October 14, 2009
Write What You Know: Reflections of a Wayward Soul
By ERIC KONIGSBERG
CLINTON, Wash. — When Pete Dexter invites you to his house for dinner at 6 p.m. but says it’s fine to show up any time before 10, you can tell that he means it because he adds, “I’ve been late my whole life.”
Mr. Dexter’s seventh novel, “Spooner,” has just come out three years late. The blame lies with a case of prolixity. “I just couldn’t stop writing — I didn’t want to let the thing go,” he said last week. He typed 800 pages before pressure from his publisher forced him to prune it and be finished. But not completely: Mr. Dexter, whose previous novels include “The Paperboy” and “Paris Trout,” which won the National Book Award for fiction in 1988, has found a bunch of things he doesn’t like in the published book, and is hoping for the chance to tweak a few for the paperback edition.
“Spooner” (Grand Central Publishing), which clocks in at around 460 pages, thanks to the wonders of dense pagination, is in many ways a departure for Mr. Dexter, who has made a career of spare prose, tight plots and stories that center on a single violent act and its effects on the concentric circles that can make anyplace (a small town in the Deep South, postwar Beverly Hills or the old West of Wild Bill Hickok) feel gothic. This time Mr. Dexter has spun a discursive cradle-to-grave yarn about a well-meaning but wayward soul and his saintly stepfather.
For Mr. Dexter, whose father died when he was 2 and who was reared by his stepfather, the story — unlike his previous fiction — is also largely autobiographical. Much like Mr. Dexter’s real stepfather, Thurlo Tollefson, the stepfather in “Spooner,” Calmer Ottosson, is a military-school teacher who takes in a widow’s two young children and then has two sons with her.
“It dawned on me when I was writing this that my stepfather never let on that he preferred his real sons to me, but how could he not have?” Mr. Dexter said. “I never understood how you could help but love one child more than another in the first place, which is part of why my wife and I only had one.”
Mr. Dexter and his wife of 30 years, Dian — known to readers of his books’ dedication pages simply as “Mrs. Dexter” — live here on Whidbey Island in a large Arts and Crafts bungalow on 10 wooded acres overlooking Puget Sound. On the land are three tractors and a Mercedes, all of which are operated mainly by Mrs. Dexter.
“Mrs. Dexter drives cars I don’t even get to look at,” he said. (“He likes to eat in the car and throw things on the floor,” she explained.)
Mr. Dexter, a hipless and round-shouldered 66-year-old, is allowed to use the barbecue. He emptied the contents of one and a half bottles of Kraft Catalina salad dressing onto a large salmon filet, then went outside to the patio grill armed with a flashlight. He wore elastic-waist shorts that his wife kept reminding him to hitch up, tennis shoes without socks, a Hawaiian shirt with sailboats on it and a pink Yankees cap. He looked like Oscar Madison in Miami Beach.
Much like the protagonist of “Spooner,” Mr. Dexter had a youth full of broken bones and bodily wear and tear (he has had “six or seven” hip replacements, he said) and not much academic engagement. While the three other children in his blended family went off to Harvard, Yale and the University of Chicago, he drifted in and out of enrollment at the University of South Dakota and took eight years to earn a diploma.
He was working odd jobs in Florida when he walked by the offices of what is now The South Florida Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale and saw a sign advertising a reporter position.
“I looked around the place, and it just looked like heaven,” Mr. Dexter said. “For one thing, it was air-conditioned. The next day I was a reporter with 11 beats: poverty issues, juvenile issues, hospitals, tomatoes — they were a big crop down there.”
The path eventually led him to The Philadelphia Daily News, where he became a popular city columnist. His conversion to fiction came about not only by accident, but also by catastrophe; an iteration of it occurs in the saga of Warren Spooner, the title character in his new book. Mr. Dexter visited a neighborhood bar to make peace with a man who had taken offense at a column he wrote. Instead, the man and his friends took baseball bats and crowbars to Mr. Dexter and a friend, the heavyweight boxer Randall (Tex) Cobb, nearly killing Mr. Dexter.
Mr. Dexter’s leg was broken, his back was fractured in three places, and cuts on his scalp required 90 stitches. After that he was no longer interested in late nights in bars in search of column material.
“Something happened to my brain that made alcohol taste like acid for a couple of years,” he said. “And all the stuff that you can tolerate when you’re drinking — all the hugging and yelling and the way people spit when they’re talking to you — wasn’t so much fun. All of a sudden I’m waking up at 9 in the morning instead of noon, and I’ve got a couple of hours to write something else before I get to work on my column.”
