LatinosUSA

W.W. Norton & Company. 2025. $ 26.99 Hardcover, $14.99 Kindle

Wyatt Tyler is the rookie shortstop of the Brown Bats. On Opening Day Tyler’s line drive hit wins the game. Much later in the novel Tyler suffers an injury at the plate that will likely end his career; Olney Kartheizer, the novel’s third person narrator, too is injured, from a gunshot wound, but recovers. For Olney “nothing keeps its secrets like the future.”  Before being injured on the field, Wyatt, with his keen eye, had a knack for seeing what was coming, for seeing the future; that was part of his talent. Author John Dufresne’s talents are amply displayed as his lets readers know, makes them care, and holds them at bay. Olney and his son Cully are at the heart of the novel’s conflict, in which imagination is a bridge between past and present. 

     Early in the novel Olney finds a photograph of a young man standing beside a Mercury Cougar, with a toy poodle perched on its hood. Olney names the poodle Pierre, the man Buck, and gives him a mother, Verna, and a home in Nacogdoches, Texas. He depicts Buck singing along to Frank Sinatra records. Verna wonders why Buck doesn’t stay living with her, similar to Kat, Cully’s mother, shortly after Cully left home. Dufresne’s imagination is layered and those details tie in to what’s going on in the present. Buck, the imaginary young man who lives alone, makes other appearances as Olney looks for Cully, and thinks in frustration that the closer him comes the further away he drives his son. In his search, Olney is at times with his ex-wife, Kat, and his friend Merielle, with whom he’s romantically linked, and with other flesh and blood characters, who trigger not only his imagination but also his son’s.

      Olney’s past is Spanish Blade, where he and Kat and Cully lived in a small rent house for the first nine years of Cully’s life. The past itself is fixed, but, as Olney says, memories are malleable.  In contrast to his friend Julie, who was raised by indifferent adoptive parents and never knew her biological parents, Olney’s memories of Cully in Spanish Blade are happy. He remembers playing games they invented in Turpentine Park, and riding Cully home in Cully’s red wagon. One memory that foreshadows Cully’s inner conflict is the sadness he felt when his childhood friend Anthony moved with his family from Spanish Blade to Georgia. Cully, the drug-addled young man, doesn’t remember Anthony, doesn’t remember much of what his father remembers. By contrast, Olney’s memories of his own father are happy.

      Two pivotal characters who make the gritty, desperate, and vibrant present tolerable and pleasurable are Mirielle, who is terminally ill and in her latter stages hospitalized, and Samir, a physician who genuinely wants to help patients. They both help Olney look for Cully, and they add tenderness and compassion to these difficult times which comprise the present. So does Robbie, who manages the Dixiewood Motel that Olney stays at, briefly; and Auralee, the clairvoyant Julie and Olney visit. She spends much of her time at her daughter’s grave in the cemetery where Mireille will be buried.

Elbert, Kat’s husband, is another character whose caring is contagious. Kat, like Olney, is anxious about their son. Olney doesn’t want Cully to be in his home, but wants Cully to be in his life.

     Two of Olney’s friends, the Burgesses, Rylan and Taffi are in the ministry. They have a cable access show Olney enjoys, The House of Burgess, in which they appear with Buddy, their son (in reality a ventriloquist’s doll). At one point in the show God’s design is mentioned, and Buddy shows skepticism, similarly to ways Cully is skeptical with his parents.  Buddy, through Rylan, says “infertility,” which greatly upsets Taffi. Unlike Kat and Olney they have no real son. First and foremost Cully is real; his inner conflict drives this novel, with its many arresting scenes involving full realized characters.