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Trout Kill
Eddy Trout doesn't know his family history, and grim memories fester in his heart. Anymore, his heart merely pumps blood. He'd like to kill the damn thing and, hopefully, grow a new, more loving one. But how do you kill your nightmares? And what about the stranger who's making damnable claims of fatherhood? Should Eddy kill him, too? It wouldn't be the first time he's killed a man claiming to be his father.
- GenresBook Club
327 pages, Paperback
First published November 28, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
May 11, 2021
One of the more interesting books you shall read as this book has everything. The images of the coast range are certainly vivid and capture the expected mood which is essentially dark in nature. It does have a certain Ken Kesey in it for three obvious reasons. That would be the setting, the mood as the glimmer of hope that lurks in the darkness. I hate to make this pop comparison as it has a thread of "This is US" in it with the obsession of reconciling one's heritage and back ground. In this case it is when you were not necessarily looking for it. The other factor that is similar to Kesey is that one must stick with it to get to where you were going. This is true in the reading of this book as well as the journey of the lead character in this book.
April 7, 2022
Trout Kill has an awful lot going for it: it’s a gift for those for whom “books were a lifetime of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners,” (vi) which is what I’d expect from an author who spent much of his life ladling out literature to starving students.
What makes this novel unique is that it inhabits a world of texts that are almost universally misunderstood by the narrator himself, Eddy Trout. Eddy and his sister, Em, were formed and marked by trauma: their entire world is carved from it. But instead of a release or escape from it, books, words, and images only bring back the horrors of their past and answer none of their questions. Eddy hangs like J. Alfred Prufrock—a fellow literary schizoid—in a gray space where eating a peach might twist the universe up into something unimaginably worse. Which is a feeling Eddy’s wife, Beth, knows too well.
Yet the stories and poems we read to make sense of the world don’t fade away even when they don’t make sense. Like Eddy, we have a hard time forgetting what our high school English teachers tell us. When we can’t make decisions, we ask T.S. Eliot what to do. When an animal suffers, we wonder at one of William Stafford’s verses. When we’re desperate to live we ask Albert Camus how he made it through. And when we find out that the Great Gatsby is nothing more than Gatz the Fraud, well, we feel about as good about it as Eddy does.
Paul Dage has a gift for interweaving the past and present in his stories; ’Nam is as present to Eddy as present-day Milo is, and the first date he met Beth might as well have been yesterday—yet he’s still just as confused by her two decades later. We are marked by the trauma of growing up, and Eddy feels that every day of his life. He becomes a fascinating, painfully sympathetic protagonist—and a selfish, ridiculous figure—as he runs through his life subsisting on one everlasting string of emotion with little logic interrupting his actions. You find yourself engrossed in his life, begging him to just—please—stop! For once. Stop the self-destruction. It feels awfully real. He sympathizes with and is identified by the suffering animals he sees, just as much as his sister is. And the nails Eddy hammers into the tree tell you more about his inner workings than anything Dr. Lund could come up with.
The story asks us to cite our own sources, to discover where we belong, and where we don’t, and to wish, like Eddy, that we didn’t have to care about any of that at all. Eddy’s rush to chaos, his inability to ever take the easy, sensible way out, speaks to his authenticity. Eddy had Mr. Willis teaching senior English, and I had Mr. Dage teaching me, and it turns out that we don’t forget the sources of our ideas, the places we learned there were names for the indescribable feelings we had to eject. This is a book about those texts and how they shape us no matter where we end up.
Eddy’s friend, Ernst, sums it up well: all things will die anyway, but we ought to let them at least “see the stars first” (146). Beginnings and ends, all wrapped up into one.
What makes this novel unique is that it inhabits a world of texts that are almost universally misunderstood by the narrator himself, Eddy Trout. Eddy and his sister, Em, were formed and marked by trauma: their entire world is carved from it. But instead of a release or escape from it, books, words, and images only bring back the horrors of their past and answer none of their questions. Eddy hangs like J. Alfred Prufrock—a fellow literary schizoid—in a gray space where eating a peach might twist the universe up into something unimaginably worse. Which is a feeling Eddy’s wife, Beth, knows too well.
