The Daily Review, Thursday, Oct. 15
Dunce Moves Pete Dexter
Pete Dexter’s latest novel follows the ill-advised antics of a man not gifted with a strong intellect who manages to thrive nonetheless
Warren Spooner, the eponymous hero of Pete Dexter’s richly comic new novel, is a very naughty boy. Raised in Kennedy-era Georgia, he manages to get himself kicked out of kindergarten for sprouting a precocious erection every time he draws close to his pretty young teacher. Soon after his expulsion, he begins to terrorize his sleepy town by sneaking into neighbors’houses at night and urinating into the shoes of unsuspecting owners. And then there’s the incident where he plants himself on a teeming colony of fire ants, just to see how it feels. People around him can be forgiven for suspecting nothing good will come of the boy.
But Spooner discovers in his teens that he has a gift for something other than sociopathic mayhem – he can throw a baseball. He is drafted into the big leagues, only to have his elbow disintegrate before he can strike it rich. After a few shiftless years in door-to-door sales and a busted marriage in Florida, he winds up in Philadelphia, where an auspicious combination of talent and incompetence lands him a job as a tabloid columnist. He also starts writing novels that share plots and even titles with the early work of one Pete Dexter, who also worked for a spell as a newspaper columnist in Philadelphia. The novel ends with Spooner living on an island in Washington State, where he proves himself singularly unwilling to go gentle into that good night. And that’s about it. Unlike the best of Dexter’s earlier novels, Brotherly Love, The Paperboy and the National Book Award-winning Paris Trout, Spooner relies more on tone and character than a surging plot to work its magic.
With Warren Spooner, Dexter has just the hero to carry this load. Anarchic, stubborn, befuddled and shrewd, he wins over the reader from the moment he is born. Although each of his siblings proves to be intellectually gifted, Spooner is deemed a dunce by most everyone, including himself. “He had a certain curiosity about how that might feel, to be intelligent, but didn’t dwell on it when it didn’t come.” Women seem particularly down on him, notably his first wife, Honey, who, “like so many women of Spooner’s acquaintance … looked at him one day and seemed to come all at once to her senses. It was always the same, like they’d wandered into a pet store and almost bought a monkey.” And yet Spooner somehow manages to thrive, perhaps because he lives in a world where so many smart people seem intent on cornering the market in stupidity.
Dexter structures his story upon a series of deftly drawn set pieces. One of the best involves a high-school football coach named Evelyn Tinker, a man who manages to combine pig ignorance and boundless self-confidence in such a perfect balance that it’s a wonder he is not a Republican congressman. Like so many coaches, he’s fond of exhorting his players to give more than 100 per cent, and sticks stubbornly to his guns when challenged by a pie-chart-drawing geometry teacher. “What I’m trying to instill in these individuals is to want a bigger pie,” the coach explains, “which the only way to get it is to give a hundred and twenty per cent.”
Equally captivating is Harry Faint, a heavyweight boxer with an unfortunate name whose main pugilistic skill is the ability to take a punch. He endures such a pounding after his arrival in Philadelphia from the wilds in Texas that “it is possible that in the history of the democracy no citizen has ever had his nose broken by so many different people in one week.” Spooner meets him, in all places, at a literary luncheon honouring Margaret Truman, the daughter of the former president whose attempt at novel writing proves as inept as her earlier career as an opera singer. “The sentences rolled out of Mrs. Truman, bloodless and arthritic, one after another, more dangling fancies stuck to the ends than a French tickler.”
It is Harry who accompanies Spooner on his most perilous adventure, an ill-advised but altogether characteristic trek to a South Philadelphia bar to confront the enraged family of a small-time drug dealer Spooner insulted in his column. Spooner barely survives the ensuing riot, though any notion that he has learned his lesson is put to rest in the novel’s final chapters, as he once again enters combat, this time with an obnoxious neighbour. Their prolonged battle, both funny and menacing, is a perfect finale for this fine novel, proving that, although Spooner may be getting old, when it comes to riling people up he is still willing to give it 120 per cent.
