Reading Addict

I rarely read a book more than once. It just seems like poor time management: why retread old ground when yet to be discovered books lie in wait? Of course I’ve made exceptions, but generally that’s exactly what they are: exceptions, special authors whose books have something new to offer upon further examination. I usually go back for the authorship rather than the singular work. I first read the Lord of the Rings trilogy in grade school.

I am about to embark on the last year of my 30s. (No condolences necessary. I’m okay, really.) Which means I grew up in the 1980s and am one of those reviled as well as revered Generation X-ers, they of the mythical combat boots and flannel shirts, and, earlier, the sky-high “mall bangs” and neon bracelets.

An interesting thing has happened in the last few years. People my age are finally coming of age in the literary world, which means many more novels are being written with characters roughly my age, and with settings in the U.S. during the 1980s.

Last summer film crews descended on Tulsa to film The Killer inside Me, a film adaptation of Jim Thompson’s pulp classic. Like other pulps, The Killer inside Me celebrates the lurid, sensational aspects of fiction. Pulps were created for the everyman. They were not written for critics; in fact many consider pulp hero fiction the antecedent to modern day comics.

You’ve lost your job, which you didn’t even like and weren’t very good at in the first place. You’re pretty sure your wife is having an affair, which she isn’t trying very hard to hide. You love your kid(s), but he/she/they are, frankly, sociopaths-in-training. You have asthma or allergies or a bad back, you’re overweight and out of shape, and if you’re not bald yet, you will be soon.

You are a man falling apart, and you’re well-represented in several American novels written in the last few years.

Sometimes a novel traffics such beauty it feels foolhardy to assign descriptors, analogies, adjectives. It becomes a visceral thing. Sure it evokes a myriad of emotions beneath, but what you’ll also notice is tight and lumpy and hard throats. Red welled eyes. Quickened breath. A disregard to your environment. Time stops or time flies but you can’t discern the difference. Patrick Thomas Casey’s debut Our Burden’s Light is such a novel. The writing is brave and formidable.