Running: Difficulty at the Beginning, Book 1

by Keith Maillard

A Globe and Mail Top 100 Pick of 2006 In this, the first volume of Difficulty at the Beginning , John Dupre is a student at Raysburg Military Academy, where his best friend Lyle Ledzinski is training him to be a perfect Socratic A sound mind in a sound body. Together they want to experience all of life athletics, philosophy, beer, the quest for Truth, and most of all, those mysterious creatures that seem to come from another girls. By their junior year they've taken to hitch-hiking around, fired up on Kerouac, James Dean and St. Augustine, and their horizons begin to expand like an endless sunrise. They're out for experience and suffering , and that's just what they're going to get. Written as though on the back of the pages of Gloria (shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, 1999), Running depicts the lives of young men in late-1950s America with humour, pathos, and muscle. Taken on its own or as the prelude to Difficulty at the Beginning, it's a memorable and invigorating piece of writing that shows how the smug, grey culture of the 1950s was shattered forever with three little words.

Genres: Modern

144 pages, Paperback

First published August 6, 2001

About the author

Keith Maillard is the author of fifteen novels, one book of poetry, and two memoirs. He has won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Literary Prize and the Governor General's Literary Awards. The Clarinet Polka was awarded the Creative Arts Prize by the Polish American Historical Association. Dementia Americana won the Gerald Lampert Award in 1995 for the Best First Book of Poetry Published in Canada.

Keith was born and raised in Wheeling, West Virginia, the inspiration for the fictional town of Raysburg which serves as the setting for many of his novels. He has been a musician, a contributor for CBC Radio, a freelance photographer, and a journalist. He teaches in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.

Reviews

[Rico]

The first of a quartet of novels following a young man from his high school days in the late '50s, through the conflagrant '70s.

Maillard is a supple writer who manages to tell this oft-told Boomer tale in a way that's avoids nostalgia or overstatement. His main character, John Dupre, may undergo familiar rights of Boomer passage (discovering philosophy and folk music, questioning his faith) but he's no mere cipher for the times. He's a complex kid with a class-war chip on his shoulder and a secret sexuality that comes into play late in the book, coloring everything that came before. You also get the feeling that Maillard knows this character and his world so intimately that he could write thousands of pages about it all, compellingly . Told in the first person, the story unfolds more like an autobiography than a work of fiction.

Maillard's an expert at describing the sensuousness of adolescence. I mean that almost literally -- he puts into words that youthful feeling that your senses have awakened for the first time. And that it can't last: The book's ecstatic ending coincides with the end of the '50s, loaded with foreshadowing of darker times ahead. I look forward to the next book to see what awaits in the '60s...

[Donna Meredith]

I enjoyed this coming-of-age tale about a young man who feels ambiguous about his sexuality as a child. Set in a fictional town modeled after Wheeling, WV, this novel examines class distinctions.

[Heather]

I would actually rate this 2 1/2 stars. Better than "okay" but I don't think I'll read anything else by him.

[Debs]

I picked this one up for the cover. A story about a young runner during the 1950s.