Douglas Bauer

To start, I should probably confess that I am a longtime fan of Douglas Bauer's work, having read his PRAIRIE CITY, IOWA; THE BOOK OF FAMOUS IOWANS; and WHAT HAPPENS NEXT. And now we have his latest, THE BECKONING WORLD, a quietly beautiful character-driven novel that begins with the 1918 influenza pandemic and its far-reaching effects on an Iowa farm family, and ends with that same family thirty years later in the post-war years. The main protagonists here are Earl Dunham and his son Henry, but other characters are equally important - Earl's wife, Emily; his in-laws Lottie and Frank 'Rooster' Marchand; and the very real people, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

Ruth and Gehrig cross paths with Earl and Henry when they pass through Iowa on a fall barnstorming tour, playing local baseball teams along the way. Earl is pitching for the home team, and is on the very edge of striking out the Babe, when nine year-old Henry runs onto the field, followed by an unruly crowd of fans that threatens to trample him, but he is scooped up and rescued by Gehrig. In a delightful sequence of events, Earl and Henry are invited to accompany the two stars as they continue their tour west, traveling in plush Pullman accommodations. Along the way, we learn more of all of their stories, and meet a number of other colorful characters too.

But to my mind the most powerful element of this novel is the way in which Bauer takes us inside the minds of his characters, offering their most private thoughts in a variety of circumstances.

I'm not going to say any more. If you like deeply felt, fully realized characters, then you will love this book. I did. My very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (altro)

This ones been sitting on my shelf for several years, too darn long. What was I waiting for? Douglas Bauer's THE BOOK OF FAMOUS IOWANS (1997) is a classic coming-of-age story, crafted by a master writer. It is narrated by a mature, thrice-married Will Vaughn, looking back at his small-town Iowa childhood, especially 1957, a pivotal year for him, when he was just eleven. It was the summer of his mother's discontent, when "she took up with Bobby Markum," a local baseball hero, whom Will idolized. Forty years later Will is still trying to understand how his beloved and beautiful young mother, Leanne, could have simply left him - and his father, Lewis. He re-examines what he knew of his parents' first meeting and courtship near an Air Force base in Cheyenne where his father was an aircraft mechanic and his mother was a singer in a local club, and how they married hurriedly before returning to Iowa where his father took over the family farm. He considers how his family was different from their mostly Dutch Reform neighbors - non-believers - exemplified in his crusty, widowed grandmother, who lives upstairs in the family farmhouse. The characters here are all finely drawn and fully realized, from the boy Will to his parents and grandmother, and Bobby Markum. There's even a neighbor kid, Will's friend, who is a devout believer but curses like a sailor. Made me laugh out loud. Mostly though, this is a dead serious story about a boy's accelerated journey into an adult world he's not quite ready for, and it is a heartbreaking trip.

I was caught up in the Vaughn family's story from page one. It's that kind of book. My very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (altro)

In one brief scene in Douglas Bauer’s majestic debut, "Dexterity," a secondary character recalls her mother losing track of a sharp knife in sudsy dishwater. She cuts her finger on it, the suds become pink, and she eventually suffers permanent nerve damage, even after her husband tells her such cuts are never as severe as they first seem. This is a perfect symbol of the poor chances waiting in life for "Dexterity’s" characters: they treat each other with a toxic combination of self-centeredness, verbal bullying, and violence.

In an Upstate New York village not far from the Hudson River, Ed King’s young wife Ramona turns her back on her abusive husband and the infant son she has not learned to love, and walks off – literally. She heads down the highway on foot, in her flip flops. The village focuses on Ed’s troubles, and this focus is exceedingly uncomfortable for him. For Ed is his generation’s main bully, and knows the town and its culture of gossip and scandal better than anyone. When he enters the crosshairs of the town’s attention it makes him paranoid, delusional, and ever more violent.

"Dexterity" exhibits the mental states and thought processes of its main antagonists Ed and Ramona – that is its main calling and raison d’être. Mr. Bauer convinces us of these internal processes so completely – his triumph here is utter and complete. We can only wonder at such assurance in a debut work of fiction.

