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Full of substance, tempered by an unflinching realism, The Dropper is an emotionally complex portrait of a confused and determined young man aching for something better, unable to provide it, but still fighting to, anyway. This is the type of story that defies easy categorization, for all those who love rooting for the underdog, the fighter in all of us.
Albert "Shoe" Horn is an apprentice plumber and part-time boxer in 1922 England. A seventeen year old young man who's been forced to grow up far too quickly after his mother's death, Shoe is saddled with caring for his alcoholic, often abusive father and special needs brother, Bobby, while trying to make a life for himself as a plumber, and a name for himself as a fighter.
During the day he lugs his tool box around town, wading through sewage and water, fixing pipes and water closets while his employer is busy down at "the club". At night he "goes under the lights", carving out a reputation by the cut of his fists. And somewhere in between he watches after Bobby and romances two different women, one a romantic ideal who dreams of being an actress, the other a woman Shoe could easily marry. If he could ever make himself stay in one place with one woman for any length of time.
Things are changing for Shoe, though. One night, under the lights, he deals a head-blow to a friend that turns lethal, and becomes haunted - either supernaturally, or psychologically - by his friend's resulting death. And Molly has tired of Shoe's indecision, forcing him to make a choice Shoe isn't sure he's capable of. And, worst of all, is Bobby. It's become painfully clear that Bobby's needs have grown beyond Shoe's ability to manage, and this seventeen year old is suddenly faced with the very real possibility that he can longer care for his brother.
And then there's Shoe's worst nightmare: The Dropper. A specter of darkness and rumor, a midwife-turned-child murderer...or so the story goes. She haunts Shoe's steps, speaking in cryptic half-truths, and Shoe fears even more for his growing inability to care for Bobby...because he fears that Bobby may be The Dropper's next victim.
Haunting and melancholic, with the lightest touch of the supernatural, The Dropper is sure to be one of the year's best novels. This isn't a "ghost story" or "dark fiction" or anything like that. This is simply storytelling at its finest, a tale about a young man who never quite figures things out, but never drops his fists, either.
Kevin Lucia is a Contributing Editor for Shroud Magazine and a blogger for The Midnight Diner. His short fiction has appeared in several anthologies. He's currently finishing his Creative Writing Masters Degree at Binghamton University, he teaches high school English and lives in Castle Creek, New York with his wife and children. He is the author of Hiram Grange & The Chosen One, Book Four of The Hiram Grange Chronicles, and he's currently working on his first novel. Visit him on the web at www.kevinlucia.com.
“Ron McLarty, who has proven himself a terrific storyteller in such books as The Memory of Running and Traveler, has outdone himself with The Dropper, a story where beauty and brutality mingle in a yarn I just couldn’t put down. This book is filled with rich pleasures and textures—it reminded me of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. As in his previous novels, The Dropper avoids sentimentality, but not sentiment; Shoe and his brother Bobby live and breathe. I highly recommend it.”
--Stephen King
I recently completed The Dropper, a novel by Ron McLarty. Because of his other novels that I enjoyed so much, mainly about his own life as a kid growing up in blue-collar E. Providence, Rhode Island, or his efforts as a writer, I was eager to get this one also, even though it was an audio-book only (Random House Audio). After many difficulties with my iPod, I finally, but very slowly, heard the whole novel. Because I listened to it only in the car and because I now drive so seldom and for such short rides, it took me a long time to finish it. I wish that I could read it now. I would like to check so many things. I would like to hold it in my hands.
The basic story is of “Shoe” Horn, seventeen years old, who is growing up to be a man in Barrow-in Furness, UK (near the Irish Sea and the Scottish border. McLarty, the reader as well as author, takes the listener into the mind of this flawed character, who is trying to grow up under difficult circumstances. Shoe’s main concern, as the story opens, is his sweet, retarded, stuttering brother, about five years younger than Shoe. Shoe works as an apprentice plumber for “Mr. Lowden,” a lazy, ignorant, pompous man whose main activity is making money from Shoe’s work, pretending to be an expert himself, staging fights with Shoe as a champion winner for him, and giving most of Shoe’s wages to his drunken friend, the father of these two boys in name only. Their mother has been dead for some years. Cherished in memory, she never sided with Shoe in all the brutal beatings the drunk administered, and on her deathbed she made Shu swear an oath never to strike his father, no matter what this beast did to him. By the end of the novel we understand her more clearly. Her response when her husband knocked out two of Shoe’s teeth at age 12 was to chastise Shu for upsetting his father. Finally Shoe is able to put aside the oath.
Early on, in one of Lowden’s staged fights, Shoe hurts Phil Gougherty badly. It was a boxing match, and both played to win the kitty. Shoe, contrite, visits the family and apologizes: he’s sorry, but at the same time he knows he did nothing wrong. This is a family of vicious young men and one young woman: they all hate the English and Shoe especially it seems. Phil had been the only decent one, a hard worker. But Phil dies a few days later. Throughout the novel, then, the ghost of Phil follows Shoe around but never says anything. Shoe talks to him as a friend and companion.
