Family Values

‘Back Roads’ unwraps the dark riddle of a troubled household

By Patrick Sullivan

EVERYBODY makes mistakes, but some people make more than others. Case in point: Oprah’s Book Club, which has, it’s true, selected a few really wonderful novels over the past few years, but which has also used the bone-crushing power of its founder’s name to hammer home some truly terrible books, driving them like a stake through America’s literary heart.

Therefore, if you’ve wandered into your local book emporium lately, you might be tempted to instantly dismiss Tawni O’Dell’s Back Roads (Viking; $24.95). Copies of the new novel–selected by Oprah in March–confront you at every turn, stacked in towering displays that cry out for a seismic retrofit. It makes you feel, frankly, as if you’ve wandered into a bookstore run by McDonald’s, with dozens of literary happy meals served up lukewarm for speedy consumption.

But suspend your judgment. Back Roads is no masterpiece, but it deserves–and rewards–a careful read.

The book’s narrator, Harley Altmeyer, is a boy with a few problems. Let’s start with the big stuff: after suffering years of abuse, his mom recently blew his dad’s head off with a rifle and then went to prison, leaving the 20-year-old Harley alone to raise his three younger sisters in their poverty-ridden Pennsylvania mining town.

Those three siblings are each a problem in their own right. More focused on getting laid than being a good parent, Harley has to hold down two jobs and keep track of the 6-year-old Jody, the 12-year-old Misty, and the far-too-old-for-her-age Amber, a 16-old dangerously mired in the muck of adolescence.

Women, it seems, bedevil the narrator at every turn. His sisters confound him with their mercurial personalities and strange passions. Callie Mercer, his sexy 30-something neighbor and the mother of one of Jody’s little friends, attracts and frustrates him. His court-appointed shrink disgusts, provokes, and annoys as she tries to get to the heart of his brooding anger.

By now the danger here should be obvious. This book, full of dark family secrets and youthful tragedy, has all the elements of a daytime soap opera.

But O’Dell sidesteps melodrama (mostly, anyway) by giving her narrator a hard, nasty voice. To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, if tragedy made people nice we wouldn’t hate it so much. Just when you start to feel really sorry for Harley, he says or does something outrageous enough–like setting the family’s couch on fire because his sister was making out with her boyfriend on it–to make those jerked-out tears dry right up.

Early in the book, Harley recalls the time he told a friend how attracted he was to Callie: “Skip thought I was joking. He said I was sick. He said wanting to nail somebody’s mother was like wanting to nail your cousin. And I told him if she walked over and pressed her wet shorts against him and whispered in his ear that she wanted to fuck him, he would shoot off in his pants before he could say anything back.”

Which is, I’m sorry to report, exactly how teenage boys tend to talk–in a sort of ugly poetry that’s one part Walt Whitman and two parts the stuff you find on the bathroom walls at the gas station. O’Dell captures that language almost perfectly. Indeed, the author is at her strongest when she’s crafting characters and putting dialogue in their mouths.

But, alas, she has her few weak spots too, mostly in the vital area of plot. It takes far too long to realize that a mystery lies at the heart of this book, a thorny question of what really happened on the night Harley’s father died. Before that riddle surfaces, the book just treads water.

There are other problems. Ironically, O’Dell seems to write male characters better than female ones. The women here don’t seem quite real. Perhaps you can chalk it up to the limited view of her male narrator that most of the book’s women remain enigmatic right up to the last page. But it’s a bit daunting how frequently Harley’s suspicions that women are deceiving him turn out to be right on target.

Ultimately, though, it’s Harley himself who keeps the reader coming back for more. Carved out in blunt, spare language, he’s an undated Holden Caulfield, trapped in a violent hurricane of a family that rages across these pages. By the end, despite his dirty little mind, he’s won your sympathy–if only because you’d like to see at least one ship survive this storm.

From the April 13-19, 2000 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

California’s diversity shines in ‘Manuel and the Madman’

By Patrick Sullivan

DON’T JUDGE a book by its cover, we’re often told, so maybe it’s not quite fair that the first thing some folks will notice about Manuel and the Madman is the name of one of the book’s two authors.

