Simply Stated - Blogs - No-Obligation Book Club

First of all, I want to thank you for all of your thought-provoking comments. There’s a lot going on in this book, and it’s great reading everyone’s feedback. I’m pleased to tell you that Jonathan Miles will be taking your questions next week, so please post them in the comments area by the end of the day on Monday, January 26.

So . . . getting kidnapped by your mom on your tenth birthday? We knew that there was some deep dysfunction in Bennie’s life and now, sadly, we have more proof. While Bennie yearns for a “normal” Bil Keane Family Circus life and a horse for his birthday, what he gets instead is his mom in one of her “manic episodes” and an unsettling road trip to New Mexico.

In the scenes leading up to that trip, Miles’s descriptions are just wonderful. I loved the passage where Bennie talks about the little comic-reading ritual that he has with his dad and how his father so wanted amuse his mother: “For him, this was a study—a concerted effort to break the code of funny, and perhaps make her laugh. Dagwood Bumstead was his Cyrano, his tutor in romance.” It just reminds you what a mismatched couple his parents were, so far away from role models of a happy couple.

The sections where Miles writes about Bennie’s two childhood obsessions—horses and nuclear annihilation—were brilliant and set the stage for the next series of events. Bennie speaks of his mother’s brutal cunning, and we see evidence of it as she tricks him into the umpteenth big escape. She wants out so that she can have time to paint, but she gets her child with the promise of a horse. It’s all Bennie needs to hear: “The horsemen of the apocalypse would not find me without a steed.” Of course, Bennie later realizes how she has twisted things: “By weaving my desires into hers, by brushing my horses into her chimeric landscape, she made me an accomplice. Why were we abandoning my father? Because he was different than us.”

What struck me was how a young Bennie was so quickly thrown into the role of the adult, the one in charge. He says that he found it disturbing that his mother spoke to him as if he were a contemporary. And when the road trip ends with their sputtering car, Bennie is really forced to be the adult. He is the one who has to deal with men who come to their aid (while his mother is afraid she’ll be scalped), and Bennie is the one who has to call his father to help bail them out. It’s as though responsibility is too much for the adult Bennie, it’s too hard to be in on control. I imagine the drinking helped him blur the lines. What impression do you think all of this made on him?

There was another passage that stood out to me, and I wonder if anyone else felt the same way. When Bennie’s mom tells him that the probability of a nuclear attack in New Mexico would be much less than in New Orleans, he finds the news weirdly disappointing. “For all my nightsweats about nuclear attack, there was something mesmerizing and exciting about it as well, something that felt the way a dangerous bout of lust would strike me later in life—an amalgam of dread and desire that made my heart race…. I wanted to worry about it.” It seems to explain his need for drama and says quite a bit about his personality.

The scene where his father shows up and finally gives him the toy horse for his birthday is heartbreaking. And so is Bennie’s assessment of the landscape as they are ready to make the ride home from New Mexico: “It was what I imagined the world would look like in the aftermath of a nuclear war.” This is also the portion of the book where Bennie’s thoughts on marriage are shared when he talks about his mother’s constant attempts at escape and marriage as “an awful game of hide-and-go-seek.” It’s not hard to see why Bennie screws up relationships—look what he’s been exposed to.

I was glad to see that Bennie properly addressed his feelings about his father’s death. Certainly what Bennie says about his passing—“all I could think of was that he’d gotten out”—says a lot about him, but I was relieved that he came back to the discussion.

Once again, toward the end of this section, I was struck by how Miles is able to make us laugh in otherwise terrible moments: Bennie back in his empty apartment fascinated by what Stella took and what she left behind (“Was life with me so terrible that she would abandon all her shoes?”). And I cracked up when Bennie, even in the midst of desperation, still manages to roll his eyes at their neighbor Robbie’s music choices (Anne Murray!). But I was also moved by the details. When does Bennie truly fall apart? When he sees a tiny poop stain on his daughter’s changing table. In fact, those are often the things that really get to us, the tiny details of something that we’ve lost.

I’m starting to feel crazy trapped in O’Hare with Bennie; it’s conjuring up all of my bad travel flashbacks! I want him to get out of there soon. I will wrap up our discussion early next week. How do you see this all ending? I’m looking forward to finishing up—the suspense is killing me.

—Suzanne Rust

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