The Book of Ralph: A Novel - Hardcover

McNally, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743255550 ISBN 13: 9780743255554

Publisher: Free Press, 2004

Synopsis

Promising eighth-grade student Hank forges an unlikely friendship with troublemaker Ralph, who with a pair of older cousins encourages Hank to engage in unscrupulous activities in their 1978 southwest Chicago neighborhood that set the groundwork for more serious behaviors in their adult lives. 25,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

John McNally is the author of two novels, The Book of Ralph and America's Report Card, and a short story collection, Troublemakers. His next book, Ghosts of Chicago, a collection of short stories, will be published this fall. A native of Chicago, he lives with his wife, Amy, in North Carolina, where he is associate professor of English at Wake Forest University. The first word he ever spoke was "Batman," who has remained, in his darker incarnations, his favorite superhero. John's first creative work, a play written in the fourth grade, featured an overweight superhero who gets stuck inside a phone booth while changing into his costume. He is happy to return to the genre, albeit thirty-four years later.

From the Inside Flap

"This book is charming, sensitive, and at times flat out hysterical. I knew kids like Ralph--and they scared me--but none of them had his heart, his humor, or ultimately his entertaining story. I hated to say goodbye at the end of the book." --Mitch Albom, author of The Five People You Meet In Heaven and Tuesdays With Morrie

Reviews

Woe is Hank Boyd. He is grimly enduring his adolescence in the Chicago 'burbs of the late '70s -- and along with it the hopeless schemes of his Schlitz-swilling father, the insults of his morose older sister, the blue tirades of an elderly neighbor with Tourette Syndrome and a litany of (invariably unrequited) loves that do little more than provide fuel for his adolescent awkwardness.

Then there's Ralph, a friend whom Hank never introduces as such, a wrong-side-of-the-tracks kid who courts trouble even when it isn't shadowing him (which is almost always). Ralph is an inquisitive sort who nonetheless sits in Hank's eighth-grade class even though he's 15 -- the result of being held back for two years.

Hank is drawn to Ralph's relative worldliness and sense of adventure, even if it leads him to burglarize the homes of the recently deceased and to advertise his services as an enforcer ("Ear chawed off: $15"). Hank becomes the de facto chronicler of not only his own life, but the ongoing disaster that is Ralph's.

Out of this Huck-and-Tom setup somehow comes a comic series of connected episodes -- The Book of Ralph is subtitled "a fiction," although its pacing and depth qualify it as a novel -- that careen around three decades. Sometimes hazy, occasionally wistful, often picaresque chapters are delivered with a satirist's perfect understated pitch and announce John McNally -- also the author of Troublemakers, a collection of stories -- as a gifted meta-memoirist.

The South Side Chicago suburb that McNally describes mirrors his native Burbank, Ill. Chicago men of letters -- both exalted (think Saul Bellow and The Adventures of Augie March) and underrated (Stuart Dybek and I Sailed with Magellan) -- have frequently made the Second City their canvas, then daubed versions of their memories upon it. While Hank Boyd might evince some of the yin and yang of hard-won, proto-Midwestern common sense and derring-do found in Dybek's characters, McNally nevertheless carves out his own turf.

The Chicago he paints has little to do with stockyards, far-flung adventures or lakeside trysts. McNally's Chicago stars John Wayne Gacy and Styx, corrupt aging hippies and fake Jesuses, untouchable Catholic schoolgirls and tough Tootsie Roll-plant workers. His portraits of Hank's placid suburb alternate with the rough-hewn people with whom those who live beyond beltways sometimes share their neighborhoods -- people like Ralph.

"I didn't know why Ralph and I were friends," Hank, who narrates the story, tells us. "The best I could figure, it was because I'd been taught to be polite. Everyone else was too afraid of Ralph to stand around and listen to what he had to say. But the more I listened to him, the more I liked him. If I were any smarter, though, I would have done what the other kids did -- run full tilt in the opposite direction."

