Boy's Life by Robert R. McCammon
Hello, Stranger.
Primary Driver: (Plot, World, or Character)
Bechdel Test: Pass
Technobabble: N/A
Review: This objectively boring and meandering book is somehow completely and utterly engrossing. Truly exceptional writing captures both the whimsy of childhood and the slow maturation of its characters. Backdrop of 1960s in the South used well: both the idyllic aspects of life in days when the milkman still made his rounds, and the darker aspects of embedded racism. It's a snapshot of life with overlaid story elements - but it just works. Switches from casually humorous to introspective to devastating and back, without warning. A few scenes really punch you right in the gut.
The Medium of It
I WANT TO TELL YOU SOME IMPORTANT THINGS BEFORE WE START our journey.
I lived through it all. That’s one problem about relating events in first person. The reader knows the narrator didn’t get killed. So whatever might happen to me—whatever did happen to me—you can be sure I lived through it all, though I might be a little better or worse for the experience, and you can make up your own mind which.
There might be some places where you’ll say, “Hey, how come he knows this event right here happened or this person said or did this or that if he wasn’t even there?” The answer to that question is that I found out enough later on to fill in the blanks, or in some cases I made up what happened, or in other cases I figured it ought to have happened that way even if it didn’t.
Even better, this prologue sets up another one of my pet peeves - in-universe admissions that the story is made up. Even before the end of the prologue things went from folksy to heavy.
The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It’s not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don’t know it’s happening until one day you feel you’ve lost something but you’re not sure what it is. It’s like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you “sir.” It just happens....We had a dark queen who was one hundred and six years old. We had a gunfighter who saved the life of Wyatt Earp at the O.K. Corral. We had a monster in the river, and a secret in the lake. We had a ghost that haunted the road behind the wheel of a black dragster with flames on the hood. We had a Gabriel and a Lucifer, and a rebel that rose from the dead. We had an alien invader, a boy with a perfect arm, and we had a dinosaur loose on Merchants Street.It was a magic place.In me are the memories of a boy’s life, spent in that realm of enchantments.I remember.These are the things I want to tell you.
It's an oddly specific thing, but I am a sucker for introductions that set up the events throughout a book. The Name of the Wind is a perfect example. We learn from the start exactly what will happen, but with no context. It's the same here. I was a bit curious about Lucifer and the dinosaur.
This book is incredible. McCammon nails the sense of wonder that childhood brings, the feeling of limitless potential at the end of a school year. The confusion at finding out that teachers are not just tethered to their desks, the desire to be respected as a grown up and promptly realizing just how young you are.
Very little actually happens over the course of this book, and it is at its best when nothing is going on. The narrative is broken into a series of vignettes, all told within the frame of a single larger plot. At the very beginning Cory and his father witness a car with a corpse in it sink into a lake. The overarching plot is a mystery: who was he, who killed him, and why? There are a number of subplots with higher stakes as well: disasters, mobsters, explosions. These moments of escalated drama are when the book is at its weakest, as they do some damage toe the feeling of being immersed in this world. They're too outlandish. Far better are the more relatable moments: struggling to deal with an injured pet, a friend moving out of town, nervousness about speaking in public. It's worth a note that the plot is itself interesting, but is not really why you keep reading - the draw is the writing and character work. Put another way: you could spoil almost any plot point in the book and it would not make it a worse read.
The worldbuilding would likely resonate for those who were alive at the time. For someone born later it is an interesting historical backdrop, but it does not really elicit nostalgia - it was never my reality. The place and period - 1960s in small town Alabama - are a good setting for plenty of underlying class and race tensions.
It is a delight to read a book where kids act like kids.
The horse was a carved golden palomino that had been salvaged from a doomed merry-go-round somewhere; now it was bolted to the floor next to the regular barber’s chair. Only babies got their hair cut while sitting on the horse, even though there were times when I wished I might be able to sit on that horse again and put my feet in the stirrups while my hair was being snipped. Still, the fact that the Curliss boy—at nine or ten years of age, say—wanted to sit on the horse told me he must be a pansy.
