From Amazon
A coming-of-age story set in Florida in 1967, Edward O'Connor's Astral Projection concerns a teenager with the ungainly name of Goodwin DeFoe. Our hero comes from a fairly standard dysfunctional family background: at home his parents drink and fight, and his father is given to violent fits of rage. The novel's title comes from DeFoe's attempts to escape this miserable home life through spiritual flight, both literally and figuratively.
Astral Projection is strongest when O'Connor, a freelance writer and short story author living in Toronto, writes about music. DeFoe's passion for the guitar and his lessons with guitar teacher Chuck Buffington draw us in, however briefly, to that universe of two occupied by student and instructor. Here's Buffington explaining the mechanics of tenor saxophonist Lester Young's version of "I Want to Be Happy" to his young charge: "'Hear how that goes? Like you're being all boxed in, and that whole note at the end is the last nail in the coffin. But right then Lester makes his statement--he's gonna be happy. He blows this little four-note announcement--toodle-loo-doot--and he's off like a rabbit.'"
O'Connor is less convincing in his portrayal of the family and DeFoe's "horror-story home life," and even with the introduction of a gun into the plot line the tension never amounts to much more than the equivalent of a flat E-string. Without this tension, Astral Projection remains earthbound, a well-meaning, likable, but ultimately unsatisfying first novel. --Shawn Conner
Review
“An original and winning novel…. utterly breathtaking.” -- The Vancouver Sun
“O’Connor is adept at isolating the telling moment either through dialogue or description…. No regard for self-respect, charity, or pride is allowed to impede the uncompromising realism of the narrative until the inescapable truth has been stated.” -- The Toronto Star
From the Trade Paperback edition.
“O’Connor is adept at isolating the telling moment either through dialogue or description…. No regard for self-respect, charity, or pride is allowed to impede the uncompromising realism of the narrative until the inescapable truth has been stated.” -- The Toronto Star
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Book Description
A haunting novel of a guitar prodigy who thinks the only problem with the world is that there are so few real ways to escape it.
The place is Miami, the time is 1967, and nothing in Goodwin DeFoe’s short life has given him any sign that good things might come to him. His parents are locked in booze-driven mortal combat; his gawky teenaged body and relentlessly cynical mind can find no relief – until he picks up a guitar and finds himself a teacher, a down-on-his-luck womanizing jazz musician named Buffington, who inadvertently leads Goodwin to the promised land. Music. Music that fits his mood, lifts his spirit, sends him spiralling outside his life, that connects a loveless boy to a screwed-up man who becomes as close as Goodwin has ever got to a friend. But what happens when the student clearly surpasses the teacher, takes all that Buffington has got to give and goes him one better, into the land of the musically blessed? What happens to the boy when even his music won’t insulate him from the violent drama his parents act out every night?
Shaped and coloured by the music and culture of the 1960s, this novel is rich with dark humour, snappy vernacular and
piercing observation. From the first days of Goodwin’s guitar lessons to the brutality of the Miami race riots and beyond, Astral Projection telescopes in on Goodwin’s struggle to pass from the world at hand into a new and better one – giving us just one year, then just one day, then just one hour.
The place is Miami, the time is 1967, and nothing in Goodwin DeFoe’s short life has given him any sign that good things might come to him. His parents are locked in booze-driven mortal combat; his gawky teenaged body and relentlessly cynical mind can find no relief – until he picks up a guitar and finds himself a teacher, a down-on-his-luck womanizing jazz musician named Buffington, who inadvertently leads Goodwin to the promised land. Music. Music that fits his mood, lifts his spirit, sends him spiralling outside his life, that connects a loveless boy to a screwed-up man who becomes as close as Goodwin has ever got to a friend. But what happens when the student clearly surpasses the teacher, takes all that Buffington has got to give and goes him one better, into the land of the musically blessed? What happens to the boy when even his music won’t insulate him from the violent drama his parents act out every night?
Shaped and coloured by the music and culture of the 1960s, this novel is rich with dark humour, snappy vernacular and
piercing observation. From the first days of Goodwin’s guitar lessons to the brutality of the Miami race riots and beyond, Astral Projection telescopes in on Goodwin’s struggle to pass from the world at hand into a new and better one – giving us just one year, then just one day, then just one hour.
From the Back Cover
“An original and winning novel…. utterly breathtaking.” -- The Vancouver Sun
“O’Connor is adept at isolating the telling moment either through dialogue or description…. No regard for self-respect, charity, or pride is allowed to impede the uncompromising realism of the narrative until the inescapable truth has been stated.” -- The Toronto Star
From the Trade Paperback edition.
