Ohio

by Stephen Markley
Feb 18-Mar 10, 2019

I'm going to find it hard to put my review into words. So many thoughts and emotions swirling through my brain as I finished this book only an hour ago. I was nearly ready to give up on it after the prelude, but like a pas de deux, I continued to dance with my partner, this book, until the coda. I'm so glad I did. What a complex, challenging, heart-breaking book.

Complex: Attempting to keep all the characters straight and comprehending the political aspect of Bill's character. Challenging: I found myself looking up several words I had never heard of – verisimilitude, threnody, senescence – and yet there was not an ounce of pretension in the author's voice. Heart-breaking: At times, the graphic depictions of war, rape and self-mutilation were unbearable, but I realized that they were absolutely necessary.

As we all know, the way memory works is that the sweep of your life gets explicated by a handful of specific moments, and these totems then stand as narrative. You must invent the ligature that binds the rest.

And the draw was so familiar and comfortable, because, well, Ohio. Every mention of my happy places from Cleveland to Akron to South Bass Island, made me feel like home. While I'm not native to our great state, it's still my home.

“Johnny Appleseed. Ever heard of him? Ohioan.”

It seemed to take forever for me to finish, but I realize it was only short of three weeks. Worth every minute and with a payoff no reader could ever see coming. In an interview at the end of the book, Markley is quoted as saying,

"You just want those last forty pages to shock the shit out of you and yet feel totally inevitable in retrospect."

Absolutely. Poetically lovely, and absolutely relevant.

"And they were gone, these infinitesimal creatures, walking the surface of time, trying and failing to articulate the dreams of ages, born and wandering across the lonesome heavens."

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