Photo courtesy Macmillan Publishers
Patrick Dacey’s author bio in the back of his novel, “The Outer Cape,” (Henry Holt, $27), reminds me of the ones you’d see in the old pulps: The author’s been a reporter, landscaper, door-to-door salesman and worked at a homeless shelter and detox center. Dacey admits to restlessness that puts him at odds with routine. Yet he’s developed sufficient discipline to craft a novel in which attempts at beauty and casual cruelty turn into a confusing muddle. Dacey shows us how just trying to figure out how to make life work afflicts the Kelly family. He’ll be sharing some of the mess they’re in at Chop Suey Books in Carytown, today, June 27, from 6-7 p.m.
Dacey came into most of those odd jobs during college. He traveled and taught in China and Mexico. Out of grad school from Syracuse University, he taught composition at Virginia Commonwealth University. “After a while of teaching composition, it becomes redundant and starts to kill your brain cells,” he says. The students weren’t the problem, but the repeated arguments for legalizing marijuana and lowering the drinking age seldom varied. He chose to leave academia and pursue writing. He began forming his own fictional territory of Cape Cod, Wequaquet, which if you say it right, seems to say, “We can’t quit.”
"The Outer Cape" author Patrick Dacey (Photo by Amanda Doyle courtesy Macmillan Publishers)
While on the midnight staff of The Healing Place he began his short stories of people hanging in and hanging on, “We’ve Already Gone This Far.” “While people were in there snoring and farting, I was finishing the manuscript,” he recounts. Dacey went back and forth, working in Roanoke and in Yorktown, and going through a divorce. Dacey’s stories started getting published in the pages of publications like “The Paris Review.”
“I feel like when something tragic happens and you don’t see it coming, it opens you up,” Dacey says. “Even if you’re depressed or sad about it, it gives you freedom.”
One of the book's characters, Irene Kelly, at one point considers, “Whatever was inside most people during those years [the '70s] has now spilled out, replaced with rational logistics, the fastest route between point A & B, and her greatest fear is her greatest irony, that she is somewhat comforted by the fact that she is not different than most people.” Yet Dacey writes with great feeling for her, and all his characters.
“Every individual life and dream is part of our history,” Dacey says. “Got a ways to go because so many people haven’t had a chance to speak, or had their history written by others. Ordinary people deserve great feeling. I took a lot from my family thinking about their lives and struggles and joy and love, and every character has a piece of me in it. They’re symbols of this country and what’s happened during the past 30 years.”
In the novel, Robert Kelly, scion of the family construction firm, is always attempting to make the big score that’ll set him for life. His wife, Irene, is a frustrated artist who seeks larger meaning in her life. Older son Andrew works for a Boston financial consulting firm, and his life is turned upside-down by sudden death and divorce. His sibling Nathan is afflicted by post-traumatic stress disorder following multiple combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and near-fatal events stateside. Their mother’s illness returns them home to the Outer Cape.
There’s a marvelous John Cheever-esque scene and dialogue after Nathan, his nose bleeding, leaves a train in Boston to await the arrival of Andrew. He joins two men who are taking a smoke on the platform, “and the three men stand together like transients with nowhere to go, connected by smoke and idle time."
“You ever see the purple martins in Virginia?” says one of the men.
“Haven’t,” the other man says. His arm is in a cast up to his elbow and the right side of his face looks to have been badly burned some time ago.
“You?” the man asks Nathan.
“I’ve never been to Virginia,” Nathan says.
“What about ’em?” says the man with the burn scar.
“If we’d seen them, what would you tell us?”
“It’s a feeling I can’t explain.”
“Look at that,” says burn scar.
“A beauty,” says the other man.
“Better than those goddamn purple martins, I bet.”
Nathan follows their gazes toward the fully decked lback BMW that has inched its way into the lot.
The horn sounds.
The three men stare, lovesick for something they will never have.
Dacey says he thinks a great deal about dialogue, which in a novel or short story allows more freedom than in TV or movies. “The way people talk in that medium is to progress the story. People often speak in these real nonsequiturs, a real confused mishmash.”
What’s not oblique or odd is Dacey’s accomplishment. Not only is “The Outer Cape” available, but the paperback of his short stories, “We’ve Already Come This Far,” drops today, too.
