Ancient Highway about lost dreams

• By GREG LANGLEY
• Books editor
• Published: Aug 10, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Share

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• 

ANCIENT HIGHWAY
By Bret Lott
Random House, $25

Each thing that ends is the beginning of something else. Lott begins this gentle tale of flawed characters with the end of 14-year-old Earl Holmes’ stay in the “nothing town of Hawkins, Texas” as he prepares to hop a freight train west in 1925. He is following his dreams, hoping to get to Hollywood and break into the “flickers” — motion pictures. He wants to be an actor.

Nothing in life is so simple. Earl is leaving his Texas life because he feels so alienated by the town and his family. They don’t understand him. When his beloved older brother Frank lies dying, Earl sneaks into the room where he is alone with the sick young man. He wants to give his suffering brother something special, so he does the only thing he knows how to do: he performs. He turns a flip. He is rewarded with a smile from Frank, but just then his grief-stricken mother bursts in and Frank draws his last breath. Earl hears his death rattle. But he’d made him smile.

“ ‘Hurrah,’ Earl whispered as quiet as he could, one last time just for Frank, one last time for Frank, the word out of him and already a memory of his brother’s smile, brand-new and as ancient as the sound he’d heard.”

But his mother hears him and misunderstands. She slaps little Earl, and the memory of that blow and his brother’s death stay with him the rest of his life. A life he interprets in cinematic terms with him as the star. It’s a movie that begins aboard the train, in a boxcar.

“He saw the intertitle that would begin all this all, saw the brilliant white letters curlicued and strong up on the silver screen, saw the words that would introduce the audience to this story of a boy with a momma couldn’t give a damn about him, a daddy gone to live in a shack, a dead brother who loved him, and a million brothers and sisters who couldn’t remember his name, and how this boy ran away one night, jumped onboard a train outside his little hometown and rode west to find his fame and fortune in the flickers.”

He had it all figured out. But life has a way of being rude to people with expectations. Even the train ride west is not what he expects: Earl witnesses a murder, has to run away, goes in the wrong direction, gets turned back around, has his shoes stolen, picks lettuce and finally finds himself in Hollywood. It is where he will find his destiny, just not the one he imagines.

Lott has crafted a multi-layered story with three main plotlines: Earl’s story, the story of Earl’s daughter, Joan, and the story of Earl’s grandson, Brad. The story is related in retrospect, but told in first person, present tense in the alternate voices of these three characters.

In the hands of a lesser writer such shifts in voice and time would be hopelessly confusing. It’s very smoothly done in this book. In addition to the other main characters, there is Saralee, Earl’s wife, a would-be big band singer who gave up her career for marriage and a family.

As Lott builds the tale from the end backward, he unravels details about Earl’s attempt to be an actor, his vanity, his self-centeredness, his naïveté. When Joan speaks, she recalls how neglected she felt by her handsome father and her often-ill mother. Brad is carrying a load of guilt around for things he has done in the Navy, but he also has some cherished memories from which he draws hope. He hasn’t spoken to Joan, his mother, in years.

Each of these damaged characters blames one of the others for his/her unhappiness. As Lott leads these four people toward an eventual confrontation, he paints a clear picture of what is wrong with the relationship, what unrealistic expectations each has held, what the inability to express love has forced them to do. Although it’s told in a sensitive and careful manner, the final resolution of the book — and there is one — is surprisingly powerful and moving.

Lott, a former LSU professor, was editor of the Southern Review from 2004 to 2008. He now lives in Charleston, S.C. with his wife. As with his first successful novel, Jewel, Lott drew on his own family history for inspiration for this novel. His grandfather really was named Earl Holmes and he really did leave Hawkins, Texas, and head to Hollywood and meet and marry a singer named Saralee.

Lott, a man of faith, is adept a working his deep beliefs into his plots unobtrusively. The book’s title is both the name of an old movie and a metaphor for life itself. Lott’s characters struggle to cope with life because they have no underlying faith to sustain them, yet each discovers his or her own capacity for hope in a different way. It is not by accident that there are three main voices, three parts of one story.