The Wire Donkey, by Charlie Dickinson

The Wire Donkey is an advance copy of a self-published novel that I received from Charlie Dickinson, a writer who lives in Portland, Oregon. He had read my novel Temping (I don't know how he found it) and liked it (he reviewed it here):

http://www.hackwriters.com/temping.htm

I didn't have high expectations for Dickinson's novel, and worried when it came in. I thought Charlie Dickinson was quite a young man, so I let it sit in a pile of books until about two weeks ago when I opened it, and read the first chapter. The first chapter had a young idealist male named Ocean who is dumped by his Asian-American girlfriend (she's forty).

I wasn't hooked, but was intrigued. I had really enjoyed the chapter. It put me in a good mood. So I kept reading.

Ocean goes back to his job at Planet Foods where he is fired in favor of a Hispanic. His job was stacking vegetables but he can't do it right.

He takes his wire donkey (Hungarian for bicycle) everywhere around Portland (I like Portland and it's fun to visit the town again especially via bicycle).

The prose is fresh, and captures something that I can't put my finger on about the northwest. Young people in the NW have a curiosity about Asian religions, natural foods, surfing, and good deeds.

"Planet Foods was the pits. When I showed up for work, Dennison introduced me to this Latino dude, Jaime, who was hired to work the same hours as me, to get the benefit of my training, so Dennison said. It wasn't as if we needed another produce guy during my hours, so my paranoid brain immediately seized on the idea I might be training my replacement. Jaime's English was, for sure, limited..." (31).

Ocean gets fired and goes to see his parents in Eugene (a couple hours south of Portland). Ocean's mom is a hippy in Eugene. She has recently left his dad, and is now shacked up with a guy who smokes too much weed. Ocean can't stand him. His mom is worn out. She waitresses to keep a roof over their head, but is so stoned out, she can barely remember when her son would visit. Ocean's next job is selling cellphones door to door, and he's fairly successful but has to hang out with the boss' son, a creep who takes him to sex shows by the airport. As an idealist, Ocean can't stand this, and the descriptions bring out the sad ways in which such scenes drive people apart. The stripper strips Ocean of his glasses:

"She gives me a wicked smile. And she plunges, really, I'm not joking, she plunges the glasses straight down, flat into her snatch, I mean it's down there, behind that cloth triangle fronting her thong bottom. I collapse back on the chair, feeling had. Guffaws, yucks, whistles, table-pounding. Then she arches backwards, her hands go up, leaving behind the glasses whose unmistakable outline asserts itself beneath her purple silk triangle. Laughter in abundance, like the glasses are getting an eyeful now. I could get on hands and knees, crawl out of here, right now" (86).

Ocean wants to get people to donate organ parts to medicine, and signs them up at Rose Festivals and at Saturday market with his friend Brianna (who isn't interested in him). Ocean is basically a loser trying to get a decent job (he has an application at something called Americorps -- I googled and it's some kind of program for new college grads put together by the Clintons. You have to want to help people of all things, and some of them are down on the coast now helping with the oil glut on the Gulf beaches). In addition to ethical work, Ocean wants a decent girlfriend. He loves Asian girls, and Asian religion. I think Buddhism is a horrible idea, or set of ideas, and turns everything into dreck, killing everything it touches, since it has no philosophy of history, but only offers meaninglessness on the grand scale, and a theory of special moments (be here now), but it comes off very nice in the book. He meets a nearly forty-year old surf babe, who takes him for a ride in her van out to the Eastern Oregon desert, and is kind to him, and tells him about her 6 months in Japan searching for a religious understanding of the universe. They eat rice together, and have green tea, and there's nudity, but nothing happens, and it doesn't last. She drops him off, and he's back to his Hawthorne area apartment.

Summer changes to winter and Ocean's riding his bike around town, the snow lights up in the moonlight, and he has moments of satori. Is this enough? For Ocean, and for many young people, it is. They seemingly need no greater structure of meaning than that which such beautiful perfect moments provide. And maybe that's all there is.

This is a very special book that is in a class of its own in northwest fiction. It encapsulates an era. It is a joy to read. It is something like Brautigan's Revenge of the Lawn, and something like my own novel, Temping. It has an outsider feel, and is quite special. What's neat is that Dickinson has created a character who is not himself (Brautigan is always somewhat the author AND the narrator in his books, and in Temping, I am somewhat the same as the narrator to an alarming degree).

The narrator of the book (Ocean) is twenty. The actual writer, a man named Charlie Dickinson, is 65. It's neat that an older writer can still reach into the idealism of his youth and create a compelling gentle narrative, filled with minor misadventures, and insightful detail. Sadly, few people will ever read this book. It's self-published and will probably not have a big retail market. But it's a book that many twenty-somethings could relate to, and would be a huge success (perhaps even become a generational landmark as The Catcher in the Rye was, or as Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America became).

Charlie Dickinson is someone who had writing talent as a youth but never the time or the inclination to develop it, he told me in an email. He did take a course with Joan Didion who told him he had talent. This first novel is indication of what Didion sensed. I might be the only person to ever read this novel because of the ways in which circulation is cut off unless you have a giant corporation behind you. If word of mouth is something, however, I counsel everyone who comes here (especially Brett, maybe Wendy) to find this book and give yourself a ride across Rose City.