Pete Dexter

About a month ago a member of a small book club i am apart of chose Deadwood by Pete Dexter as our book.  I don't like to go into a discussion of a book not being familiar with the author so, to better aquaint myself with Pete Dexter, I read Paris Trout (national book award winner) in anticipation of Deadwood.  Since, I have also read The Paperboy.  There is a darkness and a haunting that permeates Dexter's work, it reminds me of a man bitten by a rattlesnake cutting open the bite, a bit to deep, in order to draw out the poison.

Paris Trout is set in the south and centers around the man, Paris Trout, who kills a young black girl while out collecting on a debt.  The unfolding story is elegent and grotesque as Trout slips from just managable to completely out of his mind, a man desperate to go down fighting and take down every one else en route.

Deadwood is a fictional retelling of, well, Deadwood around the time Wild Bill Hickock was there.  If you are familiar with the HBO series of the same name, there is no need to go into the setting, but as Charley Utter reflects, from novel, "It looks like something out of the bible...the part where God got angry."  But Dexter's ability to write so comfortably and without apology on something spiraling out of control marks it as something exceptional and powerful... not a read for every reader, but certainly a book that will stand in posterity.

The Paperboy...I have no new superlatives for Dexter with this novel.  Haunting, dark, elegant, and powerful...a story about a family in the newspaper business and the crushing effects of overwork, dark secrets, and need for belonging.  The final line of the novel sums the whole of the book:  "There are no intact men."

Familiar, to some extent, with Dexter, I can safely say he does not, necessarily, write only about the people in his work, rather the landscape and communities work as characters and aid, one way or another, the failures and achievments of the people by whom they are inhabited.  The barren, dangerous landscape of Deadwood and The Paperboy (badlands of the Dakotas and the swamps of Northern Florida respectfully) have a crushing effect on the people wandering in and out, the institutional racism the permeates the small southern town in Paris Trout has a suffocating, blinding effect on Trout, his wife, and the lawyers involved.  These are not simply books about the protagonists and antagonists and plot lines and story arcs but become regional exposes that you might find condensed in an issue of Time magazine or, perhaps, National Geographic.

I intend to continue reading Dexter, after a short repose, I am drawn to the honesty with which he writes, and the honest reflection of people on the cusp of darkness.  He seems to have found a way to write the way desperate people balance on a knife edge, either withdrawing, wholly, into themselves and by doing so leaving the poeple around them to the violence of the wolves or openning themselves up, just enough, in vain effort to protect those around them.  But at his core, Dexter is authentic, there is nothing contrived or dreamed up and I think he desperatly wants to order the failures of his characters with  a sense of redemption at the point all is lost.