“Cal Jenkins was born in the spring of 1920 with one leg shorter than the other.” So begins Buckeye, Patrick Ryan’s ambitious and engrossing debut novel. From that single detail, Ryan spins a story that ripples across two Ohio families and several generations, charting how wars, depressions, political upheavals and suburban booms insinuate themselves into ordinary lives. The scope is broad but the attention is forensic: history as it trickles into kitchens, marriage beds and funeral parlours.
Life in the fictional town of Bonhomie is at once comforting and claustrophobic. Deemed unfit for military service due to his leg, Cal Jenkins stays in his hometown and marries Becky, the first girl he goes on a date with. But Becky is no ordinary housewife. She can speak with the dead, a gift that neighbours begin to treat as a civic service when the war swallows their sons and brothers.
Becky is the novel’s heart, a force for compassion and connection. On hearing of Hiroshima, she wonders: “What did they do, suddenly, without their lives? Nothing, perhaps ... the land of the living was a fractured and smouldering place at the moment, and it was leaking heavily into the other side.” In lines like these, Ryan shifts the vast abstractions of history into the intimate, fractured consciousness of its witnesses.
The novel’s more earthly drama arrives in the form of Margaret Salt, whose brief affair with Cal detonates slowly but decisively, sending tremors down the generations. It’s an affair plot, but not at all melodramatic; Ryan is more interested in how secrecy stagnates in small communities, how shame and desire become communal burdens.
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Everyone in Buckeye drags a past behind them, and Ryan is exquisite at showing how those pasts resurface: childhood slights, wartime compromises, unsatisfied hungers. What results is a tightly-wound plot built out of an accumulation of human choices, mistakes and loyalties.
Buckeye is a family saga, a ghost story, an affair novel and a social history rolled into one. Above all, it is an investigation into how ordinary lives absorb the shocks of a violent century. At nearly 450 pages, it never slackens: the novel is both ambitious in scope and startlingly nimble, a story that tackles dark times with lightness and compassion.
