About the Book
Nevermind its bravura storytelling. Nevermind its prose and unfolding of character that have to them an often poetic, lovely kind of nihilism, moments of startling depth-first-rate stuff all-Flick is, besides all that, an increasingly rare kind of a first novel, one whose words burn, written by a man with his back up. There's none of that sucking for an "A," here, not from me, from you, from the poobahs. Flick is a book by, for and about those who turn their lives on its head, f-up their lives, doggedly do themselves wrong and don't know why but that it has to do with what they know in their bones and haven't words for, that it's not about what's good and evil, what's right or wrong, that for all our worry over these, heaven is small and hell is large and you don't get to the former by following rules and faith. You get there by having added to the world more poetry than you had stolen from it. Written by a West Point appointee who walked away, got on a bus and became a drifter, a piece of oil patch trash, a highway mucker, a cook, a coal miner, a ranch hand, eventually a tradesman, a stonemason and bricklayer, Flick is an improbable answer for those who read Vonnegut, Kerouac, Hemingway, Henry Miller, too, and wonder what happened to all that, the broad and genuine American voice given original expression every ten, twenty years. Revealingly, Flick was rejected, unread, by one hundred and forty-seven of the better literary agents claiming interest in its like. That Mr. Badyna, an assured and talented writer, could not get one reading from the cultural gatekeepers says something. What it says is open to the interpretation of one's inclinations, but it does say something, and that something likely has to do with what more than a few cultural critics have observed, that across the creative spectrum, across the political one as well, our late decades have seen little other than a recycling and manipulating of pre-existing styles and sensibilities. It was said of Hemingway's early work that he wrote like a man who had never read anything. Something that could be said of the author of Flick, a wholly original work that begins with a curiously off-key, hardboiled telling of two no-accounts at the Greyhound station in Enterprise, Alabama and a consideration of money missing between them, but as the narrative takes the twain up into the hills, to the trailer home of one, the reader soon enough suspects something else is afoot-and it is. It takes a few pages, ten, twenty, thirty, depending on the reader, but soon enough one gets it. A light goes on. The donkey of the book kicks you in the head. This is not a bringing into the literary collective a new styling of outcast. This is a raw voice speaking directly. When, on page 35, the narrator, having endured a nasty bit of matter-of-factly-described abuse at the hands of a fat cop, says, "There was a reason the men's rooms in Greyhound bus stations had a bad aura, and it wasn't paranoia, nor prejudice against the lower class. It was institutional memory. Contrary to the common hypothetical, walls did talk. I wasn't so sure about God and spirits, but the walls, they talked. It was an article of faith among the scum of the earth that the walls would talk." there ought be little doubt what's going on. This is the yelp, the yawp, the modulated bellow of a gut-shot critter. The story, to great effect, is told backwards. The narrator retraces his journey back through a decaying New Orleans, to a Pennsylvania farm, to a New York slum, Wyoming oil fields, New Mexican highways, run-down Seattle, college-town Indiana, to a childhood in a Detroit burning down. The effect is not so much an unpeeling, but an unsettling. There's a hurt coming, a big hurt, a mythic hurt, and there's nothing that can be done about it. Behind the mess and sorrows we make of things, there's a raw longing dangerous to follow, but for some-the rejected, the cursed, the misbegotten and misfit-an irres
About the Author :
Tom Badyna was born and raised in Toledo, Ohio, received a West Point appointment, but went west instead, did this and that, hard to describe. A hundred hegiras, coast to coast-that comes close. By and by, now and again, he returned to Toledo, the University of Toledo, took a creative writing class from Joel Lipman, a poet-prof trailing a hundred fellowships, who told him, four or five weeks in, "I have nothing to teach you." So it was good riddance to all that insufferable sincerity, and two, three years later, Mr. Badyna was six a.m. at the kitchen table of a lunatic woman whose two children, five and seven, waddled out to ask what was for breakfast. He said, "I usually have beer, what about you?" and soon thereafter became a tradesman, a bricklayer and stonemason. Six years he raised the two, and when he had nothing more to teach them, nothing good, he consigned them back to the mad woman and moved on, stacking rock on the shores of the Maumee, the Hudson, the Platte and Poudre, the Columbia, the Red, the Missouri, Upper and Little, the Tennessee, the Ohio and the Mississippi. He lives now, as much as anywhere, in New Orleans. When chance avails, he solo sails blue water on the Greta G.