“O’Connor is adept at isolating the telling moment either through dialogue or description…. No regard for self-respect, charity, or pride is allowed to impede the uncompromising realism of the narrative until the inescapable truth has been stated.” -- The Toronto Star
From the Trade Paperback edition.
About the Author
Edward O’Connor is a freelance writer and author whose short stories have been published in literary journals and magazines nationwide. His story “The Beatrice of Victoria College” was nominated for the 1998 Journey Prize, the National Magazine Awards and the Western Magazine Awards. O’Connor grew up in Miami, Florida and moved to Toronto in 1970, where he lives with his wife and son. Astral Projection is his first novel.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Part One: THE ALBUM
Track One: THEM THAT'S NOT
Goodwin deFoe’s first guitar teacher was a poor man, so poor in fact that on days he gave lessons he had to ride a bicycle from his rented bungalow in the black part of Coconut Grove all the way down to the music store in the Dadeland Mall, a distance of some six miles. Chuck Buffington was white himself and lived where he lived because it was the only place he could find a house with affordable rent. The house he found was a small house, a very small house indeed, made of stuccoed cinder blocks painted the color of Dijon mustard. Safe to say that if a man stood in the front doorway of Buffington’s house and fired a shotgun at the open back door, all the pellets would make it through without hitting anything because the shot pattern wouldn’t have time to spread. Out by the front steps of the bungalow, a stubby coconut palm arched its trunk, and in a corner of the fenced-in back yard a mess of banana trees produced tiny hard green fruit no one had ever been tempted to pick.
There were days when Buffington, pedaling to the mall in the heat of the early afternoon, would stop at every convenience store on the way to buy himself a can of beer. He’d pull at the beer while riding down the banyan-shaded avenues of the Grove and South Miami and deposit the crushed can in the basket at the front of the next store he reached. The quickest route to Dadeland took him by two 7-Elevens and a Farm Store, but if he felt in a desperate enough mood, he’d make the necessary detours and have downed five or six beers by the time he reached the mall.
Once there, he’d walk his bike into the central square, where a larger-than-life-sized dinosaur squatted on its haunches in the middle of an immense fountain. Water dropped from the dinosaur’s nostrils in two twirling streams to the pool below, and the chlorine in the water was so strong, shoppers could smell it in the farthest reaches of the mall. Buffington would park his bike against the side of the tiled fountain and plunge his head into the cold penny-studded pool, keeping it there for as long as he could hold his breath. When he withdrew with a gasp, he was sober again, or so at least he told himself. Often a Cuban girl would pad out from behind the juice bar on the square and hand him a piece of terrycloth to dry his head with and a thimbalized paper cup of café cubano. Her standard uniform was a pair of tight fruit-colored slacks (banana, avocado or the deep pink of ripe papaya) and a nylon shirt that buttoned down the front but never quite met the top of her slacks, allowing a swath of bronze belly to show through for Buffington’s appreciative eyes. Her white teeth flashed through her lips when she smiled. Her sandals smacked the soles of her feet when she walked over, and they smacked them again when she walked away.
About his drinking, Buffington never fooled Leo Spec, the owner of the store where he worked. Spec knew his guitar instructor arrived for work drunk as often as not, but he was reluctant to fire Buffington because all the man’s students (and a few of their mothers) were wild about him. Receipts were up since Buffington started, and not just for lessons but for all the subsidiary things that went with them – instruments, sheet music, composition books, pitch pipes, strings, picks – you name it, Buffington kept the merchandise moving and the appointment book full.
***
Goodwin DeFoe bought his first guitar with a twenty-dollar bill he received in exchange for a slalom water ski he’d made in a shop class he was forced to take in the summer of his fifteenth year. They wouldn’t let him graduate from junior high without the credit, and he’d been avoiding the course because he’d never so much as driven a nail into a plank of wood. In spite of his best intentions, the ski turned out to be a poorly constructed piece of equipment, mainly because he’d planed the strip of ash down on either edge until it was too narrow to provide a secure mount for the ski boot. The first time Goodwin’s friend tried to use the ski, screws popped out, boot blew off, and friend took a header into Biscayne Bay.
“Tough shit for him,” thought Goodwin, who for someone so young had a very foul mouth. By then he had already bought his guitar and had no intention of refunding the other boy’s money. So it was fitting, in the sense of universal or karmic justice (if karmic justice can be instantaneous rather than taking a lifetime to unfold), that Goodwin’s guitar should turn out to be just as wretched an instrument as the ski he had sold to buy it. When the strings were tuned, they held so high off the fret board that pressing them down to make a chord or to pick out the notes of a melody was a much more demanding and even painful operation than it should have been. The first thing Buffington did when Goodwin showed him his guitar was to strip off the steel strings and replace them with nylon. Then he excused himself for a moment and returned with a white cardboard box in the palm of his hand.