Ralph means trouble, but the book achieves its charm not because of any misty-eyed nostalgia or the joy of recognizing its many pop-culture references, but because Ralph's mind is much more engaged than everyone, including Hank, thinks. It is Ralph who puts the daft antics of Hank's father into some kind of perspective. As the old man picks through neighborhood garbage to find ornaments that might help him win $500 in an outdoor Christmas-decoration contest, Ralph sees the value in the enterprise. "It looks like something Picasso would do," Ralph tells Hank, as they view the results. "But don't expect the judges of the contest to recognize that. That's the whole deal with being a genius. No one realizes you're one until you're dead."

Hank's father's collection of run-over rooftop reindeer, a snowman made of beaten-up, white beanbag chairs, and old wire contorted into something resembling a camel, combined with Ralph's generous judgment, gets Hank thinking:

"As best as I could tell, Dad's vision was this: Christmas gave everyone a good beating -- the way the flattened reindeer leaned against the TV antenna . . . or the trolls . . . [that] appeared to be climbing down the drainpipe at the corners of the house, as if escaping the long hours of Santa's workshop. It was chilling. I found myself wanting to weep right there at both the beauty and the sadness of it all."

As Ralph stoically endures false accusations from the school principal and the studied indifference of his classmates, one sees glints of character that Hank -- sheltered as he is by suburban mores -- can only vicariously experience through Ralph, criminal tendencies and all. In the end, Hank isn't as immune to the Ralph way of life as he previously thought. The two link up decades later as adults after a chance meeting involving lawyers and injuries. A loser in love (again), Hank begins to understand that life isn't the comfortably appointed promise of suburbia, but that it frequently operates on the Ralph plan, thriving on disappointment, rejection and a sense of ethics that could charitably be called situational -- all in all, a conceit worthy of a fine novelist. Or "fictionalist," at least.

Reviewed by Michael Anft

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Following a collection of short stories (Troublemakers), this enjoyable first novel is a nostalgic trip back to late 1970s suburban Chicago and the foibles of eighth-grader Hank and his twice left-back delinquent pal, Ralph. The novel unfolds in a series of comic episodes, chief among them the boys' Halloween adventure with Ralph's ex-con cousin, Norm, and Norm's attempt to unload a trunk of stolen Tootsie Rolls; a hilarious afternoon spent wearing Big Bird and Snuffleupagus costumes to promote the opening of a car dealership; Hank's father's effort to turn the family house upside down and win the local Christmas decoration contest; and Hank's obsession with a potential new CB for his mom's Maverick. Particularly memorable is Hank's job at South Side Records, where he tries out a variety of vintage-era vinyl, from Kiss to the Rocky soundtrack, then quits in disgust at the sleazy store owner's corner-cutting. The novel is sprinkled with other '70s cultural artifacts, too: Evel Knievel, the rock band Styx and Star Wars cards. The tone is predominantly light, but the seriousness of Hank's parents' constant smoking, bickering and their inevitable breakup is subtly conveyed, and McNally nicely captures Hank's pubescent angst, naivete and insecurity. The last section is a little over the top, with rudderless, 35-year-old accountant Hank returning to Chicago after many years and, much to his surprise, falling in with Ralph again and working for Ralph's cousins in the crime scene clean-up business. The two get caught up in an unlikely murder scenario and, as Hank discovers, it is possible to go home again. This lively novel will appeal to fans of Rich Cohen's Lake Effect or even Jean Shepherd's wistful fiction.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

In this collection of tightly interconnected short stories, narrator Hank details his misadventures with the scheming, eccentric Ralph. Having already been held back twice by the time they become friends in eighth grade, Ralph is nonetheless charmingly bright and mischievous--he does extensive research in the library, for instance, before finalizing his price list for his business of mob-style hits (he charges $15 for chewing off an ear, though naturally never goes through with it). In another story, Ralph convinces Hank that Hank's dad is an artistic genius after he begins collecting trash that looks vaguely like different Christmas decorations--three beanbag chairs for a snowman, for instance. Thus Hank imagines his dad as a kind of latter-day Picasso. The final story moves forward in time from the 1970s to 2001, with Hank and Ralph working together cleaning up after homicides and suicides. Ralph is a memorably lovable troublemaker, and though the stories don't really build upon one another to form a cohesive whole, McNally's talent for characterization and his lush sense of place make for funny and oddly compelling reading. John Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0743255550
• ISBN 13: 9780743255554
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304