All you need to do before you read Pike, Benjamin Whitmer's first novel, is prepare yourself to avoid people for a few weeks after you finish. It’ll leave you surly. And strangely elated, maybe even exalted. As if you’d been made privy to some root human dream that, once witnessed – in a cavernous old theatre with smokers in the balcony and bottles rolling in the aisles – renders post-millennial life impossible. “A dream,” muses one of Whitmer’s characters, “is a sausage mill you feed your life into.” So too this novel. Nor will you be able to explain your mood to your friends, let alone the staying power of this relentlessly visceral book, another title in the outstanding Switchblade imprint from PM Press. The surliness will pass. That is, until you miss Douglas Pike’s gruff company -- and Whitmer's -- enough to read the thing again.
The set-up is straightforward. A dirty Cincinnati cop named Derrick leaves a race riot in his wake as he flees to Pike’s town, Nanticonte (sometimes spelled Nanticote). Meanwhile, Pike’s estranged daughter, Sarah, a Cincinnati hooker and junkie, has died. Her friend, Dana (same work, same habit) drags Wendy, Sarah’s thirteen-year-old daughter, to a café to meet her middle-aged grandfather. Dana dumps the kid on Pike and blows Nanticonte. Pike’s in the business of hanging drywall part-time, while his full-time gig is regret for the horrific, self-inflicted nightmare that is his past. He hardly knows what to do with Wendy and the kitten she keeps under her coat, named Monster, but he seems grateful enough for the chance to take her in. Wendy’s mouth proves as sharp as Monster’s teeth, and Pike’s young partner, Rory, an exiled Appalachian and barroom boxer with a devastating past of his own, takes the bite of her sarcasm tolerably well. In a lesser writer’s hands, the novel would play out as a story of redemption for Pike, and of love-they-never-had for Wendy and Rory. But you get the feeling that Whitmer’s heard that story a hundred times and never did buy it. He’s got a more unsettling tale to tell.
So... Pike and Rory promptly abandon Wendy and truck off, guns loaded, to Cincinnati, in order to get the lowdown on Sarah’s death. Immediately the trip goes wrong, though Pike doesn’t think so – the grislier things get, the more fitting an outlet they become for his mammoth regret. If he’s a man wanting repair, he just as often seems a man who has found a really, really good excuse to wreak havoc. Which in turn inspires more regret. They pick up a junkie sidekick named Bogie (sometimes spelled Bogey) and zigzag from character to character -- each cameo original, hilarious, a little moe eccentric or disturbed or both than the last -- on the ‘Nati’s lurid post-workingclass streets, searching for… well, for Dana. They lose Bogie and keep picking up clues about Derrick who, lurking in and around Nanticonte, seems to be circling Wendy. Pike wants to know why. And every time Pike wants to know why, more loss and violence ensue, as bizarrely inevitable as it is rivetingly described.
With its alliterative, driven prose, with the largesse of its characters’ hungers, with its dark humor and its country-in-the-city’s-shadow setting, probably no book will remind you more of Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree. If Pike is a bit like Sut, and Rory’s a more amiable version of Red Callahan, Bogie could be a distant cousin to Gene Harrogate. And, just as with Buddy Suttree, you keep wishing that Pike would do first what he does last. But… Pike has his reasons:
“’I’ve done things here that created a kind of gravity,’ he says slowly. ‘Having the right to move away would be like having the right to claim not to have done them in the first place.’”
And Pike is entirely its own book. As the novel gains momentum like a pickup truck twisting down a mountain road, the short chapters open onto scenes that both displace and compel the reader. There’s enough chain-smoking and drinking-while-driving-a-Monte-Carlo to convince you the book could be set in the mid-seventies, when its author was about five. No laptops or smart phones. The novel’s single episode of physical affection – a man and woman necking in a bar alley -- is laid to waste within paragraphs, as wrenchingly as if loss followed intimacy like cause and effect. A solitary sex scene, between hooker and pimp, bears out the same law. The chief locale, outside of James Wright’s poetry, is a region unique in print. Whitmer can’t shorthand his way along with mere references to street corners, the way New York novelists so often do (believing, no doubt, that the rest of us understand the implications of this number and that avenue); he has to do a writer’s work of describing this place, evoking it, a burden under which he thrives.
“The stars burst like frozen collisions against the black of the night, and the moon full and brittle white, like a disk of ice, as though you could breathe on it and melt it into the dark.”
Whitmer proves a master of the Raymond Chandler simile, the Philip Marlowe phrase:
“…their faces like looking-glasses into their appetites.”
“You ain’t a cop. You’re a dumb [expletive] thug who wandered into a job with a pension.”
“…windows winking at the rising sparks as if gleeful at seeing the city on fire.”
“The law’s never enough and it’s always too much.”
“His face sagging like a sail short of wind.”
“South Dakota…. Hell with the flames put out.”
“Derrick’s voice sounds like ashes being scraped out of a metal bucket.”
Regrettably – the operative word in Pike – there are also sentences like this one: “She comes through the door leading with her greasy pelvis, wearing a pink winter coat that looks to have been run over by a garbage truck.” The quick description of the coat is terrific, as is her walking pelvis-first. But Whitmer can’t see her actual pelvis any better than we can, and so whence the “greasy”? Similarly, early on, Derrick is described as “crunching through the slick snow” which is confusing. If Whitmer means the “ice-crusted snow,” he might as well say so, because “slick” connotes smooth -- not the deep, refrozen snow that crepitates underfoot.
Enough nitpicking: you’d rather have a writer like Whitmer try a little too hard once in a while than err on the other side. Because when he hits the mark, he hits it dead center:
“The truck winds through the mountains like an undercurrent through the ocean."
And again, near the end, with Pike and Wendy on the run through the plains of West Texas:
“It’s a landscape meant to remind you that everyone has a hollow feeling they can’t handle. That the only risk to living your life is not to destroy yourself trying to shake it.”
Pike is like that landscape. The hero's regret can’t be shaken off. It has to be borne. Benjamin Whitmer makes this most difficult work a terrible and funny and enthralling dream. If that dream renders our life impossible for a week or two, so be it. When you can talk again, tell your friends.
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