The Smoke in Our Eyes
Here is a great new addition to a classic American genre: the small-town story. James Grady, whose distinguished career began with Six Days of the Condor and includes many crime and mystery novel awards, has written a wonderfully funny, tender, psychologically acute study of a fictional town called Vernon, Montana (pop. 4000), set in 1959.
In Vernon, Grady finds crime and suspense, as well as mystery. Besides a wealth of everyday details from 1959, he also adds historical and political references that resonate in 2024. But mainly this is the story of appealing young Lucas Ross, age ten, as he passes through adventures and misadventures toward maturity.
Appropriately, he starts wearing glasses, and the “kindly toad” of an optician tells him that if he sees Main Street clearly, he’s “seen it all.” Indeed, Vernon is a microcosm: villains and heroes, including Lucas; victims and tormentors; a whore and a nun; a Beauty and a Beast. (Grady has a Dickensian flair for creating freaky characters.) In this novel, bitter tragedy (teenage car wreck) is balanced by comedy (Lucas’s epic battle with the Toilet Monster). Love, hate, birth and death: small-town life contains it all.
Young Lucas observes wickedness and inhumanity as well as kindness and tolerance, all the while learning morality from his admirable father and teachers. Between Easter and September, he babysits, overhears adult chicanery, drinks many Cokes, witnesses an illicit love affair, and, in a particularly entertaining episode, goes out for football.
Grady has some stylistic quirks. He likes to scramble up the English language (ignitions are “keyed” and “she’d scissor-chopped her midnight hair”) and to write short sentences without subjects. No matter. Follow along. Get used to it. Laugh. Cry. Admire. A+
