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There aren’t too many authors out there who do as many things as well as Ron McLarty does here. Traveler is powerful, entertaining and thought-provoking. Revelations about the past expose the power and precarious fluidity of memory even as they shape decisions in the present. From adolescent angst, youthful indiscretion and teenage oaths to abuse, murder, psychosis and middle-aged insecurity … they’re all here in the pages of a remarkably affecting and riveting novel.
--AOL Journals
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Traveler has an acuteness about acting, aging and failure . . . this deeply personal reflectiveness, while often funny, also has a nostalgia for the old days. McLarty keeps the tension up as short chapters shift between then and now, unresolved and irresolvable, each feeding the other.
--The Washington Post
Ron McLarty, the hotshot rookie among recent American novelists, returns with a second book that proves he's no one-hit wonder.
Traveler employs some of the same ingredients as The Memory of Running, McLarty's 2005 debut. Its lead character and narrator, Jono Riley, is a likable, flawed middle-aged man whose ongoing casual introspection about his past has rarely motivated him before now to mitigate those flaws.
As with The Memory of Running, the heart of the story lies in passages, paragraphs, sentences and phrases that capture some truth about adolescence, friendship, relationships or family. Perhaps McLarty's most impressive skill, on full display again here, is weaving a story into which so many of those moments fit naturally.
McLarty also proves again that the flip side of "chick lit" isn't limited to action tales with a lot of sex and killing. Male readers, though not male readers alone, will savor the subtler vignettes and characters that conjure moments and relationships from their own youth.
Most grown men reduce the "old gang" of their youth to a few well-polished anecdotes. But underneath the one-liners rumble primal forces that shaped a man far more than he's apt to admit. "Traveler" finds those forces, and Ron McLarty scores again.
-—New York Daily News
McLarty excels at creating a sense of place . . . . But he is positively brilliant at creating characters, nearly all of them wounded in one way or another. Especially Jono's childhood companions, adolescents in a working-class neighborhood whose halting speech and combination of braggadocio and vulnerability call to mind people we knew in our own youth--perhaps even ourselves.
We care about these people, enough to try to follow them through McLarty's alternation of past and present . . . The effort pays off.
When the end comes, you'll wish you were in the presence of McLarty the actor, so you could stand up and cheer and shout "Encore!".
--The Providence Journal
I'm a sucker for this kind of guy: tough-talking, tender-hearted,
self-mocking, loyal to his friends, grateful for the love of women,
unashamed of his past, haplessly engaged in the present.
Jono Riley, the hero of Ron McLarty's novel, is a 50-year-old bartender and
sometime actor in New York City. Called back to his childhood home,
working-class East Providence, R.I., by the death of his first love, Marie,
he finds himself investigating not only her death but also several other
suspicious deaths. Marie dies when a bullet that has been lodged in her body
for 40 years suddenly moves. A traveler, such a bullet is called. In
reconstructing her death, Jono recalls his adolescence in the 1960s. The
characters and events are stunningly recalled by themselves, then made
unforgettable by their relation to one another. All the pieces fit snugly
together. This novel has a great voice, a great plot, great suspense, a
great evocation of time and place.
—The Boston Globe
Ron McLarty, author of The Memory of Running writes about what he knows. Like Jono Riley, the main character in his new novel Travler, he grew up in East Providence, R.I., in a rough and tumble neighborhood of Portuguese, Italian, and Irish immigrants where loyalty, tough talk and strong exteriors guard sensitive hearts of boys maturing into men.
McLarty writes with sensitivity without being sentimental. He smartly lets Jono be the sentimental one while he carries on with the story. Just as with The Memory of Running, McLarty proves himself a superb storyteller possessing integrity, charm and wit.
--The Denver Post
I finished Traveler yesterday. I simply loved the adventure. So beautifully written, so clearly and perfectly told.
I was in public when I read the swing set scene and had to hide my face as I wept. I loved those people and rejoiced with them and mourned with them and celebrated the sad, sad joys of living and dying.
And I have never read a better depiction of my profession. Thank you for a wonderful couple of days and for memories that I won't soon forget.
--Paul Mullins, Actor/Director
Actor and playwright McLarty, whose debut, The Memory of Running (2005), caused a stir, returns with a crisply written novel that is partly a mystery and partly a nostalgic look back at childhood. When Jono Riley, an aging NYC actor and bartender, receives word that his first love, Marie D’Agostino, has died, he immediately returns to his hometown of East Providence, Rhode Island. Marie died when a bullet, lodged in her back some 40 years ago, traveled, causing her heart to stop. Jono was present on the winter day in 1961 when the shooting occurred, but the shock of Marie’s death has caused him to remember the event in more detail. He seeks the aid of a retired cop who is still bothered that he never solved the case. McLarty gives us a real sense of place here, evoking both East Providence’s past as an immigrant enclave for dockworkers and its newly gentrified present. Jono’s bighearted firefighter girlfriend and the many colorful figures from the old neighborhood serve to further enrich this atmospheric tale.
—Booklist
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