Fatboi

 

April 6, 2024

Squalid dreams that gradually became graceful dreams, like riled water clearing. 

Finally opened my Kirkus review, which arrived Monday:

THE FALLS OF THE WYONA

David Brendan Hopes

Red Hen Press (203 pp.)

$10.61 paperback, $10.08 e-book

ISBN: 9781597098939 May 23, 2019

BOOK REVIEW

The love between two teenage boys is threatened by the homophobia of a football-mad town in this plangent romance.

Hopes’ tale follows four friends growing up in an unnamed small town in the North Carolina mountains in the 1940s: gifted athlete Vince Silvano; oddball Tilden Roundtree; everykid narrator Arden Summers; and Glen Copland, a “sissified” St. Louis transplant who stargazes and collects local flora and fauna. The boys roam the sylvan landscape surrounding a 100-foot waterfall on the Wyona River, a gorgeous but treacherous watercourse that is said to kill one every generation. Vince and Glen covertly fall in love as they start Eddie Rickenbacker High School, where Vince becomes the football team’s star quarterback. Unfortunately, the domineering football coach, who likes to toss around homophobic slurs, is Vince’s dad, and when Coach Silvano discovers the relationship, he quashes it by administering a beatdown to Vince. Tensions come to a head when Glen appears at homecoming dance and kisses Vince on the lips. Hopes’ yarn vividly portrays the fervent bond between young boys—camping out, bantering, double-daring each other into crazy stunts by the Falls—with its occasional erotic undertow, and the way it fractures under the pressure of stereotypes and bigotry. His young characters are full of vigor but also experience poignant, tongue-tied confusion over their warring impulses. Hopes’ prose is intense and evocative, infusing nightmarish scenes with a mordant lyricism: “Something that was less like water than everything else was bobbing on the near side of the river, snagged on the roots of a clump of willow…The way the Wyona was treating her, it almost looked like she was alive, lifted up by the waters, then settled gently down.”) The result is a gripping read with an undercurrent of elegiac yearning.

A darkly vibrant coming-of-age novel, richly textured and full of passion.

*

A fair day for gardening. By no means too hot. Bought plants to put in tomorrow, pulled strangling vines out of the hibiscus beds. The wind in the bamboo behind me was especially ghostly. I kept turning around to see who was there. 

Fatboi is back, looking so comical when he tries to conceal his immense self under the tool shed. 

DJ motored down in the chair to vew the garden. It was modest, assuming he’d come back when it was in full glory.