‘By the time the US got into the Second World War, the population of Bonhomie had topped six thousand.” An unremarkable sentence that nonetheless gets the job done, and sentence by sentence, chapter by chapter, that’s what this novel does: efficiently, unremarkably, it gets the job done.
Bonhomie is a fictitious small town in the Midwest state of Ohio, a bit like Andy Griffith’s Mayberry, where nothing especially good or bad happens, and neighbours are nosy, chatty and kind to each other. Of course they are – the town’s called Bonhomie! Everybody gets along. In the pre-civil rights era of segregation, even the racists are okay, really: the novel doesn’t endorse their racism but it’s treated as an unlovable quirk rather than a disqualifying failure.
Not that it gets much chance to manifest itself: there is, I think, only one black character, a minor one, in the novel, which, even allowing for the Midwest setting, feels odd. The town’s white citizens go about imperfectly realising the American dream of prosperity and happiness. Then the lives of two ordinary couples collide and the consequences of this collision reverberate in the decades ahead.
Cal Jenkins is married to Becky. Cal, who has a congenital limp and was rejected for military service, works for his father-in-law (an overtly racist and yet somehow fundamentally sound character) in a hardware store. His own father is a cantankerous alcoholic, traumatised by his experience as a combatant in World War I, who Cal looks after as best he can. Becky settles into motherhood and explores her ability as a medium to connect people with their dead loved ones.
Margaret, a foundling raised in a Toledo orphanage, is unsatisfactorily married to the handsome, upwardly mobile and closeted Felix. Cal doesn’t have much time for Becky’s séances (to be fair, neither do we, but the novel appears to endorse them), and a coolness develops between the two. Felix is away serving on a naval ship. Margaret walks into Cal’s hardware store one afternoon, and, well, one damn thing leads to another: an affair, a pregnancy, loads and loads of guilt. Meanwhile, Felix is having a sexual awakening of his own with a sailor aboard his vessel. It’s like John Updike’s adultery fables without the nuance, or John Irving’s family sagas (the novel shares some significant plot elements with The Cider House Rules) without the comic surrealism.
It’s old-school leisurely narration, in fact – where the narrator, an omniscient presiding voice that sounds rather male, has a story to tell, and he’s going to tell it and you’re going to listen. This anonymous narrative voice roams freely from one character to another, describing their actions, reporting their speech and inspecting their thoughts. It doesn’t privilege or mimic a particular point of view in the way that, say, Jane Austen does: this affable, intelligent, hospitable voice remains unchanged throughout the novel; it talks and talks and never shuts up.
Pivotal scenes are reported rather than shown, and crucial conversations are told to us rather than reproduced as dialogue. The novel offers a window through which we see an epochal era of US history, from the American entry into the war following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to its disastrous entry into another war in Vietnam. It concludes in 1981, as its ageing major characters enjoy a tentative, hard-won happiness. That American dream doesn’t seem so impossible after all, though not everyone gets to share it.
The big events that comprise the historical backdrop of the novel – the two world wars, the Vietnam War, the protest movement, the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King – are consequential for three generations of characters. But they’re also detached, a kind of stage setting.
The novel invites the reader to see its people in the flow of these historical currents, but – perhaps because of that uniform, unvarying narrative tone – these characters seem instead curiously outside or untouched by time.
Patrick Ryan is a very good writer. The narrative voice I complain of is humane, perceptive and smart. But I’m not convinced (despite hyperbolic blurbs from Ann Patchett and Richard Russo) that he’s a very good novelist.
DH Lawrence once complained in a letter to his publisher about EM Forster’s great novel A Passage to India: “It’s good, but makes one wish a bomb would fall and end everything. Life is more interesting in its undercurrents than its obvious, and EM does see people, people and nothing but people ad nauseam.”
Reading Ryan’s novel, I don’t wish for a bomb, but I do wish for a deeper dive into the complexity, messiness and mystery of human behaviour.
