Review of Peter Ferry's Travel Writing

September 18, 7:28 AMChicago Literary Scene ExaminerRobert Duffer

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Peter Ferry has given novelists an answer to the tired but eternal question “how much of this is true?” The writer can tell the audience member to read Travel Writing, Ferry’s debut novel. Or autobiographical first fiction. Or fictional memoir. Peter Ferry the narrator is very similar to Peter Ferry the 62 year-old retired teacher: both of them finished this novel while on sabbatical. The construct is that Peter Ferry the narrator is teaching his high-school students, some dog-faced, some with multi-hued hair, a lesson in story telling. The author Peter Ferry taught English at Lake Forest High School for 27 years. The story he’s telling is what he could’ve done to prevent the drunk-driving death of a 28-year-old actor, Lisa Kim. The book is dedicated to Lisa Kim and two other real characters, including Peter Ferry the author’s wife, who is Peter Ferry the narrator’s close friend who becomes his true love over the course of the book.

If the construct sounds familiar, or Rothian, its execution is unique. This is not genre-bending pomo navel gazing: this is metamemoir (or is it metafiction?) of the highest order because it focuses not on the writer but on the art of storytelling. Travel Writing (2008), which just came out in paperback and will be the Gapers Block Book Club selection for November, is not just an inquiry into the stories we tell ourselves to create truth, it is a subtle love story and suspenseful amateur detective story. In the year following that fateful rainy night on Sheridan Road when Lisa Kim swerves and skids her car into a light pole, Pete Ferry develops a posthumous obsession with her that takes him to her funeral and into her family circle, who has mistaken him for a lover of the deceased, mercurial beauty. The more he delves into her life, the further he’s taken away from his teaching and out of his relationship of convenience with Lydia. Lydia and Peter have gone along with the relationship—which started as roommates—into middle age and Kim’s death impels in him the need to take adult responsibility for his actions for the first time in his life. Initially, their mutual friends mock his obsession with Kim until he separates from Lydia and turns his friend’s Caroline’s Wrigleyville apartment into a crime scene investigation.

And he’s beginning to uncover that Kim’s death might not have been an accident. The only breaks he takes from his dogged detective work are to complete freelance travel writing assignments that take him as far from Bangkok, and the complicity of young prostitutes with Westerners, up to the borderlands of Canada at Quetico National Park, where Ferry, a guide and a handful of male students are removed from the comforts of civilization and immersed in a soggy week of camping and portaging. Spliced into these travelogues are reminisces of traveling with Lydia and their eccentric expat friend Charlie Duke in Mexico, who’s fondness for gossip is topped only by his penchant for drink. If existing between two places and never being entirely part of one is the forte of the travel writer, so it is for Ferry, split between his obsession for Kim and his fizzling relationship with Lydia. The travel writing takes Ferry to a place he’s avoided, having to make a decision and act on what he wants from the world and himself. It’s not just fine writing that is part of the Ferry meta-memoir; this is where the split narratives dovetail.

Ferry’s writing, much like his protagonist’s quest, is patient and introspective, self-effacing and authentic, prone to deceptively cogent renderings of the exotic and the emotionally complex. Whatever the Ferrys have been teaching his/their students, there’s no doubt that he/them has learned a lot about how to tell an enchanting, essential story.