My seventh novel, The Smalltown Way, will be coming out later this month. This one covers 13 years in the lives of some of my favorite Colby County characters, taking them from the invasion of Iraq to the Great Septic Tank Explosion of 2016, which of course some people refer to as Election Day. I’m still messing around with the blurb, but here’s one that’s pretty close to right:
Chuck Kelso grew up in the little town of Colby City, Illinois and figures he’ll probably never leave. But lately he’s noticed something seeping into his beloved hometown, a divide that’s making residents more insular, provincial, and frightened. From the invasion of Iraq to the disaster of 2016, this novel takes a wry and insightful peek behind the smalltown curtain and finds phony preachers, subtle racism, fearmongers and fanatics, sleazeballs and seekers of truth, murder, and one more slice of banana cream pie.
Another main character is Jerry Allison, whose memorable line as a sixth-grader in The Rocheville Devil, “What’s one less hippie?” proves to be one of the least reactionary things to come out of the red-hat-wearing electrician’s mouth. Chuck and Jerry maintain a rocky friendship that comes to a head in the book’s climactic scene, a scene that I can only describe as thriller-meets-slapstick. I had no idea it was going to go that way, but I think you’ll be as pleased as I was.
However, that’s not what I want to talk to you about today. What I plan to do before and after The Smalltown Way comes out is give you all a closer look at my other novels. One reason is that I think I’ve taken perhaps a too subtle approach to directing readers to these books. Another is that I’m recharging my nostalgia batteries and this will give me some content until I decide to regale you with detailed memories of Goofy Grape, Rootin’ Tootin’ Raspberry, and other ancient history.
So let’s start with my first published novel, The Fraternity, from 2012.
A Little History
I started writing this one in longhand back in 1991 and managed to get a few thousand words in before my hand started cramping. The rest of it was written on a Mac Classic and I didn’t finish it until 1994. Up until that time I’d been trying unsuccessfully to interest publishers and agents in my first novel, Bob Smith, but finishing The Fraternity gave me a fresh start. Publishers and agents are going to love this one, I said to myself. I was in my mid-30s at the time and had not yet realized that the industry was looking for unknown writers only in terms of their marketability. It’s not “Is this book worth reading?” but “Is this book going to keep our shareholders happy?” One agent responded to my query with “Nothing new here.” Well, I thought, you’re right, I did not invent the concept of college or fraternities or human beings interacting with each other.
The Title
Back in the Nov 8 newsletter, “There Was No Ned,” I talked about one of the scams happening in the mid-1990s where phony literary agents were referring hopeful writers to phony book doctors. The phony book doctors charged the hopeful writers big money, kicked some of the money back to the phony agents, and made some half-assed suggestions that weren’t going to get the hopeful writers’ manuscripts accepted by agents real or phony. I never fell for it but I was involved in a correspondence with one of the agents involved before the scam was exposed. He suggested giving The Fraternity a more engaging title and the only thing I could come up with was “The House of 50 Brothers.” It didn’t matter. I think The Fraternity is a perfectly good title and I particularly like the double meaning of (a) a group of college students and (b) the bonds of brotherhood.
What It’s About
Occasionally people ask about the plot of The Fraternity and I have to explain that it’s more of a character study, an episodic story with plots that come up, get resolved, and move out of the way. The setting is all-male William Shelby College in the fictional town of Taylorville in northwestern Indiana—specifically the Psi Alpha Chi house—and the narrative runs from August 1978 to May 1979.
Main Characters
Doug Larner, a freshman who didn’t really want to go to college six hours from home but who couldn’t turn down a four-year scholarship. (This plot point turns up again in Love and Corn and Whatnot. Apparently I didn’t want any of my characters saddled with student loans.) Doug is somewhat introverted and a little intimidated by the idea of college in general—and growing up, for that matter. He’s also so desperate to keep his high school girlfriend that he agrees to an arrangement that lets her go out on dates while he’s away—fun dates, meaningless dates, and no-making-out dates.
Mike Halloran, a senior English major and talented writer who isn’t sure what he wants to do with his life but who knows he doesn’t want to disappear into the corporate world of the Halloran supermarket chain. As Doug’s pledge father at Psi Alpha Chi, he helps the shy freshman navigate the intricacies and absurdities of fraternity and academic life.
Zed Streator, the only freshman who feels more out of place at Shelby than Doug. The first of his family to go to college, Zed finds himself overwhelmed and thus easily tempted to use his free time hanging out in the video arcade as opposed to studying. The friendship between Doug and Zed mirrors every “best friend” relationship I’ve had in my life. The inspiration for the Zed character comes from a 1946 book called Pitcher and I, in which “Pitcher” is a scrawny young man having trouble adjusting at a private New England boarding school.
Favorite Passages
Every year my alma mater Wabash College plays DePauw University in the Monon Bell Classic, which has been called the oldest football rivalry west of the Alleghenies. The winner of the game gets possession of a 300-pound bell from a Monon Railroad locomotive, and then spends the next year trying to keep the other college from stealing it. At Wabash, pledge classes from each fraternity are assigned a night to patrol the campus during the week leading up to the game; this is ostensibly to frighten off marauders from DePauw but mainly serves as a bonding exercise. In The Fraternity, the rival school is Southern Michigan University (derogatorily referred to as the Missies), the game is called the Border Clash, and the prize is an old canoe said to have belonged to Jacques Marquette. Doug, Zed, and their friend John Martin are assigned to patrol the arboretum near the main entrance of the campus, and there they confront a member of the Tau Sigma Alpha fraternity:
At 10:15 they spread out into a triangle, with Martin taking the northeast corner by the campus sign and Doug and Zed guarding opposite corners of the arboretum. Quite a few Tau Sigs emerged from the darkness on the way back to their house, but anyone going in had to prove they were from Shelby. Zed had devised a series of questions for that purpose, and had a chance to use them on a Tau Sig pledge who was on his way to the library. He jumped out from behind a tree and brandished a dead branch, Robin Hood-style. “Halt! Who goes there!”
