Shawn Huelle

On why I stopped reading Buckeye by Patrick Ryan

Sometimes, a friend gives you a book, and you start reading it, and it's not a very good book. And sometimes, you continue reading that not very good book because

  • it's good to know what's going on in the world of books blurbed by Ann Napolitano, Ann Patchett, Tom Hanks, Alice McDermott, and Emily Fridlund (even though I've not read a book by any one of those people);
  • it's good to read a not very good book every now and again to remind yourself of what really good books look like;
  • sometimes not very good books are still really good on some level (I loved The DaVinci Code even as I hated every poorly written sentence because it was exciting and had interesting ideas about European art and history).

But then, inside the not very good book, you come across something so at odds with what you've read thus far . . . I'm not talking about plot holes; I can handle those. I'm not talking about bad writing; see the above about Dan Brown. I'm talking about what felt like a breach of the contract the book had set up with me, the reader.

Buckeye by Patrick Ryan begins as a book about two people in a small, Ohio town, and how their lives (and the life of the town) are affected by WWII. The novel is a historical novel. Even if the people and the town are not now and never were real, their stories are set against the verifiable, historical background of America during WWII. The contract the book is setting up with the reader goes a little something like this: If you suspend your disbelief about this town, its people, and what those people do, I will provide you with trustworthy background information, i.e. the world in which these people live will be as close to real as the book can get it.

So when, on page 187, I read

Seaman A. Varick, twenty-nine, a farmer from Scottsbluff, Nebraska, asked if anyone could spare a smoke. He'd been on the Teague for a month. Tawny-haired, lean, but as strong as two men, somehow. Felix had listened to him talk about his Pentecostal upbringing, Foursquare Gospel, snakes.

the contract was, for me, in that moment, broken.

I grew up, in part, in a town just across the North Platte river from Scottsbluff, Nebraska. There are Pentecostal churches, including a Foursquare Gospel church, in Scottsbluff, but there has never been a snake handling church in Scottsbluff. Snake handling has never been part of the Foursquare form of worship. Snake handling churches have never, in fact, been found outside of Appalachia. The Foursquare Gospel church was started in California, which makes it, according to my friend Daniel, who happens to be an expert in American religious history, more Beverly Hills than hillbilly.

What this says to me is that Patrick Ryan, author of Buckeye, the book under discussion, threw a dart at a map of the US and then threw another couple of darts at the idea of socially conservative protestant denominations in an attempt to provide a quick introductory characterization of a gay figure who grew up more repressed than the figure with whom this particular section of the book is dealing.

Like I said, I can deal with certain kinds of lazy writing, especially in not very good books, but when the lazy writing throws me out of the book completely and also misrepresents the place where I grew up[1], then I put the book down. I do not yet know if I'll tell the friend who gave me the book I quit reading it (or why).

  1. Of course this happens all the time: Nebraska is, for most people, a blank place in the middle of the map of the contiguous United States, but I guess that means, for me at least, that if someone is going to fill in part of that blankness, they should do it correctly. ↩︎