Such simple and hilarious judgment - the snap determination of a child. Reversed, of course, because Nemo Curliss sure can throw a baseball. One of the most endearing scenes is just a bunch of kids pretending they can fly - including the one who isn't that into make believe but ends up getting caught up in it anyway. Like actual children! Characterization works, partly (dang it!) because of that opening preface. The most important characters are given interests, depth, goals, and growth. Those who are there just for a vignette are often caricatures - but that is, of course, how it ought to have been even if it wasn't.
This is a book that should not work at all, and I could not put it down. I highly recommend giving this a read.
If that sounds appealing, consider using the link below! I'll get a few cents at no extra cost to you!Boy's Link
I loved my dog, though the gray flesh showed through his thin white hair, his skull was scarred and misshapen, and his withered gray leg was as thin as a warped stick. Mom couldn’t be around him. Dad brought up the subject of putting Rebel to sleep, but I wouldn’t hear it. Rebel was my dog, and he was alive.He never ate. Never drank a drop. He stayed in his pen, because he could hardly walk on his withered leg. I could count his ribs, and through his papery skin you could see their broken edges. When I got home from school in the afternoons, he would look at me and his tail would wag a few times. I would pet him—though I have to be honest here and say that the feel of his flesh made my skin crawl—then he would stare off into space and I would be as good as alone until he came back, however long that might be. My buddies said he was sick, that I ought to have him put to sleep. I asked them if they’d like to be put to sleep when they got sick, and that shut them up.
McCammon does a remarkable job with writing grief and its attendants: guilt, anger, and emptiness. Cory's dog is not the only death, and McCammon nails it by having each death closer and closer to home. First, the unknown man in the car. Then Cory's teacher:
“You know she’d been fightin’ cancer for the last year.”
“No, I surely didn’t!”
“Well, she put up a good fight, but she passed on about two hours ago. She wanted to pass at home instead of a hospital.”
“My Lord, I didn’t know Selma was sick!”
“She didn’t want a fuss. How she got through her last year teachin’ I’ll never know.”
It hit me who they were talking about. Mrs. Neville. My Mrs. Neville. The teacher who’d said I should enter the short-story contest this year. Good-bye, she’d said as I’d left her room on the first day of summer. Not see you next year or see you in September, but a firm and final good-bye. She must’ve known she was dying, as she sat behind that desk in summer’s light, and she had known that for her there would be no new class of grinning young monkeys in September.
Then his dog, and most importantly one of his best friends.
He was silent, but for the soft wet rattling of his breath. The machine blip… blip… blipped. “I guess I’d better go,” I said, and I started to stand up.
His marble-white hand grasped my own.
“Tell me a story,” he whispered...."I’m awful tired, Cory.” He frowned, the red saliva beginning to thread down his chin. “I don’t like bein’ so tired.”
“You oughta rest, then,” I said. “I’ll come see you tomorrow.”
His frown vanished. A smile sneaked across his mouth. “Not if I go to the sun tonight. Then I’ll have me a suntan and you’ll be stuck here shiverin’.”
“Cory?” It was Mrs. Callan. “Cory, the doctor needs to get in here with him.”
“Yes ma’am.” I stood up. Davy Ray’s cold hand clung to mine for a few seconds, and then it fell away. “I’ll see you,” I said through the oxygen tent. “Okay?”
“Good-bye, Cory,” Davy Ray said.
“Good—” I stopped myself. I was thinking of Mrs. Neville, on the first day of summer. “I’ll see you,” I told him, and I walked past his mother to the door. A sob welled up in my throat before I got out, but I clenched it down. As Chile Willow’s mother had said, I could take it.
...
On Sunday morning I awakened with a start. Tears were in my eyes, the sunlight lying in stripes across the floor. My father was standing in the doorway, wearing the same clothes he’d had on all day yesterday.
“Cory?” he said.
There is something that is just so raw in how emotion is depicted, and the artful mix of both show and tell is effective. Perhaps it is more effective coming from a child, and framed as realizations. The same types of emotional notes for an adult character would likely come across as odd and out of place.
This book hit me harder than I would have thought.
I think I could use a comforting mug of hot chocolate. Would you like one as well, Stranger?And don't forget to read a book!
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