Ray in Reverse - Hardcover

Wallace, Daniel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1565122607 ISBN 13: 9781565122604

Publisher: Algonquin Books, 2000

About this title

About the Author

Daniel Wallace has published stories in numerous magazines, including Story, Glimmer Train, Prairie Schooner, and Shenandoah. His first novel, Big Fish, was translated into German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese. Raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Daniel Wallace now lives with his son, Henry, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he also works as an illustrator.

From the Back Cover

Early praise for Ray in Reverse

"Funny, thoughtful, full of refreshing surprises, it will take you to Heaven and back." --Elizabeth Strout, author of Amy and Isabelle

"Ray in Reverse is filled with wonder at the world and a gentle sadness over one man-child's baffled place in it. Unfailingly gentle and acute, the book somehow manages to get bigger and bigger as it moves toward its unusual vanishing point. A winning production from a singular writer." --Thomas Mallon, author of Dewey Defeats Truman

"A damn good book." --Percival Everett, author of Glyph

"A delightful, small package of exquisite writing...Ray is real, and his life makes oddly compelling reading--especially in reverse." --Booklist, starred review

Praise for Big Fish

"A comic novel about death, about the mysteries of parents and the redemptive power of storytelling." --USA Today

"Refreshing, original debut...the transformative quality of fable and fairy tale." --Publishers Weekly, starred review

"An audacious, highly original debut novel...an imaginative, and moving, record of a son's love for a charming, unknowable father." --Kirkus Reviews

"Both comic and poignant." --The New York Times Book Review

"A magic carpet ride of a novel...amazing." --Birmingham Weekly

From the Inside Flap

Sitting in Last Words group where everyone is recounting their last words on earth, Ray is embarrassed. He didn't declare his love. He didn't say anything symbolic. He didn't reveal his benevolence or goodwill. In fact, he didn't even finish his sentence. His words didn't measure up, and now he can't seem to get them out of his head.

Now, in Heaven, he has time to reflect on his short life of fifty years. This is the darkly humorous story of that life, told backward. We see Ray Williams in his life's most crucial moments--his moments of infidelity, his premature proposal of marriage, his sexual confusion, the dog he accidentally killed, the penny he had to have, and the baby he unwittingly saved. Ray is Everyman at his very best and at his absolute worst--and is none too clear about when he's being either one. Beginning at death and ending at age ten, Wallace's novel leads us back to Ray in his innocence--achieving, against all odds, a happy ending.

Funny, unforgettable, and with one foot in a fabulistic world, Ray in Reverse continues the incandescent storytelling of Big Fish, the storytelling that one reviewer described as "Gabriel Garcia Marquez meets Rowan and Martin."

Reviews

Wallace follows his inventive debut novel, Big Fish, with another ingenious tragicomedy about a father and son, death and life, storytelling and reality. Beginning when a dead Ray Williams arrives in Heaven, the novel unfolds as the deceased proceeds to tell his life story backwards. As dodgy and shiftless in the afterlife as he was on Earth, Ray finds himself in Heaven's popular Last Words discussion group, where, for dramatic effect, he lies about his final utterances. A series of flashbacks reveals Ray's defining moments, including his real last words and what they meant, in a funny, poignant narrative that moves with the clarity of a fable and the complexity of modern psychology. Ray spent his life hidingAfrom the demands of marriage and fatherhood; from his fears of sexual ambiguityAand each chapter riffs on his signature confusion about reality. Ray builds a tree house for his 10-year-old son, James, then usurps it, using it as a getaway from his wife and life, drinking and dreaming about his girlfriend. Elsewhere, Ray walks through his life like a ghost, although it is 1982 and he's alive. Often in the wrong place at the wrong time, Ray can be a meddler, as when he chases bluebirds in the yard of the attractive widow next door or finds himself accidentally in the middle of another couple's messy divorce. Consistently, scenes of Ray's everyday life turn both farcical and insightful. When Ray writes a letter to an ex-girlfriend, he's honest, then heartfelt, then confused, then ridiculous, and then he starts over again. Wallace's stylistic tour-de-force, bolstered by the richness of his family portraits, humor and appreciation of ordinary people, demonstrates again extraordinary originality, craftsmanship and charm. Author tour. (Apr.) FYI: Big Fish was a Book Sense and Barnes & Noble Discovery selection.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Wallace's second novel, following Big Fish (1998), is a delightful small package of exquisite writing. We meet Ray in Heaven as a rabble-rousing member of a "last words" group. He's special or he wouldn't have made it to Heaven, but he's not special enough to play it straight with the others in his group. He tries to make his death and last words more dramatic than they were. He bullies others into admitting that they had also embellished their last words. Who is this Ray? His story unfolds backwards. You kinda know who he is, and then you find out how he got that way. Each chapter--a few years earlier in Ray's life than the last--could stand alone as a charming, quirky story. He has a fabulous button collection; he suffers from deep sexual confusion; he isn't really a good husband. A woman he beds for one night tells him his heart sounds like "that place at the end of the record when the needle won't lift." He's more interested in the tree house he built for his son than in his son (who is not much interested in the tree house). Who is this Ray? Even when his life is over, he's still trying to find out. "There was always somewhere else he wanted to be, someone else he wanted to be with. Ray felt present only in the future and the past." If nothing else, Ray is real, and his life makes oddly compelling reading--especially in reverse. Peggy Barber

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Ray in Heaven

Ray, like the rest of us here, is dead. He sits in a folding metal chair toward the back of the group, right on the fringe, as though he's unsure of himself, of where he belongs. That's fine, he's new here, and there's always a transition from one world to the next. He doesn't know how lucky he is though! First of all, he's in Heaven, which clearly makes him at least a little special. Second, he's in Last Words. In Heaven these days Last Words is more popular than ever, so securing a place here in our group has become quite difficult. There's the waiting list, which is longer than most, and then of course the words themselves have to be of a certain caliber (there's a screening committee). Still, sometimes strings are pulled, and I wonder if this is what happened with Ray. Certainly that's why Stella Kauffman is here, this slight, pale woman with an eager, ingratiating smile, who joins us today for the first time: it was her ancestor Betty Karnovski who started the group an age or two ago, so we had to take her in.

