As Good as Gone by Larry Watson
My rating: 4/5 cats
”It’s been a long time since anyone expected me to think or know much of anything. I’ve drawn wages for most of my years for simple doing.”
“And do you think your son asked you to come here to do something?”
“If need be.” He flicks away his cigarette, and together they watch its sparks pinwheel down the drive. “If need be.”
it’s 1963 in the small town of gladstone, montana.
when his wife requires a surgery local doctors are not equipped to perform, bill sidey asks a rare favor of his estranged father calvin: to stay at the house while they are at the hospital in missoula and watch the two grandchildren calvin has seldom even seen.
calvin sidey is a man with a complicated reputation: once a respected town leader, war hero and businessman, he became so consumed by grief after his wife’s death that he abandoned his teenaged children and went off to live alone and unencumbered in a trailer outside of town where he drank himself into oblivion, hiring himself out as a ranch hand and living the life of a cowboy-hermit. an individual with a great “capacity for ferocity,” calvin is a taciturn man of the old school, when men were men and did what needed doing and many unsavory rumors have sprung up in his thirty-year absence, one involving a tire iron and a man who said something indelicate about calvin’s wife. the selling point for me was right there in the synopsis:
Calvin only knows one way to solve a problem: the Old West way, in which ultimatums are issued and your gun is always loaded.
hell. yeah.
but now calvin is many years sober and spends his time quietly, reading poetry in latin, still scoured by pain and loss unexpressed but not unexperienced. all that time alone has stunted his social graces, and his track record with being part of a family is not awesome, but he agrees to return to the town and the very home he once abandoned to be a warm present body in case of an emergency.
and, oh, there will be emergencies.
ann is seventeen years old – a good girl who got involved with a bad boy who has not taken her breaking it off with him well and has been following her all over town in his souped-up car ever since; a silent threat she can’t bring herself to tell anyone about; a secret that is slowly grinding her down into a paranoid bundle of nerves.
meanwhile, eleven year old will is having his own problems. his friends are edging into territory he’s not ready to follow – drinking beer, sidelining the parties of older kids and ogling girls. they also engage in activities that go against his personal moral code, like frog-killing, where he pretends to participate while secretly trying to save as many as possible. like ann, he is unable to speak up for himself, and when his friends begin pressuring him to let them pervily spy into ann’s bedroom, will’s planned evasive tactic is way more destructive and short-sighted than sneaking some frogs back into the river.
calvin ambles into town while the embers of all this are just beginning to flare, bringing along his gun and a bottle of whiskey just in case, and confronting thirty years of change – his haunted past, his failures, the physical changes that have shaped the town in his absence as well as the social changes to values, behaviors, and what constitutes manhood. he also takes another shot at enjoying the company of a woman.
this is a deliciously slow burning novel that triggers an ever-increasing sense of dread as all the ingredients for full-blown tragedy are presented and their likely outcomes anticipated by a reader braced for the inevitable explosion. it’s a multi-POV novel with an excellent sense of time and place in its details and its depiction of gender, race, small town politeness running up against small town gossip, and so much smoking everywhere – not only in the hospital waiting room, but even in the hospital bed by the patient awaiting an operation because why not?
this is my first book by larry watson, but it was such a strong introduction, it will not be my last. this guy knows how to write, how to pace a story, and how to cover all angles of a situation in a really satisfying way. big thumbs-up and a big thank-you to algonquin via firstreads.
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SCORE! i haven’t won a firstreads giveaway all year, but look at me now – a winner! my headspace is bad and i have a daunting stack of books i have promised to read, but i take my firstreads vows very seriously, and this will be honored as soon as possible.
gratitude, i ooze it.
