Spooner [Large Print] [Hardcover]

In his latest novel Pete Dexter has created two unforgetable complex male characters way bigger than life. Spooner, a twin who survives, is born in Milledgeville, Georgia in 1956. His mother Lily, who may have been happy only twice in her life-- "the night JFK was elected president, and the day Richard Nixon quit the White House"-- soon loses her husband and Spooner's father Ward to a mysterious illness. A few years later she marries Calmer Ottosson, recently court-martialed out of the navy, who comes South from South Dakota, where most people "wouldn't smile if you gave them the Nobel Prize."

The events in Spooner and Calmer's lives take up most of the rest of this brilliantly comic but a tad-too-long novel (466 pages). Spooner is expelled from kindergarten when he becomes sexually aroused by his female teacher, secretly urinates in the male neighbors' shoes at night, and in high school has no talent for football but relishes collisions. He eventually marries a woman in part because she is someone who would not forsake a dog and becomes a relatively successful newspaper reporter in Philadelphia-- or "staff writer" if you prefer. He is nurtured, sometimes from across the country by Calmer, who holds several thankless positions as a public school teacher over the years and finally winds up teaching English, and has the novel idea that teachers should treat students like human beings. He is, in Spooner's words, "the greatest man he ever knew" and someone whose good opinion he craved more than any other person's.

A lot of other sometimes motley characters pass through the novel: the sadistic Coach Tinker from Spooner's high school; Stroop, his boss in his short stint of selling baby pictures from door to door in Florida; his boxing buddy Harry Faint. Even Margaret Truman makes a brief appearance. Of course there is Spooner's neighbor's dog Lester Maddox as well. While Dexter skewers a lot of people in SPOONER-- newspaper reporters, politicians, undertakers, school administrators with useless doctor of education degrees, he saves a lot of his wrath for two despicable characters Marlin Dodge and his boyfriend Atlas Shrugged, whom the author describes as "the same-tool set." Does he protest a little too much?

Mr. Dexter's language is uniquely his own and seeps with dark humor. The scene near the beginning of the novel when Calmer totally screws up the burial of a congressman at sea is as funny as anything I have read in a very long time and is mirrored near the end of the book with more somber watery last rites. (This sort of bookends device is what makes Garrison Keillor and the rest of us English majors put our feet on the floor every morning.) This writer is the master of the lower middle-class metaphor. A character's expression is the same expression on one's face when the bottom falls out of a garbage bag. Calmer ties up the Congressman's broken casket like a "country girl's suitcase." The Congressman's widow accepts the folded flag from the honor guard "as you might take a baby if you were handed one with a loaded diaper." A mule has teeth like "Halloween corn."

Spooner and Calmer are tough men's men. When he is only five, Spooner is admonished by Calmer, when he attempts to take his new-found friend's hand, that men don't hold hands. They do not wallow in sentimentality either. Dexter from time to time, however, hits a universal nerve: "And in the way things happen, forty-odd years come and go, and with the exception of the one awful letter from his mother, nothing changed. And remembering that letter, Spooner would sometimes imagine a different family, where everyone poured out his deepest feelings at dinner, and the mother cried over her dead husband and brought out pictures of their wedding to show herself back when she had been happy, before she's been cheated by life." I can forgive Mr. Dexter anything for writing prose like that, even his heavy-handed handling of Marlin and Atlas Shrugged.

Spooner and Calmer are two characters that you will not soon forget.

This is one of the first novels that I can wholeheartedly recommend in a long time. It combines spare details, psychological insight, and perfect comedic timing. It is truly a delight to read.

The format is unusual - a set of short stories, ordered chronologically. The details and descriptions are those that are important to the characters in the scenes. There is no attempt to describe in cinematic detail the workings of the scene in question. Do not expect to learn much about Philadelphia geography or Milledgeville GA politics. I found the sparse descriptions to be a great relief. I was told everything that I needed to know to understand what struck the scene's main character(s) and nothing more. There was no need to visualize the unimportant or ponder the tangential.

A word in defense of this novel against critics, who usually claim one way or or another that the novel is lacking in detail or seems unfinished: this is a writer telling a story in a colloquial fashion, like a storyteller. This book does not tell how to become Spooner. Rather it tells what it is like to be Spooner in several individual moments. Thus no character is explained away - each character retains his/her dignity.

This sort of writing is unpretentious and frees the reader to laugh and ponder along with the book's characters.

If you want a how-to guide that really tells you nothing, watch Batman Begins. If you want a good novel, read this book.

I have heard of National Book Award winner Pete Dexter, but "Spooner" is the first novel by him I have read. Described as a "poignant, and comic story of resilience and love," and the story of lifelong ties behind a troubled young man, Warren Spooner, and his step-father, a once-brilliant young naval officer court-martialed out of the Service after a bizarre incident at sea. While the novel is described as relating to his lifelong struggle to salvage his son, the story does trace the intersection of their careers and how Spooner matures from a delinquent youth engaged in mischief and mayhem to a loving and responsible father. While his step-father attempts to make his son better, Spooner seems to go from situation to situation in a Forrest Gump way and eventually after somehow becoming a newspaper columnist in a city newspaper he seems to mature and become the responsible adult at the same time his step-father's life seems to start sliding down and after his father passes away, this story closes with another quirky scene, this one echoing the bizarre incident that led to the step-father's court martial. It is an amusing, quirky, and moving story that is as much about the rhythms and cycles of life as opposed to the story of one salvaging the life of another.

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