Review of Buckeye by Patrick Ryan

Patrick Ryan's literary fiction traces decades of the messy, poignant lives of two families shaped by uncompromising societal expectations who work to connect across secrets, upended traditional roles, shocking loss, and unanticipated love.

The wisdom that comes with age was needling, he found, because it brought the clarity of hindsight without the means to change anything.

In Patrick Ryan's literary fiction title Buckeye, which begins before World War II and spans to the end of the twentieth century, we begin with the story of a young couple in Bonhomie, Ohio, as they meet, fall in love, build a family, and struggle to stay connected.

Young wife Becky Jenkins is fearlessly unconcerned with others' opinions. Since a young age she has been able to contact the dead, and she holds regular seances to help those who are worrying and suffering from loss. Her husband Cal is, disappointingly to him, unable to serve in the war due to congenital factors causing one leg to be shorter than the other. Now he's working at his father-in-law's hardware store and is bewildered about how to live a life worth living, feeling helplessly buoyed along by others' interests and concerns.

The day the news of the Allied victory is announced, Margaret Salt enters their lives. Overcome with relief at the radio report, she passionately kisses Cal, a stranger, then strides away. But her general relief turns to fear when she learns that her husband, serving out of harm's way on a cargo ship, might have been a casualty of war after all. But she and Cal feel a link that draws them together and complicates everything.

The book's focus shifts significantly to Margaret and her hidden life, tracking back to the origins of her relationship with her husband Felix, to Felix's point of view and pivotal life moments, and then to the intersections of the lives of the two couples.

But while significant page time is spent on Margaret's life and the factors that shaped her, she is ultimately unknown even to herself, feeling incapable of deep emotional connection, commitment, or working through messiness. This was unsatisfying to me as a reader but pivotal to the plot.

An aspect that is ever-present and essential to the shaping of each of the main characters are the female and male roles in society, family, and marriage in the times in which they lived--and their heartbreaking lack of options when they consider or attempt to depart from the norms or typical roles of the era.

Women had the babies, and men, if they felt like it, began to distance themselves the moment they pulled out. Because they had to go to a wife, or to work, or to war, or to that secret place of stoic brooding all men were given the key to at birth. Had any mother ever had the time to stoically brood?

Ryan sometimes offers what feel more like lists of historical, societal events than developed factors; these set the stage of time and place and establish some of the outside influences on our characters as years pass. The book's pacing (appropriately, but sometimes painfully) flags for a time as our protagonists spend months and years suffering in their own worlds, trodden down by yet apart from the swirling events around them, feeling they are in stasis, hiding their true selves, and just trying to keep getting up every day.

Relationships shift, unlikely ties grow stronger, characters grow apart and find their way back together, and what seemed like indelible relationships fall away as Buckeye stretches across decades of life, choices, and loss.

Forgiveness wasn't so great if you were the forgiver, Becky discovered. Forgiveness was supposed to be the high road, but it was low and bumpy--and long.

The unexpected, unorthodox, secret-based links between the two families shape the story (with a supporting cast made up of an older generation steeped in habit and old-fashioned values yet poignantly capable of change and growth). The found-family messiness was a highlight of the novel; the caring that emerges due to and among heartbreaking splits is particularly powerful.

Wasn't it a fair measure of a person, what they did with their mistakes? How they managed to stumble into some of the right steps, after taking all the wrong ones?

Resolutions aren't always possible, and characters don't magically recreate themselves or invariably meet their full potentials, but Buckeye offers quiet peace after lives lived across eras and in the wake of mistakes, missteps, generous grace, and the gift of others' devotion.

I received a prepublication version of this title, which was published September 2, courtesy of NetGalley and Random House.

More from This Author

Patrick Ryan is also the author of The Dream Life of Astronauts, Send Me, and young adult novels.

For more family stories you might like, please check out the Bossy reviews at this link.