Dexter Looks Back

I discovered Pete Dexter late, having scoffed at his National Book Award-winning Paris Trout in remainder bins for years. About five years ago I corrected my ignorance, and he's now among my favorite living writers. The aforementioned Trout is a monster of southern gothic menace, Train is cool LA noir with golf courses, and Deadwood is a chucklefest rendition of the last days of Wild Bill before Al Swearengen was a glimmer in David Milch's eye. I've read the others too (and his recent collection of newspaper pieces, Paper Trails, also recommended) but these are my favorites. So when the years since Train wore on and no new Pete, I got worried. The non-fiction work suggested he was stalling, buying time while the prickly problems got untangled. Seems the new one is not so thinly veiled memoir fiction, and the thing had blown over a thousand pages. Deadlines came and deadlines went, but because his name is not Bolano the gatekeepers gently suggested a pruning. So Spooner arrives at a more manageable 464 pages, and boy is it choppy. Presumably the tall tale life of one Pete Dexter, we start with the death of Spooner's father and his ill-fated burial at sea, through young Spooner's Georgia childhood, his blip as a pitching phenom, his fall into the paper business, his escapades with Tex Cobb, the rescue by second marriage, and the retreat to isolated Washington. Through it all builds the enduring relationship he has with his father-in-law, the man he believes is his real father until his dying mother spills the beans in a nine-page letter. What we have here is what you'd called an episodic life story, heavy on set pieces played mostly for laughs, but cumulatively building an appreciation for the novel's good guys, especially Calmers, the father-in-law, the most decent man Spooner says he ever knew. Spooner is the self-deprecating bumbler with the balls of steal, stepping up to power and injustice and trying to hold on to the few good things he has. Beaten brutally when he and Cobb get ambushed in a Philly bar (a true story), he takes what remains of his broken body and escapes with his wife and daughter to recuperate and to seek a separate peace. But trouble always finds our hero, and harmony is a dream and a bore shattered by the malevolence of his gay neighbor, who, along with his Russian bodybuilding boyfriend, terrorizes dogs, grandpas and fences. No worry, for a bulldozer brings comeuppance, and we leave the novel in the water, with Spooner burying Calmers at sea, fucking it up and falling in, confirming at last what we found all along: the good heart leads, the body tries to follow, and the best wills bring laughter to our failed good intentions.