“On days like this the sky stiffens, as if to say that summer will never come.”
That’s how the novel begins. It continues thus:
“Those sweet April showers, each one riding the tail of the one before, migrating through Kalamazoo without a warm week, chase the longest winter since I’ve been here. And now it rains, and rains, shining the cold, black tarmac where the cars have not yet come in. Just beyond the parking lot there is a delicate mist hanging on the grasses and between the pines, bending the sleepy Dutch tulips and daffodils who didn’t know it wasn’t time to wake up yet, and I wonder why I can no longer sleep.”
With an opening paragraph like that — detailed, resonant, inviting but somewhat ominous there at the end — how could Darren DeFrain’s The Salt Palace possibly go wrong?
Actually, there are far too many novels that do, despite their promising beginnings. But this one stays true. And it does so even though its author breaks some rules here and there.
Take the footnotes. Yes, there are footnotes here, and notes of any kind can annoy readers. (Would even the great T.S. Eliot have been better off without all that explication in “The Waste Land”?)
Yet DeFrain’s footnotes work. They work partly because they are humorous; in the very first one, he describes a bank location without a logo or sign, “left off the complex so as to make the building less readily noticeable to … infuriated customers.” I was reminded of my own experiences looking for an ATM in a certain rather wealthy area of Kansas City, where banks tend to be put in out-of-the-way places, out of what I conclude is guilt.
Even the plot should be problematic, for The Salt Palace is yet another American road novel. But the journey works, as 30-something Brian puts the highway between himself and his not-so-satisfactory Midwestern life; a lapsed Mormon, he’s heading back to Utah to help with family matters that have arisen.
Sure, we’ve all been down a similar road, but we also know how, um, interesting things can get when not everything goes as planned.
The Salt Palace also includes, as its threads, both four-letter words and Utah history. (Translation: vulgarity and religion.) Some folks will not like this. This reader enjoyed the opportunities for both wit and edgy reality.
DeFrain is director of the writing program at Wichita State University. Some academics apparently believe there is something shameful in employing humor in writing; fortunately this author is not one of those people.
DeFrain also knows how to write in the present tense. I recall being told this is bad. I also know that writing is a toolbox and that some writers use some tools quite well. DeFrain handles the present tense like a hammer that, from long use, has roughened his hand with calluses.
If there is one rule DeFrain does follow, it’s that we Americans tend to like movement of various kinds in our fiction. That restlessness is here, literally and figuratively, and it has the effect of being simultaneously satisfying and disquieting, which is, I suspect, exactly what the author intended.
This is a great start to what will be, I hope, a long and productive career.