“Just feel how heavy that is,” he said, “before I put it on.”
Goodwin hefted the box and found it heavy indeed for such a small package. He gave it back to Buffington, who took from it a steel contraption, a kind of clamp, that he affixed to the neck of Goodwin’s guitar. It had the effect of pressing the strings down closer to the fret board.
“That’s a big-ass capo,” said Buffington. “But nothing else will do for your guitar.”
He retuned it, then riffed through a few chords and picked out a biting little blues solo. Instead of using a flat pick or finger picks, he plucked the strings with his fingernails, which were the longest Goodwin had ever seen on a man.
“That’s a little tiny bit better,” Buffington said and gave the guitar back to Goodwin. “The strings are free ’cause I can use the old ones, but you owe Mr. Spec five bucks for the capo.”
“Well, I don’t have five bucks,” said Goodwin. “I spent all my money on the damn guitar.”
At that moment Buffington made what was for him a characteristic gesture, one Goodwin would get to know well over the next little while. He dipped his head and cut his eyes away from the boy’s face, like a bull preparing to charge, then set his chin in place.
“You bring it next week or I’m taking back the capo.”
Goodwin had an odd feeling about Buffington, a feeling he was unable to summarize with any sort of precision. He’d arrived early for his first lesson and sat on a bench in a hallway at the back of the store. The week before he’d bought a book of lesson tickets from Mr. Spec at the cash register in the showroom out front. On the floor of the showroom were pianos and organs, and on two walls hung guitars: acoustics on one, electrics on the other. Goodwin paid sixteen dollars for four tickets; each time he had a lesson, he was supposed to rip one off and give it to his teacher.
There were four rehearsal rooms or studios at the back of the store. Two of these were reserved for portable instruments like guitars, while one of the other rooms contained a piano and one a Wurlitzer organ. It was the wall of this last room Goodwin leaned his back against while he waited that first evening, and he could both hear and feel through his back the music that was being played inside on the organ. He could even make out the clicking of the pedals as the person playing sifted through “Don’t Fence Me In” at a light skipping pace that brought to Goodwin’s mind the music of “The Lawrence Welk Show.”
The door in front of him opened and a girl a year or two younger than Goodwin appeared carrying a guitar in a cloth case. He liked her face, which was shadowed on either side by thick brown hair and animated by an emotion she attempted to suppress by biting her lower lip. This was a mannerism that always took Goodwin by storm. When Buffington said a word in farewell, the girl tossed her head to look at him, and then it was obvious to anyone with eyes in his head what the emotion was that suffused every pore of her skin. Buffington nodded and took his time watching her walk away, then turned to Goodwin and said, “Come on in, son.”
Track One: THEM THAT'S NOT
Goodwin deFoe’s first guitar teacher was a poor man, so poor in fact that on days he gave lessons he had to ride a bicycle from his rented bungalow in the black part of Coconut Grove all the way down to the music store in the Dadeland Mall, a distance of some six miles. Chuck Buffington was white himself and lived where he lived because it was the only place he could find a house with affordable rent. The house he found was a small house, a very small house indeed, made of stuccoed cinder blocks painted the color of Dijon mustard. Safe to say that if a man stood in the front doorway of Buffington’s house and fired a shotgun at the open back door, all the pellets would make it through without hitting anything because the shot pattern wouldn’t have time to spread. Out by the front steps of the bungalow, a stubby coconut palm arched its trunk, and in a corner of the fenced-in back yard a mess of banana trees produced tiny hard green fruit no one had ever been tempted to pick.
There were days when Buffington, pedaling to the mall in the heat of the early afternoon, would stop at every convenience store on the way to buy himself a can of beer. He’d pull at the beer while riding down the banyan-shaded avenues of the Grove and South Miami and deposit the crushed can in the basket at the front of the next store he reached. The quickest route to Dadeland took him by two 7-Elevens and a Farm Store, but if he felt in a desperate enough mood, he’d make the necessary detours and have downed five or six beers by the time he reached the mall.
Once there, he’d walk his bike into the central square, where a larger-than-life-sized dinosaur squatted on its haunches in the middle of an immense fountain. Water dropped from the dinosaur’s nostrils in two twirling streams to the pool below, and the chlorine in the water was so strong, shoppers could smell it in the farthest reaches of the mall. Buffington would park his bike against the side of the tiled fountain and plunge his head into the cold penny-studded pool, keeping it there for as long as he could hold his breath. When he withdrew with a gasp, he was sober again, or so at least he told himself. Often a Cuban girl would pad out from behind the juice bar on the square and hand him a piece of terrycloth to dry his head with and a thimbalized paper cup of café cubano. Her standard uniform was a pair of tight fruit-colored slacks (banana, avocado or the deep pink of ripe papaya) and a nylon shirt that buttoned down the front but never quite met the top of her slacks, allowing a swath of bronze belly to show through for Buffington’s appreciative eyes. Her white teeth flashed through her lips when she smiled. Her sandals smacked the soles of her feet when she walked over, and they smacked them again when she walked away.