This was a bit of a slog for me. The relationships between the townspeople rest on old habits of invective and falsehood; the relationships between individuals and their own memories and consciences rest on much the same. The caring or giving individual is rare – Ramona meets a few after she gets out of town – and there is a tension in the possibility of Ed going in search and finding Ramona. Overall, however, this is a very commendable entry. It sets forth a magisterial justice for us to reflect on, and engages us with its exact and dispassionate eye for the town’s endemic emotional stuntedness.

But chiefly and particularly, we witness the tortured considerations of Ed and Ramona, whose marriage and psyches are cracked and trampled. This I highly recommend, and I’m very glad I found this author.

http://bassoprofundo1.blogspot.com/2014/11/dexterity-by-douglas-bauer.html… (altro)

Douglas Bauer's WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? is a beautifully written collection of essays which thoughtfully considers the certainty of one's own mortality. After the rather unexpected death of his 87 year-old widowed mother, Bauer found himself forced to confront the realities of his own aging body - cataracts, tachycardia, and a painfully problematic knee. The cataract surgery is described in wincingly excruciating detail in "It's Time." The racing and irregular heartbeat is handled by wearing a portable monitoring device and drugs - for the present. The knee, despite its complete absence of cushioning cartiledge, does not yet require replacemnt, but certainly will at some later date. How the knee was first injured is, Bauer tells his orthopedist,"a long story." Not so terribly long, actually. Pared down to less than fifteen pages in "Hoss's Knee," it involves high school footbal, a cheerleader, and, a bit later, a drunken fraternity party and a failed army induction physical at the height of the Vietnam era. That's a lot of pretty important stuff. I mean, think about how different his life might have been had he passed that physical. For one thing, it might have been a lot shorter. That knee though.

These things aside, at the heart of this book is an even-handed look at his mother's long life and a hard look at his parents' mystifying marriage, which lasted for over fifty years. Studying old photos of his parents, he marvels at their happy faces from the early years of their courtship and marriage, particularly from the war years when they lived in Cheyenne, where his father was stationed with the army as a dental technician, and where the author was born. He remembers the fond tone his mother's voice always took on when she talked of those years. And then he juxtaposes that tone and those photos against what he remembers of growing up in a tense house where his mother became increasingly bitter and critical of his easy-going farmer father. How frustrated she must have been living for years as non-paying "tenants" in her in-laws' house. And there is more, about his mother's constant and nitpicking drive for neatness and order, an obvious attempt to put behind her own upbringing in a slovenly poverty-stricken home full of rowdy siblings and a mean drunk of a father, a coal-miner. And how finally, finding her own husband wanting in ambition, she began to belittle and demean him, driving him deeper and deeper into an ever-increasing sullen silence. Bauer, trying hard to understand, says -

"But here's the thing: in the last few years of my mother's life, something like that buoying Cheyenne lightness came into her voice when she spoke of him. Her tone grew warm. Her descriptions were fond. His foibles were recast, becoming ingrained quirks and not the behavior that had maddened her for decades ... Her voice had found that Cheyenne timbre. She seemed wholly untroubled when she invoked his name, except for her sadness that he was gone."

In essence then, Bauer is attempting to understand his mother as a whole and complex human being, which is of course no easy task when one considers all of the baggage that comes with the particular roles of mother and son. But damned if he doesn't do one hell of a job in making Maudie Evans Bauer come to life, almost as if she were a character in a Cather novel. And he does the same thing, albeit to a lesser degree, with his grandparents and other family members.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? is then, obviously, a loving, if painfully objective, look at his parents' long lives and often-troubled marriage. But it's also a memoir, by a man who long ago left the farm to become a man of ideas, a teacher and a writer. But Bauer continues to have mixed feelings about his Iowa roots, feelings he's still trying to sort out, perhaps best exemplified by these lines -

"... to find the balance: how much Iowa to let in and how much to keep out ... As a life and its conundrum, it's one I know about."

This is a book I will be thinking about for a long time. I recommend it very highly.… (altro)