Customer Reviews

Spooner

5 star:		(30)
4 star:		(32)
3 star:		(17)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

In his latest novel Pete Dexter has created two unforgetable complex male characters way bigger than life. Spooner, a twin who survives, is born in Milledgeville, Georgia in 1956. His mother Lily, who may have been happy only twice in her life-- "the night JFK was elected president, and the day Richard Nixon quit the White House"-- soon loses her husband and Spooner's father Ward to a mysterious illness. A few years later she marries Calmer Ottosson, recently court-martialed out of the navy, who comes South from South Dakota, where most people "wouldn't smile if you gave them the Nobel Prize."

The events in Spooner and Calmer's lives take up most of the rest of this brilliantly comic but a tad-too-long novel (466 pages). Spooner is expelled from kindergarten when he becomes sexually aroused by his female teacher, secretly urinates in the male neighbors' shoes at night, and in high school has no talent for football but relishes collisions. He eventually marries a woman in part because she is someone who would not forsake a dog and becomes a relatively successful newspaper reporter in Philadelphia-- or "staff writer" if you prefer. He is nurtured, sometimes from across the country by Calmer, who holds several thankless positions as a public school teacher over the years and finally winds up teaching English, and has the novel idea that teachers should treat students like human beings. He is, in Spooner's words, "the greatest man he ever knew" and someone whose good opinion he craved more than any other person's.

A lot of other sometimes motley characters pass through the novel: the sadistic Coach Tinker from Spooner's high school; Stroop, his boss in his short stint of selling baby pictures from door to door in Florida; his boxing buddy Harry Faint. Even Margaret Truman makes a brief appearance. Of course there is Spooner's neighbor's dog Lester Maddox as well. While Dexter skewers a lot of people in SPOONER-- newspaper reporters, politicians, undertakers, school administrators with useless doctor of education degrees, he saves a lot of his wrath for two despicable characters Marlin Dodge and his boyfriend Atlas Shrugged, whom the author describes as "the same-tool set." Does he protest a little too much?

Mr. Dexter's language is uniquely his own and seeps with dark humor. The scene near the beginning of the novel when Calmer totally screws up the burial of a congressman at sea is as funny as anything I have read in a very long time and is mirrored near the end of the book with more somber watery last rites. (This sort of bookends device is what makes Garrison Keillor and the rest of us English majors put our feet on the floor every morning.) This writer is the master of the lower middle-class metaphor. A character's expression is the same expression on one's face when the bottom falls out of a garbage bag. Calmer ties up the Congressman's broken casket like a "country girl's suitcase." The Congressman's widow accepts the folded flag from the honor guard "as you might take a baby if you were handed one with a loaded diaper." A mule has teeth like "Halloween corn."

Spooner and Calmer are tough men's men. When he is only five, Spooner is admonished by Calmer, when he attempts to take his new-found friend's hand, that men don't hold hands. They do not wallow in sentimentality either. Dexter from time to time, however, hits a universal nerve: "And in the way things happen, forty-odd years come and go, and with the exception of the one awful letter from his mother, nothing changed. And remembering that letter, Spooner would sometimes imagine a different family, where everyone poured out his deepest feelings at dinner, and the mother cried over her dead husband and brought out pictures of their wedding to show herself back when she had been happy, before she's been cheated by life." I can forgive Mr. Dexter anything for writing prose like that, even his heavy-handed handling of Marlin and Atlas Shrugged.

Spooner and Calmer are two characters that you will not soon forget.

This is one of the first novels that I can wholeheartedly recommend in a long time. It combines spare details, psychological insight, and perfect comedic timing. It is truly a delight to read.

The format is unusual - a set of short stories, ordered chronologically. The details and descriptions are those that are important to the characters in the scenes. There is no attempt to describe in cinematic detail the workings of the scene in question. Do not expect to learn much about Philadelphia geography or Milledgeville GA politics. I found the sparse descriptions to be a great relief. I was told everything that I needed to know to understand what struck the scene's main character(s) and nothing more. There was no need to visualize the unimportant or ponder the tangential.

A word in defense of this novel against critics, who usually claim one way or or another that the novel is lacking in detail or seems unfinished: this is a writer telling a story in a colloquial fashion, like a storyteller. This book does not tell how to become Spooner. Rather it tells what it is like to be Spooner in several individual moments. Thus no character is explained away - each character retains his/her dignity.

This sort of writing is unpretentious and frees the reader to laugh and ponder along with the book's characters.

If you want a how-to guide that really tells you nothing, watch Batman Begins. If you want a good novel, read this book.

I have heard of National Book Award winner Pete Dexter, but "Spooner" is the first novel by him I have read. Described as a "poignant, and comic story of resilience and love," and the story of lifelong ties behind a troubled young man, Warren Spooner, and his step-father, a once-brilliant young naval officer court-martialed out of the Service after a bizarre incident at sea. While the novel is described as relating to his lifelong struggle to salvage his son, the story does trace the intersection of their careers and how Spooner matures from a delinquent youth engaged in mischief and mayhem to a loving and responsible father. While his step-father attempts to make his son better, Spooner seems to go from situation to situation in a Forrest Gump way and eventually after somehow becoming a newspaper columnist in a city newspaper he seems to mature and become the responsible adult at the same time his step-father's life seems to start sliding down and after his father passes away, this story closes with another quirky scene, this one echoing the bizarre incident that led to the step-father's court martial. It is an amusing, quirky, and moving story that is as much about the rhythms and cycles of life as opposed to the story of one salvaging the life of another.

