Boy's Life
Reviewed by Gene Lyons
Never mind Stephen King and John Irving, there's a flood of new
old-fashioned novels out there, and we owe it all to CNN and the English
department. Take Boy's Life (Pocket Books, $21.95), for example.
Suffering
from 24-hour information burnout on the one hand and deconstructionist
pedantry on the other, Robert R. McCammon has lit out for the territory and
reinvented the kind of naive and sentimental storytelling most of us
thought we had to give up along with the Hardy Boys, Albert Payson Terhune,
and baseball-card biographies. (Not the kind 12-year-old futures
speculators keep today, but the stories of heroes that came with bubble gum
and could be purchased for 5 cents.) "See, this is my opinion,"
McCammon's narrator, Cory Mackenson, tells us: "We all start out knowing
magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We
are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in
grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls.
We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put
on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. The truth of life is
that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within
us." McCammon, who uses the term "fictography" for his particular brand
of autobiographical fantasy, began his career as an author of paperback
horror tales. Not one to husband his narrative energies, he writes here as
if he had several lives to squander, weaving together—if not exactly
seamlessly—enough plots and subplots to fill a half-dozen ordinary novels.
"My hometown," the narrator tells us, "was a place called Zephyr, in
south Alabama. When I was twelve years old, in 1964, Zephyr held about
fifteen hundred people. There was the Bright Star Cafe, a Woolworth's, and
a little Piggly-Wiggly grocery store . My hometown was full of heroes and
villains, honest people who knew the beauty of truth and others whose
beauty was a lie. My hometown was probably a lot like yours." According to
Boy's Life, Zephyr also had a man-eating alligator, a clairvoyant voodoo
woman, a passel of KKK bomb throwers, a fraudulent evangelist or two, a
clan of homicidal bootleggers, an eccentric millionaire fond of strolling
around town buck naked, a magical white stag, a dinosaur, a couple of
ghosts, and a pair of renegade Nazis in hiding. Not to mention, by the time
the story runs its course, a gigantic flood, a meteor, a magic bicycle, an
O.K. Corral-style shootout at the Trailways bus station, and a seemingly
insoluble murder mystery that knits the whole improbable mess together.
Exactly the world, in short, that an imaginative 12-year-old boy of the
time and place would inhabit if he could. Even George Wallace, Bear Bryant,
and Martin Luther King Jr. sidle their way into the story. Alabama-crazy to
the core, Boy's Life bears approximately the same relationship to a novel
like The World According to Garp that a laser-lit Hank Williams Jr.
extravaganza bears to a Pete Seeger sing-along. Pat Conroy's The Prince of
Tides comes closer, but for sheer screwball storytelling exuberance,
McCammon's book is hard to top. There will be times when most adults will
find themselves faintly embarrassed to be gobbling the thing like hot
buttered popcorn, but gobble they will all the same. A-
EXCERPT
A Boy and His Bicycle
My bike, old in the ways of a boy's life long before it had reached my
hands by merit of a flea market, was no longer a living thing. I felt it,
as I sat there in the pouring rain. Whatever it is that gives a soul to an
object made by the tools of man, it had cracked open and flown to the
watery heavens. The frame had bent and snapped, the handlebars hanging by a
single screw, the seat turned around like a head on a broken neck. The
chain was off its sprockets, the front tire warped from its rim, and the
snapped spokes sticking up. I almost cried at the sight of such carnage,
but even though my heart hurt, I knew crying wouldn't help. My bike had
simply worn out; it had come to the end of its days, pure and simple. I was
not its first owner, and maybe that made a difference, too. Maybe a bike,
once discarded, pines away year after year for the first hand that steered
it, and as it grows old it dreams, in its bike way, of the young roads. It
was never really mine, then; it traveled with me, but its pedals and
handlebars held the memory of another master. Maybe, on that rainy
Wednesday, it killed itself because it knew I yearned for a bike built for
me and me alone. Maybe. All I knew for sure at that moment was that I had
to walk the rest of the way home, and I couldn't drag the carcass with me.
(Posted:08/30/91)
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