The Book of Ralph
By John McNally, Free Press, 2004

In the Author's Note to The Book of Ralph John McNally quotes John Cheever in claiming that fiction is not crypto-autobiography, and McNally insists that, in his novel, "the grade school may look vaguely familiar, the locker is my actual locker, but the people wandering the halls are all strangers." It is, at once, easy to believe him and difficult to imagine that he made all of it up. The book's characters and situations function so flawlessly that they simply couldn't be real, but, on the other hand, the book is brimming with such detail and authentic authorial affection that it seems anything but fictional.

The time is 1978, and the place is a near southwest suburb of Chicago. Hank, the narrator, is a eighth-grader, a B+ student, and an all-around ordinary kid. Ralph, his friend, is a first-class loser, a troublemaker, the quintessential bad influence. As Hank stumbles around, blinded by his own personal and familial concerns, he is guided by Ralph down one ill-advised path after another. He inadvertently aids Ralph in breaking-and-entering and burglary, and the pair team up with Ralph's hoodlum cousins, Kenny and Norm, to perpetrate a long string of bad deeds, all of which unfold in spite of Hank's basic tendency to be a good kid. For his part, Ralph insists on surprising us; he is not the dumb kid that his teachers and peers have decided he is, and his antisocial behavior is not always without justification. An extended coda at the end of the novel brings Hank and Ralph into the new millenium, and what could have turned into a ridiculous and incongruent wrap-up is instead a deft and seemingly inevitable conclusion. The book shifts gears abruptly, but it never goes off the track it has established for itself.

McNally evokes the 70s without resorting to the sort of stereotypes and tired iconography employed by filmmakers and Fox sitcom producers, the kind of warmed-over cliches that twenty-first-century kiddies are crazy about. The details of clothing, hairstyles and music are present in McNallyís book - they have to be, or it wouldn't be a book about the 70s, would it? - but they are not fetishized. When Hank gets a job at a record store, it would be, in a lesser novel, the beginning of a descent into pop music hell; we'd read endless soliloquies about which band is better than which other band and why. Instead, Hank quickly gets tired of his salary - a free record every day - because all of the store's black market albums are damaged, and before long he stops taking them. Hank is never passionate about music - he tends to like whatever is popular, as do the record-buying sheep of any era - and his ambivalence is a subtle reminder that most of the cultural production of the 70s was crap, just as it is today.

The Book of Ralph feels like an important book, no matter how you look at it. At the least, it's a rich, delightful, and altogether believable picture of a particular time and place. As a quirky, hilarious and almost fantastic fictional childhood memoir, it is a perfect urban companion to Haven Kimmel's A Girl Named Zippy, a chronicle of the author's childhood in small town Indiana (although Kimmel's book is allegedly nonfictional, there is undoubtedly more than a little tall tale in it). On the surface, McNally's book is top-drawer entertainment; it is funny and human and endearing.

I would argue, however, that the book should enjoy a more significant position in the history of American fiction. A clear-eyed vision of childhood in the waning years of the twentieth century, the story of Ralph and Hank can be seen as an intermediate step, a sobering answer to the question of how we've managed to travel from Tom Sawyer to Columbine. In the early pages of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain's heroes engage in a spirited bit of play-acting in which they plan to terrorize a Sunday school picnic and pretend to kill the children. In Twain's day, it was all in fun (if especially cruel fun), and looking forward from the nineteenth century, McNally's Ralph, who puts together a "revenge list" of people he plans to pay back one day, seems as harmless as Huck and Tom. Looking back from our own vantage point, however, Ralph seems not quite so benign, and McNally expertly uses our knowledge of the new, dangerous world in which we live to inject a fair bit of menace into the childish exploits of Hank and his friend. The result is a tense marriage of humor and dread which is unfailingly invigorating.

McNally never exploits our modern fears, however, and the book never degenerates - as it would have in heavier hands - into a commentary on contemporary cultural problems. Rather, it remains a sincere tribute to a unique town at an exceedingly exact time. More than anything else, it is a tribute to an illogical friendship that endures in the face of every pressure that society can throw at it.

Copyright 2004 Ad Media Inc.