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178 pages, Hardcover
First published June 21, 2016
Willnot is not (primarily) a mystery or suspense novel. Forget that silly and distracting GR blurb, taken from the silly and distracting (and spoiler revealing, in one instance) dust jacket blurb. It appears as if Bloomsbury Publishing’s marketing team made the call to promote Willnot as something it isn’t, in order to take advantage of the built-in base of readers that respond to the mystery/suspense genre tag. As we all know, the problem with marketing a book as a mystery or suspense novel when it isn’t is that readers who might love it (if they only knew the truth) don’t find it, and those who read it anticipating the experience of reading a mystery or suspense novel are oft-times disappointed and write reviews that indicate something along the lines of, “the mystery didn’t work,” or “lacked suspense.” Don’t read Willnot to learn about those dead bodies and then blame Sallis for not delivering. Consider them a 3-bite appetizer, not your entree, as it were.
What is Willnot, then? Willnot is a snapshot of ordinary people figuring out who they are and how to survive.
That morning, with the office empty and all the ambition of a walnut, I stood at the window. Down at the corner, Ezra sat on a chewed-up, discolored Styrofoam cooler, not quite on Maple, not quite on Mulberry. I remembered Bobby giving him money that first day back. Our lives are so ungraspable. Turn them one way and light glints off them; turn them another, they drink up the light wanting more. We go to ground believing we’re heading one place and come up someplace else entirely.
Yesterday in the school cafeteria of a nondescript small town in Ohio, a sixteen-year old pulled a gun from his Fender Champ lunchbox and began firing, while at a restaurant just down the street an anonymous man called the waitress over and paid the check for a family of four seated nearby, two of the children with special needs.
We see Willnot – over the course of several months -through the eyes of Lamar Hale, town physician and surgeon. Lamar is in a long-term relationship with Richard, a teacher (later principal) , formerly that guy in high school who was the quarterback, first chair [name your instrument], most popular, best grades, etc.
In the town of Willnot, there are: several unidentified bodies found buried – and requiring excavation - near a gravel pit; a Sheriff with heart trouble; teens who are sufficiently bored that they start creating the appearance of filled-in holes around town mimicking the gravel pit find; several individuals waiting for surgery or recovering from surgery; an office manager; a couple worried about the health of the husband’s dad, due to a recently-developed unpleasant smell; Bobby Lowndes, a hometown boy turned Marine sniper who returns, but whose conduct is sufficiently creepy to suggest imbalance, menace or another unsettling explanation; a long-time homeless guy, known to all; an FBI agent, Ogden, seeking the sniper, who identifies him as AWOL; a 12-year old boy, Nathan, who turns in a 23-page essay (in response to an assignment to write 3 pages about where you live), and a protagonist whose father was a hack science fiction novelist. Eccentricity abounds, but it’s not cute or contrived. In a mere 192 pages, Sallis shows us all of this and more. He doesn’t tell us.
Days lumbered on, as they will. Miracles happen in the corners of lives, longings slumbered in our hearts.
As I watched him go, out of the office and along the street where he stopped to chat for a moment with Old Ezra, it came to me that, without having previously given it much thought, I liked Joel Stern. A man not easily deceived or distracted – not by growls, not by slogans or sound bites, not by white noise. Not even by the scripts running continuously in his head, by his own preconceptions.
Willnot is character-driven, not plot-driven. The relationship between Lamar and Richard anchors it. When Lamar is home with Richard, the world is a good place. A safe place. Everything outside might be going to hell in a hand-basket. Then Richard utters some amusing crack, or flirty comment, or insightful perspective. Lamar considers, responds, utters his own philosophical observation or takes Richard up on his ribald suggestion, gets the sustenance his soul needs to go out and meet the needs of his patients, his acquaintances, his hometown. Lamar and Richard are complex characters. So are all of the other inhabitants of Willnot, including Nathan. Sallis anchors his story in Lamar and Richard, in part, because their jobs put them into contact with the range of people who inhabit any small town. Doctors and teachers, along with the clerk at the two gas stations, the administrative assistant at the town’s utility payment window, and a pastor or two, are the sorts who encounter townfolk across a range of socio-economic backgrounds, and who may observe shadows of ghosts and glimpses of the baggage that accompany everyone on her life journey.
At times, a reader isn’t certain where Sallis is headed. Why is Lamar recalling his dad’s career and sci-fi-writer friends? Why are we reading a series of anecdotes about Lamar’s patients? Is Sheriff Hobbs’ heart trouble related to the dead bodies, or to Bobby Lowndes? How much attention should we pay to the FBI agent? The daily stories of Lamar’s patients and Richard’s school system career challenges seem headed toward a collision with the darkness of whatever explanation there turns out to be for the dead bodies of page 1 fame. The uncertainty the reader experiences is created deliberately by Sallis, as if to say. Question assumptions. Pay attention to details. Come along for the ride. See how much can be packed into this slim package.
John Updike wrote that while we all remain tragically alone, it’s imperative to go on making signs through the glass. The kids were doing that with their diggings. None of our attempts at communication amount to a lot more. And going on is what it’s all about. I hung up thinking about Jules Mawby the day before, and Bobby that afternoon, people who go on when it all gets to be too much. Then Ted Holmes.
Ted was Richard’s partner before me. Ted had contracted HIV but was doing well with the new generation drugs till esophageal cancer came along in its wake, early signs and symptoms initially attributed to side effects from the meds so that the cancer was well along when discovered. After months of treatment, a battery of drugs, and enough radiation that he claimed to glow in the dark at night and keep Richard awake, Ted showed up one day with a T-shirt that read I’VE HAD ENOUGH, THANK YOU, copies of which he distributed to his friends. Richard still has his. He wears it whenever things go their bleakest.
Lisa Levy asks in her article in LitHub:
Why aren’t we talking about James Sallis? In fact, why aren’t we talking about Sallis (b. 1944) alongside his American contemporary paranoids and peers, Don DeLillo (b.1936) and Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937)? His themes are similar to the big two: making sense of the world, and finding our place in it; chronicling the perils of intimacy; thinking about whether we can really know ourselves, or anyone else. Each book is its own world, which Sallis is quite conscious about, though the novels are often barely 200 pages. Sallis is quietly and steadily writing way above his weight class (and on the side, he plays a mean guitar). Or maybe he’s just our anti-Knausgaard, interested in the telling detail but not the whole exhaustive story (I’m mesmerized by the memory of a cockroach crawling over a sink in The Killer is Dying). And certainly not five volumes of it.
Levy is spot-on. We aren’t talking about Sallis. We should be, though. Willnot is an excellent launching pad for everyone who hasn’t yet read one of Sallis’ novels. Then let’s collaborate to give him the buzz his work dearly merits.