When it's time to begin, Stella raises her hand and Betty--no surprise to me--picks her to start us off.

"I'm from New York City," Stella says, an admission that generates a little tremor through the group: New York City is so poorly represented in Heaven that some of us had forgotten it exists. Stella shifts, uncomfortable in the metal chairs provided for our group, and she squints a bit--the overhead fluorescent lights always seem too bright in the beginning--and then she clears her throat and begins.

"Okay. My last words. 'I wonder if I left the oven on.'"

She utters them to us with an operatic undertone in her voice, as though she were God. Then she settles back, satisfied apparently.

A few of us nod, but none of us dare look Stella's way: we're embarrassed for her. Her last words are dreadful. She's only been here a day, of course, and this is her first session. Still . . . they're awful. She might have waited to hear the others, might have waited to hear what proper last words sound like before she made the mistake of uttering her own. They just weren't put well, and they don't really mean anything either, and that's unfortunate. Because meaning is important in Heaven. Consider your subjects: Life. Death. An overview of the former would be nice; a subtle observation of the latter, even better. Especially for somebody like Stella Kauffman--a woman from such a colorful place. Her showing is less than we would have expected. Betty is especially disappointed.

Which is not to say she had no reason to utter them, of course. Stella makes this clear to us immediately. On the night of her death she was alone, and it was a heart attack that killed her, one so sudden that it gave her very little time to recap her life experience. In fact, her last words were spoken that afternoon, three hours before she died, when she left her apartment to go for a short walk. Half a block away she remembered the oven, in which she had been baking some wonderfully delicious artery-hardening cookies, and wondered out loud whether or not she had turned it off.

"So, I said, 'I wonder if I left the oven on.' But it turned out I didn't," she says. "I mean, I did. I mean . . . the oven was off when I got home."

Everyone in the group nods, smiles, but still, we are far from impressed. Stella Kauffman must have led a very bland life indeed.

"They were my last words," she says, a note of defiance in her voice. "I like them well enough."

"As you should, Stella," Betty says. "As you should."

"Obviously they're not the best. Had I the chance to say them all over again, of course, I would do much bet . . ." she says, trailing off, realizing, as we all do rather quickly here, that this topic--the Ifs Ands and Buts of life--is one rarely explored in Heaven; Stella, wisely, does not pursue it.

Instead, to leave us with something a bit more memorable, she describes for us what it feels like to have a heart attack.

She says, "It is like being on an elevator and having it stop between floors."

Very good indeed, Stella! I think, and warm a bit toward her: that is exactly what it was like. For me, I mean. The sudden jolt. The stopping. The darkness.

"And that's the way it still feels," she says, a bit harshly.

Well. I have a feeling Stella has some unresolved issues about dying she may need to work on, and if so, she's in the wrong place. There are other groups for that sort of thing.

After Stella Kauffman's poor showing Ray raises his hand.

"Ray," Betty says. "You have some last words you'd like to share with us?"

He says he does. But he prefaces his remarks by telling us that he bled to death, slowly, on a roadside near Dallas.

Ray is a tall, broad-shouldered man with a nervous energy that puts us all on edge. He's always drumming his fingers against the side of the chair, and getting up, moving around, as though he can't get comfortable. But he doesn't look like the kind of man who would bleed to death on a Texas roadside. He has a somewhat more homogenized, suburban presence, and the gaunt and darkened look of a man who does not like himself all that much. Bitter for some reason, and sad. He makes a pretty big deal about this bleeding, the last episode in his life, going on and on, but no one is really interested. No one is interested in how he died. Whether it was a gun shot or if he fell off a horse or if it was suicide, we don't really care. All I want to know is, What did you say? As you were leaking away there by the side of the road, what were they? What were your last words?

"My brother was there," he says, milking his time for all its worth, "kneeling beside me."

An audience! Good. And a family member. Some of the best last words are often spoken in the presence of a family member. Ray was lucky; some of us died in front of total strangers, too embarrassed to say anything at all.

"We were waiting for help," he says, "but both of us knew I wasn't going to make it. I knew it, anyway. Tom kept saying, 'You're going to be okay, big brother. You're going to be just fine.' He kept talking like this, but I believe he knew it, too."

"The last words, Ray?" Betty says abruptly. She looks at her wrist where a watch used to be: force of habit.

"What? Oh, right," he says. "My last words. Well, I looked up at Tom, my baby brother, who was holding my head in his hands, and I told him, 'Be sure to take care of Jenny for me.' Jenny is my wife--my widow now. 'And tell her I love her.' Loved. I said 'loved.' Yeah. Like I was dead already. Then I said, 'Besides our mother, Tom--my Jenny is the greatest, most wonderful woman I ever--"

"Ray?" Betty interrupts him.

"What?"

"Is this true? Is what you're telling us true?"

"What do you mean, true?" he says. "Of course it's true."

"Ray."

Ray shifts in his chair, wipes his nose with a monogrammed handkerchief, blinks his eyes.

"Okay," he says. "Okay. I guess I'm making it up, most of it. You know. So what?"

Use of this excerpt from RAY IN REVERSE may be made only for purposes of promoting the book, with no changes, editing, or additions whatsoever, and must be accompanied by the following copyright notice:

Copyright c 2000 by Daniel Wallace. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1565122607
• ISBN 13: 9781565122604
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 225