Still, it’s a hard name to ignore. Gerald Haslam has been called the quintessential California writer, and a quick look at his body of work tells you why. Among other things, the hugely prolific Penngrove author has published one novel, eight collections of short fiction, and several works of nonfiction, including the critically acclaimed Coming of Age in California: Personal Essays. Most of this native son’s work, like his life, is a thoughtful exploration of life in the Golden State.

This time around, Haslam has teamed up with his wife, Janice Haslam, who teaches at a Petaluma high school, to write something a bit different–a novel for teenagers.

Set in a modern-day Bakersfield barrio, Manuel and the Madman (Devil Mountain Books; $9.95) follows the adventures of its adolescent narrator, Manuel Ryan, as he tries to adjust to a new life with his grandmother after his parents separate and go off looking for work.

Half Chicano and half Anglo, Manuel soon discovers that being a blonde kid puts him distinctly in the minority in seventh grade at Our Lady of Guadalupe School. His new friends speak Spanish, wear their baseball caps backwards, and tease him about being white. Manuel begins to hate his blond Anglo looks so much that he tries to dye his hair with shoe polish.

But the neighborhood is changing fast. The racial picture grows more complex as kids with names like Tran and Phuc enroll in school, and gangs and guns begin to draw Manuel’s buddies into their deadly orbit. All the while, the narrator is struggling with typical adolescent questions about sex and God and his parents’ separation.

Unfortunately, most of the adults in his life aren’t much help in these matters. His absent father is mysteriously incommunicado. His priest is content to warn him against the grim crime of self-abuse. Worst of all, his abuelita, his grandmother, is highly traditional and deeply superstitious, and she despises the newcomers to the neighborhood–“los otros,” as she calls them.

But Manuel does find a sympathetic ear and a kindly voice in his wise but eccentric neighbor, Mr. Samuelian, an Armenian immigrant who is the madman of the book’s title. With the old man’s help, the boy comes to terms with the kids in his neighborhood and with his own multicultural identity.

This novel’s greatest strength lies in its presentation of life in the barrio. Kids of all races come together to curse, fight, and make friends in a fairly realistic fashion on the neighborhood’s colorful streets. The authors also bring California’s rich history alive as Manuel encounters aging vaqueros who tell him stories of cowboy shootouts in old-time Bakersfield.

Now for the tough part. It’s no fun to criticize a book this well intentioned. But there are, it must be said, a few problems with Manuel and the Madman.

The plot has a wandering, accidental feel to it, with too little dramatic tension and not enough clues about where we’re going next. For instance, the book makes much of the fact that Manuel misses his parents. But then his mom just pops up without any fanfare as a casual aside.

Then, too, many young readers will grow tired of Mr. Samuelian, who offers endless lectures about tolerance, compassion, and other virtues. Using a novel to teach moral lessons to teenagers is fine, but a more subtle approach might work better.

Far more entertaining is Mr. Samuelian’s hilarious brother Haig, who wears an eye patch over a perfectly good eye just so he can tell kids tall tales about how he lost his vision.

Here’s Haig discussing an epic battle of his youth: “I had saved my final strength. With it, I threw the ruthless Nizibian from me and broke everything on him that could be broken. I broke several things that could not be broken. He never fought again. . . .”

And therein lies Manuel and the Madman’s ace up the sleeve. From Haig to the vaqueros, the book offers a cast of richly realized minor characters, an array of personalities as colorful and diverse as California itself. And if you’ve taken a good look around lately, you’ll realize how significant an accomplishment that really is.

From the April 13-19, 2000 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Beatles–Buy the Book

Fab Three reunite for tell-all tome

By Greg Cahill

ALMOST 30 YEARS to the day (April 10) after they split up, the three surviving Beatles announced last weekend that they have spent the past several years putting all their yesterdays on the printed page for an upcoming official biography.

If the resulting 360-page Beatles Anthology, to be published in the fall, is as tepid as the highly touted Anthologies TV documentary series, then Beatles fans will find yet another reason to rue the day John Lennon fell under gunfire from a demented fan.

