Details Salvage Plot Failings

Sun Herald

Sunday March 16, 2008

Reviewed by Heidi Maier

Traveller

Ron McLarty

(Sphere, $32.95)

AT THE centre of British writer Ron McLarty's second novel is a tough-talking but tender-hearted man dealing with paralysing grief.

Traveller opens with the letter that Jono Riley receives from his estranged friend, Cubby D'Agostino, telling him that his childhood sweetheart Marie has died.

"Dear Jono," the letter reads. "I am writing to tell you that Marie has passed away. I know she would want you to know, as she always mentioned your Christmas cards. We do not know why she has left us. Rhode Island requires an autopsy, but we haven't heard anything as of yet."

A part-time actor and bartender, Jono now lives in New York City, where he divides his time between working at a club and performing in an obscure off-Broadway play that perpetually hovers on the cusp of cancellation.

His firefighter girlfriend, the feisty and loving Renee, is pressuring him to move in with her, but he isn't ready to make such a large commitment. Deep inside, Jono still carries a torch for Marie, whom he regrets never having married and remembers as "frozen in time at 12 years old, tall and graceful and with a smell like she had just towelled off after a bath in rosewater."

News of Marie's death stirs a multitude of feelings in Jono and eventually compels him to return to the neighbourhood where he grew up. It is while visiting his boyhood home that he learns that Marie was killed when a single bullet, fired into her back during the summer of 1961, by an unknown gunman, suddenly dislodged itself and travelled directly to her heart.

Returning home to the working-class Rhode Island suburb in which he was a boy, Jono remembers the events of that afternoon in unprecedented detail.

We learn that he and Marie had just shared their first kiss and were walking home together from the hockey rink when she was shot.

She was rushed to the hospital, where doctors operated but were unable to remove the bullet.

For almost 40 years it remained in her body, lodged in her shoulder, causing no further problems or complications. Beset by memories of the shooting, Jono decides to contact the police officer responsible for investigating the crime.

Now a retired detective, Kenny Snowden reveals that he, too, is haunted by the unsolved shooting, telling Jono that several similar shootings had occurred over the years. With some help from the police precinct, Kenny and Jono launch their own investigation, eventually uncovering some disquieting facts about the case.

Part-mystery and part-drama, Traveller aspires to page-turner status, but it never quite succeeds as a crime thriller.

While it has the potential to be interesting and compelling, the storyline involving the off-the-books, unofficial reinvestigation of the now-long-ago crime comes off as trite and unconvincing.

Alongside Marie's death, it is revelations of past violence and the ways in which it haunts the present that underpin McLarty's narrative.

He recounts Jono's story in both the past and the present tenses, exploring rosy nostalgia and the unforseen complications of confronting one's past with a mostly deft hand and warm, engaging authorial voice.

The single thread that holds the novel together is Jono's complicated adolescence and it is evoked over the course of almost 300 pages with clarity and precision.

Indeed, it is when writing about his protagonist's friendships with fellow boys Cubby, Billy Fontanelli and Bobby Fontes and their childhood adventures that McLarty's prose is at its best and most engaging.

There is something about the author's style that reminded me of that wonderful television series The Wonder Years, in which a grown man recalled his coming of age experiences in the American suburbs of the 1960s.

Like that show, McLarty also evokes the neighbourhood in which Jono grew up with obvious tenderness and affection, contrasting the town's gentrified present with its wholesome, family oriented past.

Reading this novel, you feel as though you are walking the streets with Jono and his mates.

It is, in the end, this sort of gift for detail that makes Traveller a memorable read.

© 2008 Sun Herald

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