About his drinking, Buffington never fooled Leo Spec, the owner of the store where he worked. Spec knew his guitar instructor arrived for work drunk as often as not, but he was reluctant to fire Buffington because all the man’s students (and a few of their mothers) were wild about him. Receipts were up since Buffington started, and not just for lessons but for all the subsidiary things that went with them – instruments, sheet music, composition books, pitch pipes, strings, picks – you name it, Buffington kept the merchandise moving and the appointment book full.
***
Goodwin DeFoe bought his first guitar with a twenty-dollar bill he received in exchange for a slalom water ski he’d made in a shop class he was forced to take in the summer of his fifteenth year. They wouldn’t let him graduate from junior high without the credit, and he’d been avoiding the course because he’d never so much as driven a nail into a plank of wood. In spite of his best intentions, the ski turned out to be a poorly constructed piece of equipment, mainly because he’d planed the strip of ash down on either edge until it was too narrow to provide a secure mount for the ski boot. The first time Goodwin’s friend tried to use the ski, screws popped out, boot blew off, and friend took a header into Biscayne Bay.
“Tough shit for him,” thought Goodwin, who for someone so young had a very foul mouth. By then he had already bought his guitar and had no intention of refunding the other boy’s money. So it was fitting, in the sense of universal or karmic justice (if karmic justice can be instantaneous rather than taking a lifetime to unfold), that Goodwin’s guitar should turn out to be just as wretched an instrument as the ski he had sold to buy it. When the strings were tuned, they held so high off the fret board that pressing them down to make a chord or to pick out the notes of a melody was a much more demanding and even painful operation than it should have been. The first thing Buffington did when Goodwin showed him his guitar was to strip off the steel strings and replace them with nylon. Then he excused himself for a moment and returned with a white cardboard box in the palm of his hand.
“Just feel how heavy that is,” he said, “before I put it on.”
Goodwin hefted the box and found it heavy indeed for such a small package. He gave it back to Buffington, who took from it a steel contraption, a kind of clamp, that he affixed to the neck of Goodwin’s guitar. It had the effect of pressing the strings down closer to the fret board.
“That’s a big-ass capo,” said Buffington. “But nothing else will do for your guitar.”
He retuned it, then riffed through a few chords and picked out a biting little blues solo. Instead of using a flat pick or finger picks, he plucked the strings with his fingernails, which were the longest Goodwin had ever seen on a man.
“That’s a little tiny bit better,” Buffington said and gave the guitar back to Goodwin. “The strings are free ’cause I can use the old ones, but you owe Mr. Spec five bucks for the capo.”
“Well, I don’t have five bucks,” said Goodwin. “I spent all my money on the damn guitar.”
At that moment Buffington made what was for him a characteristic gesture, one Goodwin would get to know well over the next little while. He dipped his head and cut his eyes away from the boy’s face, like a bull preparing to charge, then set his chin in place.
“You bring it next week or I’m taking back the capo.”
Goodwin had an odd feeling about Buffington, a feeling he was unable to summarize with any sort of precision. He’d arrived early for his first lesson and sat on a bench in a hallway at the back of the store. The week before he’d bought a book of lesson tickets from Mr. Spec at the cash register in the showroom out front. On the floor of the showroom were pianos and organs, and on two walls hung guitars: acoustics on one, electrics on the other. Goodwin paid sixteen dollars for four tickets; each time he had a lesson, he was supposed to rip one off and give it to his teacher.
There were four rehearsal rooms or studios at the back of the store. Two of these were reserved for portable instruments like guitars, while one of the other rooms contained a piano and one a Wurlitzer organ. It was the wall of this last room Goodwin leaned his back against while he waited that first evening, and he could both hear and feel through his back the music that was being played inside on the organ. He could even make out the clicking of the pedals as the person playing sifted through “Don’t Fence Me In” at a light skipping pace that brought to Goodwin’s mind the music of “The Lawrence Welk Show.”
The door in front of him opened and a girl a year or two younger than Goodwin appeared carrying a guitar in a cloth case. He liked her face, which was shadowed on either side by thick brown hair and animated by an emotion she attempted to suppress by biting her lower lip. This was a mannerism that always took Goodwin by storm. When Buffington said a word in farewell, the girl tossed her head to look at him, and then it was obvious to anyone with eyes in his head what the emotion was that suffused every pore of her skin. Buffington nodded and took his time watching her walk away, then turned to Goodwin and said, “Come on in, son.”
