Flick

by T.D. Badyna

Some novels are written as if from a gimmick, a literary conceit, a selling pitch, and some are written because the author, Ancient Mariner-like, has no choice. FLICK is of the latter type and a drifter’s tale, but nevermind all that. The author seems, for the most part, unaware of either literary conventions or that he is whole-cloth reconceiving that disappearing American archetype. Written in a broad and genuine and distinctively American voice, it is apparent from the first few pages that what’s driving the first-person narrative is a great moral complexity: Each of the dozen or so significant characters is a damaged soul, damaged by childhood, by the culture, by others or by him- or herself, but all would anyway do good in the world. They would be good friends or wives or lovers or workers or, even, citizens, but the damage inside leaves them with no feel for being so. They try, but they’re clumsy at it and make a mess of their lives and hearts and right and wrong – and how to judge, then, not so much them, but the moral commonplaces of which we’re so certain? With bravura storytelling, the thirty-one chapters are chronologically backwards. Beginning with the end of a quixotic adventure in the hills of Alabama, the novel becomes structurally a picaresque Bildungsroman. The episodes, often erotically charged, are related by an ever-younger narrator, as the story crosses the continent from a decaying New Orleans, to a Pennsylvania farm, a New York slum, Wyoming oil fields, construction sites in the New Mexican desert, the Big Sur coast, run-down Seattle, college-town Indiana, to a childhood in a Detroit burning down. With several characters recurring across chapters, the effect is not so much an unpeeling, but an unsettling. There’s a hurt coming, a big hurt, a mythic hurt, and, going backwards, there’s nothing that can be done about it, and if some of this might be, for some, hard, difficult to read, what the book is doing is making the moral case for those who turn their lives on its head, f-up their lives, doggedly do themselves wrong and don’t know why but that it has to do with what they know in their bones and haven’t words for, that it’s not about what’s good and evil, what’s right or wrong, that for all our worry over these, heaven is small and hell is large and you don’t get to the former by following rules and faith. You get there by having added to the world more poetry than you had stolen from it

386 pages, Paperback

First published June 17, 2012

About the author

T.D. Badyna was born in Toledo, Ohio, received a West Point appointment, but went west instead, worked for six years on ranches, in kitchens, oil fields, coal mines, construction sites and at age twenty-four gave education a go, but neither he nor the program stuck, and he went on to earn his keep as a technical writer, then a journalist, published a few poems, stories, so on – none of which stuck either, and he became a tradesman, a journeyman bricklayer and stonemason, working seven years with a team of masonry artists, two for Ohio Building Restoration, a year in Appalachia solo rebuilding an 18th century stone farmhouse, so on, New York City to Portland, Oregon, Long Island’ east end to Montana’s high plains. He lays brick and stone still, lives, as much as anywhere, in New Orleans, Louisiana. Flick is his first novel.

Reviews

[T.D. Badyna · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took seven drafts, but I got on paper more than what I'd set out to.