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"Spooner"
by
Pete Dexter
;
Grand Central Publishing
(469 pages,
$26.99
)
———
For his
seventh novel,
Pete Dexter
returns to small-town
Georgia
, the setting for 1998's "
Paris Trout
," his grim and gripping National Book Award
winner.
This time
Dexter has other perch to fry.
Spooner
is the author's Tristram Shandy, an often bawdy
bildungsroman. The title character comes into this
world, like Elvis, with a stillborn twin. He's a kid
whose instincts and urges are warped right from the
cradle. Combine Spooner's bent nature with poor impulse
control and a notable lack of remorse, and you have the
makings of a chronic headache for the boy's honorable
stepfather, until recently an exceptional naval officer
with a promising career.
Kind,
fair and preternaturally patient, the man finds himself
saddled with a chronic and incomprehensible reprobate.
As
always, Dexter is a lapidary stylist with a keen and
unsparing eye for the world. Here he describes the
constituency of an obese congressman who sets the plot
in motion by keeling over at the 1956 Army-Navy game at
Philadelphia's
Municipal Stadium
:
"His
district was the entire state, a flat, dry rectangle of
prairie and plains out in the part of the country that
is all rectangles and plains, and occupied by farmers
and ranchers and the salesmen in wide, brightly colored
ties who follow them, selling them Oldsmobiles and
John Deere
tractors."
What
distinguishes "Spooner" from Dexter's previous
work is that it is funny. Really funny. It is more in
the vein of
John Irving
than the author's customary white-knuckle prose.
At one
point, Spooner sits through a performance of Tchaikovsky
by his most respectable relative, a classical pianist.
"He enjoyed his uncle's concerts, except for the
music, and wondered sometimes what the tunes would have
sounded like in English."
About 200
pages in, you realize, not without alarm, that the novel
is a diaphanously veiled account of the life and times
of one
Pete Dexter
.
As a
young man, Spooner gets a job as a reporter by walking
into a newspaper office in
Florida
on a whim, an anecdote Dexter has often told about his
own experience.
He
savagely details the petty vanities of his fellow
journalists.
"They
were, in fact, like the parents of ugly babies, and
gathered nightly in a bar across the street to complain
to each other about editors and editing, and could
recite word for word changes in their lead paragraphs
from six months past."
The
mirror aspect of the book continues as Spooner moves to
Philadelphia
, going to work for the
Daily News
(where Dexter made his bones).
He finds
his calling as a columnist one day early in his tenure
at the paper when he gets off the elevator at the wrong
floor to witness "the spectacle of
Jimmy Lester
, the
Daily News'
asthmatic gossip columnist, passed out and drooling on
the waiting room couch, making rooting noises in his
sleep, dressed in monogrammed silk pajamas and Italian
loafers, his tiny, plump hand wrapped around the handle
of a machete."
Who
wouldn't aspire to that lofty code of conduct?
Spooner
becomes friends with a heavyweight boxer, Harry Faint, a
curiously blithe warrior (and a transparent stand-in for
Dexter's pugilistic pal,
Tex Cobb
).
Faint is
another
Philadelphia
transplant who "ran for an hour or two in the
morning and trained in the afternoon at Joe Frazier's
gym on
North Broad Street
, where five or six world-ranked heavyweights were also
in residence. Harry was thrown in with these fighters
from the first day, and it is possible that in the
history of the democracy no citizen has ever had his
nose broken by so many different people in one
week."
The
problem with Dexter's chronological, autobiographical
approach is that Spooner spends the last portion of the
book in relative seclusion with his wife and daughter on
an island off the coast of
Washington state
.
The humor
and the scope of the novel evaporate in this dull homey
stretch. In fact, for much of the time, Spooner is
consumed in a tedious dispute with his neighbors. It
echoes the narrow-minded concerns of Spooner's mother
from early in the book, an irony that seems lost on our
narrator.
In a
sense, "Spooner" unfolds in three stages, the
first two of which are vibrant.
Sort of
like life.
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