“Jesus Christ!” yelled the pledge. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Stand by!” called Zed to his backups. “If you were really a Shelby student you’d know what I was doing.”
“I know you must be patrolling for Missies. Put that stick down, dumbass.”
Zed didn’t budge. “Answer my questions first or I call in the reinforcements, Missy.”
“Oh, jeeze. All right, make it quick. I’ve got a paper due. I think we’re scheduled to do this tomorrow. Or Thursday. Hell, I don’t know.”
“Don’t know your night to patrol, huh? That doesn’t look good. First question—where’s the chem lab?”
“In the Dorian Science Center.”
“Correct, but anyone can memorize a Shelby map. Second question—what’s unusual about the elevator in the Parks Building?”
“There’s a pencil drawing of the Last Supper on the ceiling.”
“Correct. I’m almost convinced. Last question: What fraternity has the biggest assholes on campus?”
The pledge snorted. “We do. The Tau Sigs.”
“You’re free to pass.”
The highlight of their patrol is when they find a stranger on campus intent on spray-painting the statue of Woody Bowers, the great Shelby tailback of the 1920s. They tackle the would-be vandal and discover quite by accident that it’s an SMU coed. Shortly after midnight Doug, Zed, and John decide the campus is safe from Southern Michigan invaders, so they head up to the top row of the Shelby stadium to watch the Leonid meteor showers. There they lie on the bleachers watching the sky and swapping stories. It’s a magical night, and the chapter ends thus:
Shelby won the Clash 23-21, as Lloyd Brandenburg broke through the line on the next to last play of the game, sacking the Southern Michigan quarterback and taking the Coyotes out of field goal range. Doug got caught up in both the game and the dirty cheers from both sides, but couldn’t help thinking that the Border Clash itself was anticlimactic. For rabid football fans, sure, it lived up to the hype and then some. For Missy haters and Trapper haters alike, the game served a strange but real purpose, confirming the superior manhood of one group over the other. But for Doug Larner it would never compare to that night on patrol with his friends, tackling coeds and telling tales under a sky full of shooting stars.
And he knew somehow that he would never in his life do it again.
One more favorite passage concerns Zed during finals week. He knows he’s in academic trouble, but that doesn’t stop him from asking an SMU student named Bonni Jansen to go out for pizza. At some point during dinner it hits him that this was not the most prudent idea.
And as therapy goes it was a good night for Bonni, right up to the point where it stopped being a good night for Zed. In the middle of a bite of pizza at Papa Joe’s, he felt as if he’d been hit in the head with a hammer. He dropped his crust on his plate, put his head in his hands, and didn’t look up. “Are you all right?”
He spoke through his hands. “I don’t believe I’m doing this.”
“Doing what?”
“Having a date.”
She didn’t catch it. “Has it really been that long?”
Zed put his hands down. “I have two finals Monday, and instead of studying for them I read magazines, played pinball, wandered around the house, called you, and read an assignment that was due last week. My break-to-studying ratio was about 8 to 1.”
“Well, Zed, there’s no magic amount of time you have to study—”
“In my case I would have to spend enough time to have some basic concept of what’s going on in the class—say, about three months. Actually, I know economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources. I know who wrote all the books in my English class and which two I actually finished reading. That’s about it.”
Bonni groped for something to say. She put her hand over his and found it trembling, and while she wanted to make everything better for him she didn’t feel she knew him well enough to take on his burdens. She was torn between mothering him and calling it a night, and finally she whispered “Zed—say something funny.”
He tightened his lips. “You know what my GPA is? It’s negative. I have a negative GPA. I actually owe the college points.”
Speaking of favorite passages, in the April 1 newsletter (“Red Rover, Red Rover”) I told a story about the teacher who made us miss half of our final recess for the sake of a dumb April Fool’s joke. In browsing through The Fraternity yesterday I noticed that I had given that story to Zed Streator in the Border Clash chapter. It’s always nice to be surprised by something you’ve written yourself.
What Readers Think
Way back before I had a final draft, a friend read The Fraternity and said “This isn’t about college life—it’s about life.” Another friend read it and paid me quite a nice compliment by calling me an old-fashioned storyteller.
My good friend Tim Guiden had this to say: “This is a book you don't need to ‘work through’ but rather, one that you can just kick back and slip into, like an old pair of slippers. John Donovan's brand of humor is droll and understated, but at the same time can you make you laugh until you cry.”
Another Amazon reviewer called it a tour-de-force account of fraternity life in the 1980s (with a margin of error of two years), and of course one literary agent who didn’t read it said “There’s nothing new here.”
I beg to differ. Everyone’s story is new. That’s why we keep writing them. If you’re in the mood for a funny and real look at friendship and college life, click here for a link to the paperback. I think you’ll like it.