Yet the stories and poems we read to make sense of the world don’t fade away even when they don’t make sense. Like Eddy, we have a hard time forgetting what our high school English teachers tell us. When we can’t make decisions, we ask T.S. Eliot what to do. When an animal suffers, we wonder at one of William Stafford’s verses. When we’re desperate to live we ask Albert Camus how he made it through. And when we find out that the Great Gatsby is nothing more than Gatz the Fraud, well, we feel about as good about it as Eddy does.
Paul Dage has a gift for interweaving the past and present in his stories; ’Nam is as present to Eddy as present-day Milo is, and the first date he met Beth might as well have been yesterday—yet he’s still just as confused by her two decades later. We are marked by the trauma of growing up, and Eddy feels that every day of his life. He becomes a fascinating, painfully sympathetic protagonist—and a selfish, ridiculous figure—as he runs through his life subsisting on one everlasting string of emotion with little logic interrupting his actions. You find yourself engrossed in his life, begging him to just—please—stop! For once. Stop the self-destruction. It feels awfully real. He sympathizes with and is identified by the suffering animals he sees, just as much as his sister is. And the nails Eddy hammers into the tree tell you more about his inner workings than anything Dr. Lund could come up with.
The story asks us to cite our own sources, to discover where we belong, and where we don’t, and to wish, like Eddy, that we didn’t have to care about any of that at all. Eddy’s rush to chaos, his inability to ever take the easy, sensible way out, speaks to his authenticity. Eddy had Mr. Willis teaching senior English, and I had Mr. Dage teaching me, and it turns out that we don’t forget the sources of our ideas, the places we learned there were names for the indescribable feelings we had to eject. This is a book about those texts and how they shape us no matter where we end up.
Eddy’s friend, Ernst, sums it up well: all things will die anyway, but we ought to let them at least “see the stars first” (146). Beginnings and ends, all wrapped up into one.
December 3, 2012
So beautiful!!! There are so many images and scenes that are rendered perfectly...I had to re-read them just to let the poetry soak in. The characters are believable, real, unique and lovable, despite a tendency some have to make unwise, dangerous, or even cruel choices. This is a story that has a tangible, authentic Northwest feel to it. Loved the unexpected twists at the end. It was a great ride and I look forward to reading more from Paul Dage. (FYI: If you easily take offense at "colorful" language, this book will probably make you uncomfortable.)
March 5, 2013
A man with a troubled past suffers a midlife crisis. Some wonderful prose and imagery, an interesting exploration of what it means to love, but the pacing was slow at times. Overall, a fine book; I just didn't connect with the story or characters in a meaningful way.
May 12, 2017
This is a depressing book. It exists somewhere between Ken Kesey and Stephen King. Well written...though it could stand to be longer. I found the vernacular a little jarring at times ('joshing'? Who says that?) and would have liked to know the supporting characters a little more. All in all, a decent read if you want to hate everything and everyone for awhile.
February 10, 2015
Well done Mr. Dage! Sort of a traumatic psychological mess. Interesting story line and setting. There is so many broken pieces that it is a relief that the story didn't end Polly Anna. I'm not sure how far I was in the story when it was apparent that Eddy Trout had a lot of potential, but had been enormously traumatized. But there's this point where he refers to his tour as a sniper in Vietnam as a time when his life made sense and the nightmares stopped, only to return when he went home. Cracked, but a survivor. There was a couple parts I thought could have been written better. Some of the dialogue in a couple scenes seemed off to me. When Eddy is talking to his sister in jail he is trying to change the conversation and doesn't want to hear what she is saying. But it felt a little over done, like it came across as if they were completely deaf to each other. There was a similar dialogue later in the story. On one hand it got the message across, but on the other it seemed unlikely that that would be a real conversation. Also, a couple technical bits... There's Eddy's dead dog being stiff well after the rigor mortis phase and referred to as frozen stiff. Unlikely that the dog would have been actually frozen in the Oregon coast climate... Bodies freezing temp is quite a bit lower than water due to electrolytes and other factors, but I'm probably just being picky here. Also the Jail visitation setup was not really accurate, but here again a picky detail on my part. But all in all an enjoyable read, especially for those that enjoy an off beat tale on the dark fringes of society.
June 27, 2013
Vivid imagery and surprising twists and turns. A story of a troubled man with a darkened heart juxtaposed against the quiet, soft and serene slow life along the Oregon Coast. Enjoyable Read!
June 8, 2013
Lilting an surprising by turns. It was haunting like a forest, but engaging until the final page as well!
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews