Spooner by Pete Dexter was the absolutely perfect book to read as my last book in the book-a-day year. Spooner is about everything that matters in life.  It is about connection, understanding, resilience, and, perhaps the most important aspect of life, story-telling.  How we tell our own story is how we understand ourselves in the universe: truth comes out in the way our story unfolds.  Spooner unfolds in layers of family and time and life’s lumps, weathered or not.  Spooner was recommended to me by a friend who came into my life as the result of my reading and writing project, and that is also perfect:  I have received so many gifts this year, of wisdom, of humor, of comfort, and of friendship, and Spooner covers all this and more in prose that is intelligent, genuine, insightful, and very often very, very funny.

With one huge novel (469 pages) Dexter has created a family that will live in my mind forever, placed them within a world I recognize all too well, and left them to sink, swim, or soar. Dexter is the Dickens of our times, spiraling in on the issues of the day (education, sexuality, journalism, health care, class conflict, sports, and therapy) and skewering the timeless human characteristics of hypocrisy, mediocrity, and self-indulgence (not skewing: inside joke for those who have read the book and everyone should read this book, so the inside joke will be widely shared).  Spooner is about the big questions of how to live an ethical life, how to maintain resilience in the face of failures, and how to work past feelings of abandonment and forge genuine connections.  For Calmer, the stepfather of Spooner, the guideline for life is self-reliance and caring for everyone else; for Spooner, there is no guideline other than needing to feel an intense physical and emotional connection to the moment at hand; and for Lily, her ideal of life exercised by intellect and democratic ideals has warped into a fanatical obsession with fairness and justice, and her asthma becomes the wall that offers both refuge and imprisonment.  The three of them form a family, along with brilliant Margaret, genius Darrow, and successful Phillip, bordered by the Whitlowes of southern aristocracy and the practical, durable, and farmer-stock Ottossans.

In creating his characters, Dexter takes each one’s salient characteristic and cranks it up a notch; the result are characters of exaggerated definition yet in Dexter’s hands they are still wholly believable (again, similar to Dickens). Spooner is the one character who defies any definition at all: he is everyman as wounded puppy, sometimes down but never out and always willing, with a little encouragement, to try all over again.  (Dogs play a huge role in this novel as symbols of both goodness and vulnerability incarnate).  There is a rather mean portrayal of a gay couple who are meant to be evil and stupid — and they are, with disastrous and very unforeseen results — but the truth is that Dexter doesn’t go any easier on straight couples (and has car-inflicted spousal injury down to an art).  Everyone and everything is put on a sharp skewer and  it all works, resulting in rollicking and riveting story-telling at its finest.

That’s what Spooner is: a very great telling of a story. Dexter held me from first page to last in this novel that makes big statements about life but hides them within a wonderfully looping plot that alternates between tragedy and comedy (I laughed out loud on a train, in public, repeatedly) and then mixes them up together to really hit home. We get the truth from Dexter and we love it.  Spooner proves that it is the effort to connect that saves us, even when connections sputter.  This novel is a moving homage to under-paid school teachers; a devotional to dogs and the people who love them (and a condemnation of people who leave them);  a guidebook on writing (with lots of attention paid to how to tell a story, the part we all play in a story, and the importance of caring about your story); and most of all, it is a darn good yarn.