THE MEMORY OF RUNNING •
By Ron McLarty. Viking. 358 pp. $24.95
Meet Smithy Ide, the hero (or, if you prefer, anti-hero) of Ron McLarty's first novel, The Memory of Running. Smithy is 43 years old, 279 pounds and single. He drinks too much and smokes too much. Beyond his work as a factory supervisor, where he inspects action-figure parts to make sure that the legs aren't where the arms should be and vice versa, Smithy's life is pretty much devoid of ambition -- that is, until his parents die in a car accident. This Big Bang in Smithy's life sets both the novel and him in motion.
The novels chapters alternate between Smithy's present and past. In the present, he oversees his parents' double funeral and, while inside their house, finds a letter from the Los Angeles Department of Health revealing that his older sister, Bethany, who disappeared 20 years ago, is dead. Her remains, however, are being held until someone claims them. Drunk and severely out of shape, Smithy hops onto his old Raleigh bicycle, keeps pedaling, and thus embarks on a cross-country journey from East Providence, R.I., to Los Angeles.
In the flashback chapters, Bethany is still alive, but she is hearing voices and disappearing for stretches at a time, sometimes taking off her clothes in public and standing stock-still until a family member comes to retrieve her. Young Smithy adores his sister, and the Ides spend a good deal of their time either tracking down or watching over Bethany. But the voices in her head are clearly winning, and we know it's only a matter of time before she's gone for good. And so the novel progresses: The closer Bethany gets to disappearing for the last time, the closer Smithy in the present gets to Los Angeles.
The story of how The Memory of Running came to be published is legendary. McLarty wrote the novel in the 1980s, but no publisher would even consider it; the audiotape company for which McLarty worked as a voice actor eventually released it as a book-on-tape; Stephen King heard the tape and wrote an article headlined "The Best Book You Can't Read" for Entertainment Weekly; a bidding war ensued; and McLarty, who has also sold film rights, became a wealthy man. More power to him, I say. But now that the book is no longer "The Best Book You Can't Read" -- it has front-table display at my local store -- how good is it?
McLarty clearly cares for Smithy Ide and his sister, so there's a beating heart at the core of the novel. But the book is not without its faults. The weakest parts take place in the present. Smithy's trip across the country on a bicycle quickly suffers the pitfalls of such stories by becoming episodic. Town after town, Smithy meets one madcap character after another -- a ranting priest in Rhode Island who confesses his sins; a nutty 89-year-old artist in Washington Square Park who keeps calling Smithy "fat boy"; a doctor in Indiana who thinks Smithy is trying to exploit a man dying of AIDS. This one-damned-thing-after-another plot's problems are that each episode lacks a larger purpose and the structure becomes predictable. Since any one of these scenes could easily be excised without affecting the novel as a whole, the question becomes, are the scenes entertaining in and of themselves? For many readers they will be, if only for their sheer lunacy and invention, but I rarely believed the characters in them. E.M. Forster rightly said that flat characters are at their best when they are comic, but even flat comic characters need to be credible.
The minor characters aren't the only credibility problem here. Smithy gets shot, he crashes his bicycle at 65 miles per hour, a pick-up truck hits him, and yet he keeps on going. For a character who otherwise resembles Everyman, Smithy defies all laws of physiology. There's no attempt to explain his superhuman resilience when, in truth, the bike ride alone probably would have killed the poor guy, given his general health.
The strongest sections are those in the past when Smithy and his family must deal with the haunted Bethany. This story has more of a significant arc, more purpose, more depth, and McLarty renders a number of genuinely heartbreaking moments -- such as when Bethany takes off all her clothes on a snowy and gray day, stands on one of the girders of a bridge and freezes into one of her poses. "Bethany told me," Smithy recalls, "that if she could stand so even her heart didn't beat against her chest, everything, everywhere, would be all right." As a rowing crew from Brown University passes underneath, Bethany falls from the girder and back-flops into the polluted Providence River. McLarty's attention to details in these scenes is so precise that the reader is brought fully into the moment, unlike the scenes in present-time, where he often sacrifices precision for wackiness.
Despite these complaints, the novel will doubtless find a wide audience, in large part because Smithy Ide is a character readers will root for. They'll root for him because Ron McLarty clearly loves him. My only hope for McLarty's next novel is that all of his characters, small and large, earn that love. •
John McNally, author of "The Book of Ralph," teaches at Wake Forest University.
