the alternating charm and wallop of Daniel Woodrell. He also deftly weaves in the more mystic and fantastic elements of boyhood - ala Graham Joyce's The Tooth Fairy.

This is a very, very good first novel for an author with a promising future. Don't miss it.

This is one those types of novels that keeps you reading late into the night. The type of book that makes you wish you didn't make plans for the evening because you'd rather finish it than go out for drinks. The sentences are seamless; the dialogue is regionally faithful but never in a manner that distracts. In addition, this book is unsettling-- it's a real dark world Durkee writes himself out of. Noel isn't necessarily the most charming character, but you have to admire his resiliance and his unwillingness to be anything but himself. Finally, the manner which the events of the book come together to cohere is breathtaking. I'm going to give this book as a Christmas present to everyone I know. You should not miss out on a novel that has a scene in which the protagonist couples with a water melon!

Lee Durkee is a genius. Buy this book immediately, no serious reader can afford to wait another moment, this book is like breath and food and classic fashion: absolutely essential. Your great-grandchildren will be reading Rides of the Midway in their high school english classes. Brilliant.