By Helen Elliott

Copyright smh

Cal grows up in the American world between the wars, a time when the prairies were real in many living memories, that belongs as much to the present as to the past narrated by Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Dreiser, etc (again). “Buckeye” is the fond term for those who come from Ohio. In quiet American towns, ordinary people with names that identified a heritage other than the place they saw as home got on with their lives and the century steadily, not quite consciously, hummed itself into American.

Ryan repaints, reconfigures so that the best of those last-century writers remain while the mustiness of their pages evaporates. He’s some sort of laid-back magician. Cal’s leg probably saved him from being killed in the Second World War. He tried to enlist, but the forces didn’t want a man with an odd leg. They did want the boy who told Cal he was special, though. He was killed in Germany. Just like that; re-loading his rifle and reciting The Lord’s Prayer, and then he was dead. Cal, at the time was working in a cement factory and falling in love with an enchantingly odd girl called Becky Hanover whose father owns the local hardware store. Who could not love Becky Hanover?

It’s right there in the basement of his father-in-law’s store that a red-headed woman kisses Cal. She’s lived in Bonhomie for six years, she says, and has never been in his shop. Of course Cal loves Becky, of course he loves his young son, Skip, of course he is grateful to his in-laws for this chance in life beyond the cement factory, but he can’t stop thinking about that kiss, about the exceptional woman. It was an impulse, that’s all. He knows this because it was the day in May when peace was declared in Europe, the day the world was going to filter itself back into order. The woman had stepped into the shop to listen to Truman announcing the armistice on the radio. Becky. A kiss. Truman. A definition of a life?

The red-headed woman is Margaret, an orphan, a beautiful disrupter stepping out of Nowhere and aiming to be Somewhere. But she has no ground beneath her feet, beauty always transient, is her one magnificent gift. She is married to Felix who is about to return from several years away as a naval officer. When he was away, Felix and another young man fell deeply in love and Felix has to go on living his false life when his lover is killed. It is Becky, who has an uncanny gift for communicating with the dead, who is most helpful.