None of his novels have been big sellers, he said, though all but “Spooner” have been optioned for films or television, “which means you more than break even.” He wrote the television adaptation of “Paris Trout,” and the scripts for several big-budget movies, including “Rush,” “Mulholland Falls” and “Michael,” which was directed by Nora Ephron and starred John Travolta as an unorthodox angel.
Ever since a computer glitch erased the entire middle section of “Paris Trout” on the day he finished writing it, Mr. Dexter has mistrusted technology. “It was 122 pages when it went down, and after I rewrote it for a couple of months, it came back at 112,” he said. “I’m positive those were the best 10 pages I ever wrote.”
Though he has friends who are writers, among them Richard Russo and Padgett Powell, he generally has a hard time with the success of others. “Jealousy’s the wrong word for what I usually feel,” he said. “It’s closer to hoping they get hit by a car.”
Around 11 p.m., with dinner over, Mr. Dexter prepared to head across the driveway to the guesthouse, where he writes. “I usually work really well from about midnight to 4 in the morning, when it’s really quiet,” he said. He has started a new novel based on an incident in the 1910s, when a rogue circus elephant got loose and rampaged through a town in South Dakota.
“I saw something about it in a museum five or six years ago, and the first line of the novel came to me then,” Mr. Dexter said.
The line establishes that somebody other than the elephant keeper is sleeping with the elephant keeper’s wife, though “sleeping with” aren’t the words Mr. Dexter has chosen.
“I’m in a phase of heavy research,” he said. “Right now, I’ve literally got 8 or 10 books about elephants I’m in the middle of reading. The trouble about elephant books is that they’re inevitably sad. It always comes down to people killing the elephants.”
SPOONER
By Pete Dexter
469 pp. Grand Central Publishing. $26.99
eptember 27, 2009
Objects in the Mirror
By LIESL SCHILLINGER
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SPOONER
By Pete Dexter
469 pp. Grand Central Publishing. $26.99
Everyone has heard of writer’s block, a condition that plagues authors great and small. Yet the affliction takes more forms than is commonly supposed. For some sufferers, it manifests as sitting-in-the-chair block, a disinclination to hunker down and get to work. For others it’s total creative shutdown. But the prolific Pete Dexter suffers from neither. For the past five years or so, as he worked on his memoirish novel, “Spooner,” Dexter was plagued by a reverse form of the malady: call it “stopping block.” In a note to readers in the advance edition of “Spooner,” Dexter explains that he turned in his novel more than three years late not because he was stymied about what to write but because he was bedeviled by the question of what to leave out. He simply couldn’t stem the flood of story that poured forth as he chronicled the misadventures of Warren Spooner from his birth in Milledgeville, Ga., in 1956 (where Dexter, born 13 years earlier, also grew up), to his failed early attempts at employment and marriage in Florida (another echo from Dexter’s past), to Philadelphia, where Spooner (like Dexter) acquired a happy second marriage and a career as a newspaper columnist until (like Dexter) he was violently beaten by thugs who didn’t like his writing. By the time he had transported Spooner (now a novelist) to remote Whidbey Island, in Puget Sound (where the author now lives), Dexter had written hundreds more pages than he’d intended.
“I could have kept this up for another five years,” he admits. Instead, he spent a year trimming 250 excess pages, then reluctantly released the “Spooner” manuscript, heeding the dictate of his character Yardley Acheman, the ruthless investigative journalist from “The Paperboy” (1995): “You have to let go of it to get it done.” In that book, Acheman’s instincts proved wrong. His haste to publish earned him a Pulitzer, but also sprung a swamp-dwelling sociopath from prison and brought embarrassment to his paper and his writing partner — not to mention an extra corpse or two to Moat County.
Lucky for Dexter, the consequences of the tardy, yet (in his judgment) unfinished release of Warren Spooner’s wonderful, horrible life are less fraught, even felicitous. And it’s no wonder that this newsman-turned-novelist, known for his spare writing style and taut plotting, was daunted by the task of condensing the action-packed chronicle of his alter ego — a man who, like another Dexter character, Miller Packard (from the 2003 novel “Train”), sees himself “from a distance” and mistrusts introspection. “Sometimes, when he thought about it,” Dexter wrote of Packard, “it seemed like he’d been someplace else, watching himself, for most of his life.” The same could be said of Spooner. But in some 500 pages, Dexter brings Warren Spooner to ground and to life with uncharacteristic expansiveness and tenderness.
