2 hours ago
1
By Helen Elliott
September 17, 2025 — 12.00pm
FICTION
Buckeye
Patrick Ryan
Bloomsbury, $32.99
In the spring of 1920 Cal Jenkins is born in the town of Bonhomie (population 6000), Ohio. Cal is a perfect baby, although one leg is two inches shorter than the other. “Just two inches shorter, but that was enough to make plenty of things difficult.” Things like riding a bike might take twice as long, but Cal has been told by a boy at school that his leg makes him unique in God’s eyes, so he must be he singled out for special things. When Cal asks what his special thing was the boy shrugs and replies that Cal must “wait and see”. Code for life?
That the United States is not New York might arrive as a slight and entirely forgivable shock – we’re all time-pressed and, you know, thinking takes time. I’d never heard of Patrick Ryan until last week, but he’s in that league of non-New Yorkers I like reading: Anne Tyler, Elizabeth Strout, Patrick de Witt, Lorrie Moore, Barbara Kingsolver etc. Last century, accurately called The American Century as it methodically colonised the world, owed much to the contained and confident towns of the Midwest. Their confidence had to do with an intact sense of who they were, where they came from and expectations about who they could be. These towns also shaped those creative people who just wanted to get out, to make it in New York (and never return) but most of these towns were inhabited and maintained by the more ordinary. More ordinary doesn’t mean less interesting. Ryan is very, very good about the nuances of being ordinary.
The opening page of Buckeye is an artful precis of how several lives framed by history and geography will unfold, mainly in Ohio, in the following 452 pages. The art of Patrick Ryan is not just in shading character but in his observation and accretion of the fractional delicacies that create a now long-ago world in which his characters make their lives within – or against? – the implacable historical process.
Cal grows up in the American world between the wars, a time when the prairies were real in many living memories, that belongs as much to the present as to the past narrated by Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Dreiser, etc (again). “Buckeye” is the fond term for those who come from Ohio. In quiet American towns, ordinary people with names that identified a heritage other than the place they saw as home got on with their lives and the century steadily, not quite consciously, hummed itself into American.
Patrick Ryan captures the nuances of being ordinary.
Ryan repaints, reconfigures so that the best of those last-century writers remain while the mustiness of their pages evaporates. He’s some sort of laid-back magician. Cal’s leg probably saved him from being killed in the Second World War. He tried to enlist, but the forces didn’t want a man with an odd leg. They did want the boy who told Cal he was special, though. He was killed in Germany. Just like that; re-loading his rifle and reciting The Lord’s Prayer, and then he was dead. Cal, at the time was working in a cement factory and falling in love with an enchantingly odd girl called Becky Hanover whose father owns the local hardware store. Who could not love Becky Hanover?
It’s right there in the basement of his father-in-law’s store that a red-headed woman kisses Cal. She’s lived in Bonhomie for six years, she says, and has never been in his shop. Of course Cal loves Becky, of course he loves his young son, Skip, of course he is grateful to his in-laws for this chance in life beyond the cement factory, but he can’t stop thinking about that kiss, about the exceptional woman. It was an impulse, that’s all. He knows this because it was the day in May when peace was declared in Europe, the day the world was going to filter itself back into order. The woman had stepped into the shop to listen to Truman announcing the armistice on the radio. Becky. A kiss. Truman. A definition of a life?
The red-headed woman is Margaret, an orphan, a beautiful disrupter stepping out of Nowhere and aiming to be Somewhere. But she has no ground beneath her feet, beauty always transient, is her one magnificent gift. She is married to Felix who is about to return from several years away as a naval officer. When he was away, Felix and another young man fell deeply in love and Felix has to go on living his false life when his lover is killed. It is Becky, who has an uncanny gift for communicating with the dead, who is most helpful.
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The novel follows the lives of these two couples and their sons, Skip and Tom. When Margaret kisses Cal in the backroom of the hardware Tom doesn’t exist, although Skip is a toddler at home with his mother and grandfather. The boys are destined to become great friends, their fates already aligned as a consequence of the astonishing kiss.
Does this all sound too complicated? Well, it is but, in the quiet unfolding and unveiling of these lives there is a particular low-key enchantment. What stamina it takes to live. What insight Patrick Ryan has into exactly this, ordinary stamina.
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