AMERICAN BOY - "We could have been happy."

American Boy by Larry Watson

Milkweed Editions, 2011

$16.32, 224 pages

I am in awe of this book. I thought at every turn, this is where the story will go wrong. After all how many coming-of-age books are there, and with the exception of a Catcher in the Rye or Huck Finn, they all do. Watson doesn’t. In fact I left the book wondering why I had learned so little from my own childhood. It probes family relationships, the lasting significance of that first kiss and what it can really mean when someone says, “We could have been happy.”

Let me add my poem on the subject. I wrote it after reading some letters my deceased mother had written years ago to an aunt who has just died.

Best To All

 

Reading old letters from my mother

to my aunt who died at 94 last year,

I realize there was a gracefulness

between women. No mention of my

dad’s dementia, of his brother who

was engaged to a woman for twenty

years—then she left to marry my

second cousin. And Uncle Clarence?

He quit his job and went out in the

woods to die.

 

“We will have our Easter dinner with

friends.” she writes. “Can you believe

summer is almost here.” The water

pipes freeze in winter, a neighbor’s

house burns to the ground, cars rust,

I play outside alone. But now I picture

her with a cup of coffee, perhaps

a cigarette, writing at a table, a patch

of sun reflecting off of it. Everything

is just fine. Everything is all right. 

 

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American Boy

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