In the one-page afterword to Ray Elliott’s Wild Hands Toward the Sky we’re told: “This novel is a work of fiction.” The redundancy has qualities of overstatement and question-begging and draws more attention than it might have if it didn’t cap a book that at times reads like transcribed and lightly fictionalized oral history. The story is worth telling in either case, but if it’s the latter, not the former, we have a plausible explanation of why important passages seem like records of experience rather than works of imagination.
The narrator, Sedwick, describes several years of his childhood and adolescence, when he copes with the deaths of his father, mother, mother’s suitor, cousin, other friendly adults and Hank Williams. Between funerals, Sedwick dodges compulsory fellatio, smokes discarded cigarette butts, dumps peanuts into his soda and evocatively renders the terrain as well as the tribulations associated with life in the rural Midwest.
There are several superficially colorful characters, the most lovingly drawn of whom is Sedwick’s uncle, “Big.” As a small-town trucking impresario and occasional farmer, Big provides a home for Sedwick and his mother as well as jobs for several of the “fellers” in and around town. Big is one of the few fellers who isn’t a World War II combat veteran; a coin toss decided whether he or Sedwick’s father would enlist. Big stayed home and his brother was killed on Guadalcanal.
The war’s grip on Sedwick’s imagination influences much, including his decisions about whom he’ll listen to. Take, for example, Bechtel, the gasbag country doctor whom Sedwick prefers to disrespect. That is, until he discovers that Bechtel had “... been a Corsair pilot in the Marine Corps during the war and got shot down just off the coast of China”. This information turns Sedwick’s head and buys his full attention to a pompous lecture he otherwise would have scorned.
Indeed, the war is the special character in Wild Hands Toward the Sky, which is in part a paean to the generation that begat the baby boom. Sedwick depicts the dignity as well as the special difficulties of ordinary men who fought through extraordinary world-historic events before returning to small farms and general stores where they tried to resume average lives.
Postwar comedown is captured with much authenticity. The book does not dwell on separate dramatic events as much as it shows how ill effect interweaves with common occurrence: War or no war, the fellers might have had alcohol and nicotine addictions; but add garish memories, personal injury, ongoing effort to suppress what was released for war, and formerly contented men burn down into pessimists or suicides. We see again that combat disrupts the lives of quiet, unexceptional men forever, making what was bucolic seem banal.
But the author isn’t always so deft. His trove of war stories and lessons learned occasionally obtrudes itself. When Sedwick runs away from an invitation to “play” in a barn with some boys who keep trying to place their genitals in his mouth, he is pegged on the back with a pile of cow shit. He thinks out loud:
"I couldn’t win for losing. It was sort of like Andy Utley had told Russ and me about getting shot down on a bombing raid a few months before the end of the war and being captured by the Germans ..."
Perhaps.
In several other instances—not always war-related—the narrative is stretched for something that satisfies the author but saps the story. There’s the scene in which Sedwick’s playmate falls from a bridge. Big rushes to the riverside and helps bundle the boy into the truck of a delivery driver, who abandons his route to cart the injured away to the doctor’s. Big and Sedwick then scramble to the store where Sedwick’s mother works. As Sedwick nervously prepares to tell her about the accident, he launches instead into a seven-paragraph digression about a game of dominoes, the paltry payoff for which is: “Listening to the old men talk when they played forty-two was always real interesting to me, and I’d rather listen to them than do what I was going to have to do...” The cost, however, is complete dissipation of dramatic tension.
Such passages, several awkward sentences and many misspellings (for example, no decision is made about how to spell the name Taggart), show a less than prudent regard for copy editor and proofreader. Some queries or canceling-marks could have cleared up these distractions and left the story’s hard core slightly less overdressed.
- Anthony Telschow