“They make it look effortless.” It’s how we describe the best athletes and actors. Reading anything by Pete Dexter is at once disheartening and inspiring because he makes writing seem effortless. I first read Paris Trout nearly 20 years ago, and tonight I just finished Spooner, having read everything else Dexter in-between, and in the process becoming convinced that he’s the greatest living American novelist, perhaps Mark Twain reincarnated somewhere in Philadelphia. Spooner feels like a continuation of Deadwood (Dexter’s Wild Bill novel) in that both are studies of complicated but understated relationships between men, poignant without being sentimental, and incredibly funny without ever becoming mean-spirited. An early passage, describing the title character’s difficult birth, which coincides with a fire at an old folks’ home across the street:
“It’s a stalemate, then, the first of thousands Spooner will negotiate with the outside world, yet even as visions of stillborn livestock and dead mares percolate like a growling stomach through the tiny band of spectators, and Dr. Woods discreetly leaves the room to refortify from the locked middle drawer of his office desk, and Lily’s sisters, who, sniffing tragedy, have assembled from as far off as Omaha, Nebraska, but are at this moment huddled together at the hallway window to have a smoke and watch for jumpers across the street, Spooner’s mother rolls out of the bed on her own and gains her feet, and in those first vertical moments, with one of her hands clutching a visitor’s chair for balance and the other covering her mouth against the possibility of unpleasant morning breath, she issues Spooner, feet first and the color of an eggplant, the umbilical cord looped around his neck, like a bare little man dropped through the gallows on his way to the next world.”
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