Small Town Odds [Hardcover]

Jason Headley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 7, 2004

Writing with an acute sense of place and character reminiscent of Richard Russo, Jason Headley's first novel tells the hilarious and poignant story of Eric Mercer and Pinely, West Virginia. Enromously likeable and a habitual screw-up, Eric has settled into a sometimes raucous, underachieving life in his one-stoplight hometowna life cobbled together from his part-time activities as bartender at the American Legion, assistant mortician, and father to his beloved 5-year-old daughter, Tess. Tess seems to be the main reason smart, talented, twenty-four-year-old Eric is staying in town, though her mom, a centerfold-quality beauty, would have it otherwise. When Jill, the lost love of his life, returns to Pinely in the same week that the town goes nuts in preparation for the high school football team's Big Game, life unexpectedly shifts into high gear, and Eric must blunder his way toward enlightenmentfast. Authentic, irresistible, and refreshingly unpredictable, Small Town Odds is the debut of a graceful and gifted writer.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Headley's offbeat, bighearted first novel paints a delightful portrait of smalltown life, as experienced by 24-year-old Eric Mercer, a sardonically charming underachiever. Eric lives and works in tiny Pinely, W.Va., where drama means betting on the annual (and futile) efforts of the high school football team to beat archrival Cedarsville. The bright spot in Mercer's life is his precocious five-year-old daughter, Tess, a happy accident from a tryst with the beautiful Gina Stevens, whom Mercer and his pals pined for throughout adolescence. Headley intercuts Mercer's present-day activities—drinking and fighting in bars, male-bonding with dim-bulb best friend Deke, handymanning at the funeral home—with his teenage antics of drinking in the woods, male-bonding with Deke and loving his girl, Jill Dupree. Bringing past and present together is the death of Jill's father, which forces Mercer to finally face his beloved Jill, back in town after six years, and come to terms with Gina, whose one night of companionship he paid for in the loss of both his college dreams and Jill's love. Headley makes up for the slight plot with his winning protagonist, whose gift for avoidance is as profound as his flair for understated humor. "Slacker grows up" is a familiar trope, but Headley's winning wit and his compassionate, delightful prose mark him as a bright new talent.
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From Booklist

A one-night stand foils a high-school football star's future in this astute debut about life in a small town. New father Eric Mercer has abandoned plans to attend Brown, remaining in tiny Pinely, West Virginia, to care for his infant daughter, Tess (he shares custody with her gorgeous mother, Gina). He works an unusual pair of part-time jobs-- funeral home assistant and bartender at the local pub--and predicts the outcome of Pinely's annual homecoming game with Kreskinesque aplomb. When his former high-school sweetheart, Jill, returns from law school for her father's funeral, Eric is haunted by thoughts of what might have been. West Virginia-born Headley conjures up a memorable cast of characters: mild-mannered mortician Wilson Tremble, who has the dubious assignment of embalming those he has known; Eric's best friend, Deke, who's knee-deep in duty at the local sewage plant; and wild-eyed Coach Gleason, desperate to redeem a losing football season with one big win. Despite its occasionally clunky prose, this is a sweet, candid tale about finding contentment when life doesn't go as planned. Allison Block
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Chronicle Books; First Edition edition (October 7, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811845362
• ISBN-13: 978-0811845366
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #319,303 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sad But True, October 21, 2004

By 

Marliss Healy Barczak (South Boston, Virginia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Small Town Odds (Hardcover)

This is one of those books you just can't put down. I was taken back to my small hometown and loved the images that the book brought to life. This all too often fact is that those high school heroes have a difficult time transitioning into "real life", what ever that is. Look out Pat Conroy, Jason Headley has left his mark and I'm anxiously awaiting ro learn more of "Eric's" life with Tess.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars And elegant, gorgeously-written novel, July 16, 2005

By 

Debra Hamel (North Haven, CT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Small Town Odds (Hardcover)

Twenty-four-year-old Eric Mercer is a good guy, but he copes with the disappointments of a life that hasn't quite gone according to plan by drinking too much. Weekdays find him working two jobs--assisting alternately at a bar and a funeral home--and sharing in the task of raising his five-year-old daughter, who lives full-time with her mother. Weekends he is more often than not drunk and belligerent to the point of exciting police attention. Jason Headley's debut novel follows Eric's life in the present, a chapter a day, through one unusually eventful week, from a Sunday morning hangover endured in the local jail to the following Saturday, when everything--and nothing--has changed. The seven chapters devoted to Eric's present are interspersed with chapters detailing slices from his past: his liberation of a Playboy Magazine from someone's stolen stash when he was twelve; the big game against his town's arch-rivals that Eric won more or less single-handedly during his senior year; the birth of his daughter. Gradually the pieces of Eric's life, related out of sequence, recombine to explain the mystery of his character: how a top student, a hero on the gridiron, a man whose innate goodness is plain to see--despite the darker side that reveals itself when he drinks--how such a man came only seven years after his high school triumphs to be squandering his life in a kind of hopeless holding pattern.

Jason Headley's Small Town Odds is an elegant, gorgeously written novel. And it is well plotted, the various elements of Eric's quiet drama lining up as they are meant to and leading inevitably to the book's denouement, but not in such a way that one notices mid-read what the author is doing. Only afterward does one appreciate the story's structure, how a funeral and a football game and the baggage of Eric's past lead finally to resolution. Like Richard Russo, the Pulitzer-winning author of Empire Falls with whom he has been compared, Headley offers readers a charming exploration of life in small-town America, where the cast of characters tends to remain unchanged, and people bump into one another's lives at various points, passing time together and sharing histories and resentments: the sort of aging that makes for complex relationships. And like Richard Russo, Headley is able to create from these elements some very fine fiction indeed.

Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Live in Ancient Greece

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful debut from a truly talented writer, February 22, 2005

By 

Julie Lowe (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Small Town Odds (Hardcover)

Despite having grown up in San Diego, I found myself relating to Eric, the protagonist, from page one. If you have ever wondered about the "one that got away"...or if you are that "one"...if you've ever faced a reunion that filled you with dread...if the plans you made for your life in high school are vastly different from the life you now lead...if you've ever sacrificed your dreams...or if you just enjoy an funny, warm, insightful book that leaves you wanting more and sad when it's over, then this is the novel for you. "Small Town Odds" is set in Virginia, but the life experiences portrayed (and very humorously so) are easily translatable no matter where you come from. Told in chapters that alternate from Eric's childhood to present-day adulthood, the bittersweet transitions of his life are both heartbreaking and, strangely, somewhat inspiring.

I've long felt that the highest praise you can pay a book is to not only recommend it to friend, but also purchase an additional copy as a gift. I've done both and I hope other readers will as well. In a time when only tired thrillers and sappy novels about dating seem to get read, it's refreshing to find a book of this caliber and one so deserving of an audience.