A spokesman for the Beatles–Paul McCartney, 57, George Harrison, 57, and Ringo Starr, 59–has promised that the book will be the frankest account of how the band ruled the pop world in the ’60s. “It goes across the board; everything is in there,” said Geoff Baker, McCartney’s publicist. “It is about the Beatles as a band, the music, but it deals with everything else–the tours, the drugs, the disputes.

“The book answers all the questions.”

But with the outspoken Lennon out of the picture, Beatles fans may sense revisionist history in the making. Among other things, Baker has said, the book will counter the contention that McCartney was the first to walk away, even though it was McCartney who filed the first legal affidavit seeking dissolution of the partnership. At the time, the Beatles Let It Be sessions were in a shambles, and the group hadn’t gathered in the studio since Aug. 20, 1969. Lennon, McCartney, and Starr all were working on solo albums. Harrison and Starr already had quit the group during brief spats. And, in September 1969, Lennon had informed the inner circle that he wanted “a divorce,” but was keeping silent because of delicate business negotiations.

But the real truth about the Beatles probably won’t be revealed in the official biography (though the upcoming book undoubtedly will prove somewhat insightful), leaving fans to glean info from the plethora of works already on the market. Here are a few noteworthy reads:

The Beatles: After the Break-Up, 1970-2000, a Day-by-Day Diary (Omnibus, 1999)

One of the best overviews of the post-Beatles Beatles–including a detailed account of Lennon’s last day–though author Keith Badman missed the recent assault on Harrison by a knife-wielding fan.

The Beatles: An Oral History (Hyperion, 1998)

The formation of the band and its rapid evolution–from the ebullient teen pop of “She Loves You” to the transformative psychedelia of “Tomorrow Never Knows” in just three years–is bountiful grist for editor David Pritchard and interviewer Alan Lysaght. Key players in the band’s development offer accounts in a riveting Ken Burns-like documentary style.

The Beatles: Every Little Thing; A Compendium of Witty, Weird, and Ever-Surprising Facts About the Fab Four (Avon, 1998)

From the wild nights of Germany’s tawdry bar gigs to the last day the band members spent in the studio, author Maxwell MacKenzie dishes the dirt on the Maharishi, the misunderstanding in Manila, and much more.

Carry That Weight: The Story of the Beatles (Xlibris, 1998)

Author Ernst E. Schutze takes pop history very seriously, thank you, retelling the Beatles myth as a modern Oedipus legend in this clever novel. Money, power, blood lust, and death (in this case, a McCartney look-alike comes on the scene to craft Sgt. Pepper’s) could make for a great Oliver Stone flick.

The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Cambridge Music, 1997)

A thoughtful examination of the 1967 album that marked the band’s creative apex and helped reshape pop music, with analysis by London College of Music professor Allan Moore and various commentators.

Ticket to Ride: The Extraordinary Diary of the Beatles’ Last Tour (Dowling, 1996)

Barry Tashian’s personal journal of the Beatles’ final tour (peaking in the melee in Manila and culminating at Candlestick Park) by a musician whose proto-punk garage-rock band, the Remains (one of the best American bands in the British Invasion era), accompanied the Fab Four on their stateside dates. Full of behind-the-scenes glimpses and backstage banter.

The Day John Met Paul: An Hour-by-Hour Account of How the Beatles Began (Scholastic, 1996)

This is essential reading for diehard fans. The rest of you–the ones who are thinking, “Beatlemaniacs–fer chrissakes, get a life!”–might want to skip this puppy and give that latest Oasis album another listen instead.

The Complete Beatles Chronicle: The Only Definitive Guide to the Beatles’ Entire Career (Hamlyn, 1992)

Still one of the best of its kind, with a foreword by Beatles producer George Martin. Author Mark Lewisohn provides an exhaustive 365-page year-by-year account of the band’s comings and goings, from 1957 to 1970. Lewisohn delves into concert dates, recording sessions, key personnel changes, and other critical data, all matched with a series of insightful and clear-eyed analyses of the band’s triumphs and failures.

From the April 6-12, 2000 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.