My first exposure to Pete Dexter leaves me wanting more. Spooner is a rare novel showing the author's wit and talent. The author shows an impressive skill in showing how one's mind is easily distracted by what is not obvious to most but, is indeed humorous. You can read all the reviews about how the story evolves but, you will miss those moments of greatness throughout. The book will make you want more -- more to better understand how someone can capture the mundane and low parts of life in a manner that is charming, endearing, witty, and your desire to share with others. Highly recommended.

Spooner has it memorable moments, and I enjoyed about
the first third of the book, but then got annoyed with
Dexter's style and plotting. As the American Publisher's
review notes, the book is raggedly plotted. There's a kind of
formula to the writing style that I also disliked: much of
the book is short descriptions of little events that
shed little light on the character and usually aren't
interesting in themselves. The final straw for me was
(minor spoiler ahead) when Spooner becomes an celebrated
novelist -- during the first half of the book we're to
believe he's barely literate. It becomes clear in the
second half of the book that this is a fictionalized
autobiography. I've read 253 of 459 pages and won't go
further.

Even the acknowledgments are incredibly funny. Dexter makes it look effortless. The understated regionalisms, the crafty plot structure, the characters you could swear you keep bumping into in real life, well, it all accumulates and you start wishing everybody at work would just shut up so you could finish up, go home, and read your book. Then you realize it can't be effortless or you'd have read more novels as amazing as this. You start regretting that Spooner's going to end sooner or later, so you check the copyright dates on Dexter's other novels in order to figure out how fast he writes and therefore how long before the next one is published. Don't even bother denying it, because we all know you.

Dexter paints powerful imagery with his prose, but I find something wanting in this book. When I began reading, I was expecting it to read in some kind of order, with logically organized narratives. The book is written like a collection of essays... think of Me Talk Pretty One Day (Sedaris) meets a Confederacy of Dunces (but not in a good way).

The book is written as haphazardly as the character Spooner thinks. I don't know if this was intentional, but I found myself getting very annoyed as I tried to follow what was going on. At the end of the book, I breathed a huge sigh of relief that it was finally over. If it hadn't been chosen as a book for our book club to read, I would have given up less than halfway through.

I found it especially difficult to relate to any of the characters. Perhaps the author thought that Spooner would be a loveable yet awkward character? His stepfather Calmer is much the same way, somewhat awkward, although with more common sense and intelligence. I really wanted to find at least one character that I could root for, yet I found none. I held out for the ending, hoping that there would be some revelation between the characters and there was just nothing there.

If you don't care about a well-orchestrated timeline, this may be the book for you. There were certainly some stories that I greatly enjoyed (especially The Fiend), but I found most of those to be during Spooner's childhood. The rest of the time, most (mis)adventures just made me feel uncomfortable.

My take on Spooner may be a little different than most readers. Dexter was a columnist for the Sacramento Bee in the 1980s and I was a regular reader of those columns. I met him a couple of times at functions in Sacramento and have an autographed copy of the original hardbound version of Paris Trout. I recall some of the incidents in Spooner as having been the subject of some of those columns. One incident that really stood out: when Spooner has his problems at a bar in Philadelphia, I recalled several Bee columns in which Dexter discussed his own mishaps in a Philadelphia bar in partnership with the boxer Randall (Tex) Cobb. (Dexter was a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer before he came to Sacramento.) I'm not discussing this incident in more detail because that part of the book is an important part of the story and I don't want to give anything away.

Having said that, I enjoyed Spooner very much. Parts are serious, parts are funny, and, as was stated in a quote on the cover, it is a Garpian tale (as in "The World According to Garp", I assume). It is also a very different book than Paris Trout.

Rather than reiterate much of the positive commentary regarding this enjoyable novel, I just want to remark about one of the funniest, most cleverly-written scenes I have ever read. It is the Mrs./Mr. Cowhurl adventure of Chapter 68. In a tome immersed with humor, this incident, to me, was paramount -- so hilarious, I nearly lost my breath, laughing so loudly.

The one fault I found was that the story "bounced" too often in regard to time and character, thereby causing some gaps in continuity and character development. Hence, the four stars -- not five.

On December 6 1953, after two plus days in labor, the woman gives birth to twins. The handsome newborn is dead on arrival while the uglier one named Warren Spooner survived. The mother prefers her deceased child over her breathing offspring.

On the same day Congressman Rudolph Toebox dies too. His funeral is held at sea led by US Naval Commander Calmer Ottosson. Soon afterward Ottosson leaves the military and marries Spooner's mom. This leaves Warren with superstar step-siblings while his talent is to anger folks who fume for hours after brief encounters. Spooner actually finds he has a talent as a baseball pitcher, but an elbow injury aborted his career. He lands a reporter's job where he is universally loathed. Eventually with a bad cloud hanging over his head, he flees to Whidbey Island, off the coast of Washington State. at the same that bad luck is Spooner's only mojo his stepfather becomes a successful principal.

This is a humorous satire that lampoons sacred societal icons as nothing seems to go right for Spooner in his relationship with others starting with his birth and the death of his twin, and the success of his stepfather while the title character constantly fails. Although the dark graveyard jocularity at times overwhelms the cohesiveness of the story line, Peter Dexter provides his audience with a deep character study through a dirty lens that spoofs the American dream as a nightmare.

Harriet Klausner