Regretfully, I had never read Pete Dexter until now, and after only the first few pages of his newest novel, Spooner, I was enamored. Dexter has a shifty style, long sentences with frequent breaks, and it all lines up well with the strangely human characters he creates. Like Calmer Ottoson, formerly revered as a Navy Commander, recently and hilariously disgraced during a publicized incident at a funeral at sea. Despite his broken career, Calmer becomes the father figure to the book’s title character, and raises the socially-awkward and inept Spooner into a strange and disjointed adulthood, full of bone-breaking bar fights in Philadelphia’s “Devil’s Pocket” neighborhood, a battle with a neighbor (involving bulldozers) on Whidbey Island, and an odd rise to becoming a popular columnist at a Florida newspaper.
Spooner himself is a compelling character from an early age, giving his mother her longest and most arduous birth, getting expelled from preschool on the first day due to a devious infatuation with his beautiful teacher, and sneaking into the neighbors’ home at night to steal a massive hunk from their prized block of cheese. As he navigates through his mid-1950’s childhood in a small southern town, which is fraught with overt racism and a post-depression mentality, it becomes clear that Spooner’s entire existence—from his childhood to his older years—is unique, and his circumstances are well worth the story.
Pete Dexter writes so well, it is impossible not to consider this book as a sort of epic-comedy, full of humor, tragedy, a large cast of irreverent and unique characters, and the wide and detailed environment that helps shape them. Spooner is one of those rare novels that you may find yourself wanting to read again, sooner than later. ~Jared