Buckeye

Patrick Ryan is a new author to me (though he has written a number of short-story collections and some literature for young adults), but Buckeye is already a well-loved book among early readers, with compelling endorsements from the likes of Ann Patchett and Richard Russo. It’s a gorgeous reading experience which fits right alongside the work of these authors: ordinary lives lived with extraordinary meaning against the backdrop of history; family stories and secrets; love and marriage and complicated relationships; births and deaths in war and peace; all brought together with beautiful writing that urges the reader confidently on through a complex story.

Set in the fictional town of Bonhomie in Ohio in the American Midwest, Buckeye spans the immense social, political, and historical change of the mid-20th century. Cal and Margaret are the novel’s central characters, and the story arc follows their marriages and lives of their children, and as the plot unfolds, so too does a building sense of how small encounters connect us all, determine our paths, seal our fate. While there is a feeling here of the expansiveness of time and the characters’ brief experience of it on Earth, there is also the claustrophobia of surveillance and tension created by the small-town setting, where privacy is a privilege and its lack can stifle the self.

I have no doubt that Buckeye is the kind of book you’ll want to pass around among your friends, urge them to take on holidays when an immersive and involving reading experience is the order of the day, and whose characters you’ll think about as part of your reading life’s repertoire of friends and family.