Pete Dexter writes books about damaged goods, about men (invariably men) who are defined by their actions but who act without quite knowing what they are after. Some of these characters are downright dangerous, while others emerge as noble innocents. All, one suspects, are fighting blind and destined for the ropes. The last line of Dexter's 1995 novel The Paperboy seems to sum up his world-view: "There are no intact men."
Spooner spins another tale of hapless blunderers, fired by random impulses and working an unwitting mischief on those around them. But this one comes with a difference. In his acknowledgments, the author explains that "the book by the way is a novel, not in any sense a memoir, but it is nevertheless based loosely on events and characters from my own life". Like Warren Spooner, Dexter was raised in Milledgeville, Georgia, by a widowed mother who would later remarry. Like Warren Spooner, he went on to work as a journalist and once filed a column that resulted in him being severely beaten in a Philadelphia bar. Who knows? Perhaps he was also a childhood delinquent who got his kicks from breaking into homes and urinating in the shoes of his neighbours. In the case of Spooner (character and novel), it is hard to know where the facts end and the fiction begins.
But what a jubilant jumble it turns out to be. Where Dexter's best-known books (Paris Trout, The Paperboy) played out as dark, hard-bitten thrillers, Spooner is colourful, digressive and often uproariously funny. It is as though the author has rounded up his usual suspects and sent them out in a fresh direction. Naturally, the way ahead is peppered with disasters. But the sun is out and the birds are singing, and when the characters slip up it can feel like a pratfall.
Significantly, even the eventual death of Spooner's asthmatic mother killed by her encounter with an equally asthmatic dog at a meeting of the local book club is framed as farce. "Silly tore into the living room like Christmas morning, her nails scratching across the oak floor, and there confronted the entire Greater Falling Rapids Great Books Club, the force of her barking lifting her off the floor, backing away from one guest and into another, wheezing and making terrible wet, guttural noises, and then began to sneeze, and mists of dog snot blew across the room, settling Jesus knew where."
By this point, Spooner has himself been blown in all directions. Written off as retarded and unstable, he enjoys a brief moment of glory as a high-school baseball pitcher only to shatter his elbow on the practice mound. Afterwards, he careens through a failed marriage and a gaggle of dead-end jobs, and then falls arse-backwards into a lucrative writing career. If there is a constant in his rumble-tumble existence, it comes in the form of his placid, saintly stepfather. Calmer Ottoson drifts into Spooner's orbit and then proceeds to stick with him through thick and thin. For Spooner, he is "the greatest man he ever knew or at least the greatest man who had ever known him".
Spooner is by turns a rambunctious, picaresque, subverted coming-of-age tale and a heartfelt valentine to the independent spirit, adrift in a conformist modern age. The tale's first half instals its hero as a kind of idiot Augie March, pointed towards disaster. The second, however, conspires to land him in what appears to be a contented fat-cat middle age. The first half is glorious, unruly and at times deeply moving. The second spreads out, settles down and falls prey to a dubious strain of macho sentimentality.
If there is a problem with Spooner, it is that Dexter's characters are not obviously suited to second acts. These people arrive wired with explosives, primed to lead brief, violent lives, not survive and prosper and start railing against the forces of political correctness from their luxury homes on Puget Sound. All of which makes Warren Spooner a rarity. Against all odds, Dexter's hero remains intact. The book itself is not so lucky. It comes broken down the middle, front-loaded with greatness, and imperfectly set.