The “Dropper” of the title is a wraith-like old woman who had terrified Shoe all his life, but who opens his eyes to many truths near the end when they finally talk. A former mid-wife, she had had the bitter duty to decide which of the impaired should live because they were “good” ones, like Bobby, and which should die. This duty had saddened her beyond belief.
The palette is full of characters in every sense of the word.
There is the gentle giant, McAvy, or The McAvy, as both Bobby and Shoe call him. He's is so huge that he frightens all, and he seems to grow every day. The McAvy’s voice is ever low. He accepts stoically being shunned by all but Shoe and Bobby. When a fight is set up between him and a champion from another village, the challenger and his family blanche when they see him. But the McAvy understands, and tells Louden that he is not up to fighting that night, that everyone's money should be returned. Lowden is furious, but to compensate, McAvy and Shoe agree to fight in two weeks. and the two weeks take up most of the rest of the novel.
The dog Blacky is a wonderfully realized character, a friend and companion to Bobby but loving all. He had a knack for understanding exactly what everyone needed, and he comforts the children in Bobby’s playgroup, like the blind girl who never speaks, whom he kisses soothingly. He forms a key role in the story. He's an example of McLarty’s gift for meshing fantasy with reality. Though there could never be a dog like Blacky, anyone who loves dogs would wish for such a friend—found whimpering in an alley by Bobby, who understood the dog instantly.
Many women are attracted to Shoe, most memorably Molly who initiates him into sex, which had been very much on his mind and expressed in “his thing with a mind of its own.” The women teach him how to make love, and he develops a rather insatiable taste for the sport in spite of declaring his loyalty to Molly near the end. At first, the women or girls always come on to him, but by the end he is beginning to be the initiator, in spite of his vows to Molly.
Then there are Lowden’s customers, like the Taylors. Mrs. Taylor is constantly doing crazy things like shoving huge objects (whole chickens, for example) into the toilet or down the sink drain. All the while Shoe is there, expertly repairing the damage, Mr. Taylor is bragging about the quality of paper his company made. “Our pulp . . . . ” and “I told him . . .” ad nauseum. Almost every sentence begins with “I,” and continues with outrageous self-congratulatory comments. He never stops. Finally it turns out that Mrs. Taylor is working out how to kill him and cut up his body: can she dispose of the pieces in the toilet? No. Down the sink? No? Turns out a spot in the garden will do. Finally Shoe understands what she’s doing, and approves.
Friends are few, like the very black Scotsman with the burr, a good man who knows much about boilers and people, or the middle-aged woman who tends the young retarded and disabled children like Bobby every day at the church. Shoe finds her beautiful, he doesn’t quite know why, since she is plump and middle-aged. It’s the goodness that shines out of her. She is the one who tells Shoe that the play group is not enough for Bobby, that he needs to be educated and trained. She connects Shoe with a nearby residential school for such children, and Bobby has a place there with friends, and play, and learning, thanks to the generosity of a couple in the community, the ones who had had Shoe install the village’s very first toilet to replace the water closet that they had had in their home like everyone else’s in the community. After he takes Bobby to this home, he must wait two weeks to visit: visitors can come only every two weeks. On his first visit, when he sees that Bobby does not need him as much as he had needed Bobby, when he sees indeed that he had been infantilizing Bobby, he feels empty. The important moments in his life had been getting Bobby up, seeing that he is cleaned and dressed and “does his privy,” that he gets fed properly, taken to and picked up from the church center, protected from “Mr. Horn,” and is read to before he goes to bed. As it happens, his first and last visit to this dream school is successful. Shoe sees that Bobby can do without him, and he never returns.
The story begins with old man Shoe, 87 years old, back in the old country after a life in America—in East Providence, in fact, where he had had a business. Still smoking. “Lighting one” is a constant activity in the novel. The old man regrets what he had done to Bobby, perhaps by leaving him in the very capable hands of The McAvy and in an impossibly perfect residential school for the retarded. Never returning. But the reader finds this judgment by Shoe as flawed as any of his sometimes off-kilter perceptions and beliefs. McLarty leaves it to the listener to accept Shoe as he is.
What is moving about this novel is the allowance it gives the listener to enter into a foreign scene, an older time and place when the rules that seem to function today are not operative. We stay in Shoe’s mind, but he introduces us to a wide array of characters, all very fully brought to life—some despicable, some exaggerated with comic emphasis, some pathetic—and all interesting. His pride in his skill at his trade is endearing. It’s dirty work, but honorable. He traces the Latin origins of the word “plumbing.” His last great act is to introduce The McAvy to the trade, forcing Lowden to do right by him, thus making it possible for the giant to live.
A word about Ron McLarty’s reading of his book. He captures every nuance of every single character's speech, from the burr of the Scotsman, to the hesitant voice of Mrs Taylor, to the brutal Gougherties, the soft whisper of the giant McAvy—a rich array of accents and intonations. That certainly is one advantage of listening rather than reading.
--Bernice Kilman
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