Book Review: Spooner

Miami Herald

"Spooner" by Pete Dexter; Grand Central (466 pages, $26.99)

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My official measure of a novel has to do with visionary reach and enduring ideas and other high-minded literary attributes. Secretly, it's none of that stuff. It's all about envy.

The novels I love, the ones I consume with the ferocity of a crack-smoking junkie, come with lines that stop me dead on the page, cause me to back up and read the words again, muttering jealous curses, wishing they were mine. Melville's great and all, but once I got beyond "Call me Ishmael," my self-esteem remained pretty much intact. Melville laid out the big ideas, maybe, but Pete Dexter wrote the lines that laid me low.

In his seventh novel (with a National Book Award winner among them), Dexter begins walloping lesser writers in the first chapter as he describes the book's namesake emerging from the birth canal. "Spooner's mother rolls out of bed on her own and gains her feet, and in those first vertical moments with one of her hands clutching a visitor's chair for balance and the other covering her mouth against the possibility of unpleasant morning breath, she issues Spooner, feet first and the color of an eggplant, an umbilical cord looped around his neck, like a bare little man dropped through a gallows on the way to the next world."

Page after page, like a boxer pummeling an overmatched opponent, Dexter hammers out writing just this side of sanity, revealing the sort of thoughts and inner narrative and bizarre insights other authors might occasionally entertain but wouldn't dare commit to the printed page.

Grandma Macon's frown of disapproval, through Dexter's prose, becomes "that expression when the bottom drops out of your garbage bag ... by the time you felt it coming loose, it was already too late - egg shells, Kotex, coffee grounds, a Band-Aid with body hair stuck in the adhesive, that little bag of turkey organs they stick inside the bird at the factory, like they were sending it out into the world with a sack lunch - and there was no stopping it then." An old woman's angry face never seemed so vivid.

The story of Spooner, and a life that would forever stay just beyond the reach of normality, begins in a town in Georgia and moves to another in Indiana and becomes an odyssey of Spooner's strange behavior and dysfunctional approach to life. Familial traumas and tragedies unfold as dark humor. Strange and funny asides can pop up anywhere. Driving along the Georgia countryside, Spooner's stepfather looks out the window of his 1949 Ford and notices two shirtless men in a poultry yard. One was having sex with a chicken. The other was waiting his turn. "Why he didn't just get a chicken of his own, only the man himself might know. Maybe it was too much like a double date."

Spooner was an odd child who lived a secret life tormenting his neighbors. He was a youngster whose experience allowed him to dismiss the notion that his dead father was residing in paradise. "Regarding the matter of heaven, Spooner had told enough lies of his own by now to recognize one when he heard it."

His mother was determined to be unhappy. "Spooner's mother lived her life with the certain knowledge that the whole thing, cradle to grave, was an ambush. Spooner didn't necessarily disagree with that, but had never seen any reason to take it personally."

Gradually, as Spooner stumbles into adulthood, the reader notices that the life of Pete Dexter's protagonist has an uncanny resemblance to that of Pete Dexter, including his stint as a newspaper reporter at The Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, where he describes his fellow writers: "The strangest thing, though, was that even those without ambitions to write for the ages were savagely protective of their prose. 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." That line vanquished any doubts about the deeper truths revealed in "Spooner."

Spooner, much like Dexter, goes on to become a famous (yet perpetually maladjusted) newspaper columnist in Philadelphia and the author of notable novels like "Deadwood." And Spooner, like Dexter, is set upon by an angry mob at a bar in Philly's famously nasty Devil's Pocket and beaten into a human car wreck. After Spooner rehabs, he follows Dexter's path and takes up residence on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound. Amid all that tranquility, Spooner gets engulfed in a long feud with his gay, pick up-driving neighbor and his steroid-gulping weight-lifter lover.

"Spooner" reveals the circumstances of Dexter's life, but the "Spooner" version is told through observations most folks, for the sake of sanity, would just as soon keep locked away in their inner psyche. And it comes with the sort of writing that puts Spooner near the top of my list of great American novels.

That's the secret list, of course. The one under the heading, "Damn. I wish I had written that."

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