“Spooner” is a family epic that digs out the emotions packed in memory’s earliest bonds — guilt, resentment, loyalty and love. For Spooner, the guilt and resentment attach mostly to his mother, a querulous asthmatic who impressed upon him the unique agony of his birth (which his better-looking twin brother failed to survive), and who let him know that his existence was a continuing source of distress — crying out “God, how long can I stand it?” and weeping into a dish towel or a pillow over the various miseries of motherhood. His loyalty and love (at least until he becomes a husband and father) attach to a series of unappetizing dogs and to his stepfather. Spooner’s biological father died when his son was a baby, but the boy was spared a fatherless childhood by the arrival in Milledgeville of Calmer Ottosson, a disgraced young naval commander whose seafaring career was cut short by the botched burial-at-sea of an obese congressman. To the great fortune of what remained of the Spooner family — Spooner; his clever older sister, Margaret; and his mother, Lily — Calmer ended up teaching school in Milledgeville and speedily married Lily. Handy and dutiful, nurturing but reticent, Calmer instills in the boy a sturdy, quiet code of male behavior. At the age of 4, Spooner hungrily soaks up Calmer’s example. When he sees his sister take their future stepfather’s hand, he follows suit: “Without knowing he was doing it,” Dexter writes, “Spooner reached for a hand too, and got Calmer’s little finger instead, and they walked that way to the end of the block, and then Calmer stopped and gently pried him loose. ‘Men don’t hold hands,’ he said.” Oh, the pity of masculine detachment!
But when Spooner perversely plants himself in an anthill crawling with thousands of stinging insects, it’s Calmer who rescues him, brushes the ants off him and bathes him, soothing, “Easy does it . . . just take it easy,” and it’s Calmer who watches over the sickbed. Years later, Spooner remembers “the man sitting in the dark on the chest beside the bed, helpless, and the child lying in the dark beneath him, pretending to sleep, also helpless” — the two united in their manly vow of silence, and in their unspoken affection. When Spooner, in late adolescence, briefly becomes a baseball star, it’s Calmer who goes to his games, Calmer who tells him to keep his signing bonus from the Cincinnati Reds rather than turn it over to the family (because “you can never tell when you might need it”), and Calmer whose face Spooner sees when he awakes from surgery on his shattered, irretrievably wrecked pitching arm.
These stoical lessons help Spooner weather the adversities he meets once he’s on his own — like his first boss, in Florida, a “clean-cut, low-living sort of human outcast named Stroop” who sells baby pictures door to door, and tickles Spooner with a cattle prod before handing over his paycheck. (Spooner submits to the overture to get the money, then quits and becomes a journalist.) Among Spooner’s other adversaries are the stream of women who warm to, then instantly cool on him, “like they’d wandered into a pet store and almost bought a monkey,” and the men he meets with in Philadelphia to apologize for writing an article they disliked, who break his back and bash in his face. “Spooner had empathy to a fault, perhaps had learned it from Calmer.”
Empathy certainly betrayed him in Philadelphia. And yet, any reader who knows Dexter’s biography, so closely entangled with Spooner’s, knows that it’s this very attribute, and the horrendous 1981 attack it provoked, that moved Dexter to start writing novels. If it’s a fault, it’s one that has been redeemed in both blood and ink.
“Spooner” has little in common with Dexter’s previous work. Typically, in his books and screenplays (notably “Rush” and “Mulholland Falls”) he coils a psychologically charged drama around one signal incident or relationship — as he did in his 1988 novel “Paris Trout” (winner of the National Book Award), which anatomized the racism and bubba politics of a small Southern town in the wake of the killing of an innocent black girl. The concentrated nature of each story’s core subject limited the span of its telling, while Dexter’s insight into dark human behavior and his journalistic eye for the small, brutal detail made even short sentences dense with buried inference. But in “Spooner,” he unearths the experiences that underlie this nuanced sensibility, exposing the familial archetypes that shade his characters and directly engaging the potent emotions that emerge obliquely in his other books. It’s a conversational novel, roving and inclusive, packed with Southern color and Northeastern grit, with rueful reflection and the contretemps of daily life that can’t be avoided even on a remote island in the Puget Sound. But — like Spooner and like Miller Packard — Dexter shies away from analyzing too closely the meaning of the events he describes, letting incident and anecdote replace allusion. As Dexter follows Spooner across the decades and across the continent, from a makeshift delivery room in Georgia to the Pacific Northwest, he weaves in Calmer’s progress as well — his career disappointments, his wife’s unhappinesses and his eventual move to Whidbey Island, where stepson becomes caretaker to stepfather, to the extent that proud, uncomplaining Calmer will permit.
The story of “Spooner” is the story of how Calmer made Spooner, and of how Spooner made himself. It’s also the story of why Pete Dexter writes, and of why he couldn’t stop writing this particular book. He ended his novel “The Paperboy” with the words: “There are no intact men.” With “Spooner,” he demonstrates the impulse that keeps writers at their task: the longing to reassemble the whole; to see, however belatedly, who a person was, or could have been.
Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
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