In the fictional town of Bonhomie, Ohio, the lives of four people, two married couples, are forever changed by an impulsive decision made on V-E Day, 1945. The aftermath will reverberate well into the next generation in ways that are both explosive and predictable, as Ryan maps out his characters’ lives in conjunction with the sweep of mid-twentieth century American history. While Buckeye is fresh and exciting at the start, Ryan’s inability to commit to the story leads the book to devolve into something akin to a Billy Joel song in the second half. It’s Americana kitsch at a frantic pace, the writer seemingly compelled to keep his novel under 500 pages instead of paying off the long-developing plot.
Our featured players are Cal and Becky Jenkins and Felix and Margaret Salt. Cal is a lonely guy with a drunk hoarder for a dad and one leg significantly shorter than the other. His rejection from the Army leads directly to meeting Becky, a former classmate in high school whose character essentially boils down to her one key trait, the novel’s biggest swing by far: Becky can, at least occasionally, speak to the dead. While Cal manages her father’s hardware store downtown, Becky hosts seances in the family home’s front parlor and attempts to contact the departed loved ones of her friends and neighbors. Cal’s non-belief seems to be the biggest stumbling block in their happy marriage.
Margaret Salt is a former orphan, abandoned as a baby at a girls’ home and raised by the woman in charge, who becomes her “Aunt” Lydia. At 18, she leaves the orphanage and moves to Columbus, where she meets and marries the handsome Felix, a college graduate working in management at a local company. When he’s promoted, a reluctant Margaret is dragged along to Bonhomie, away from the art and dance classes that had started to give her a sense of herself. Margaret and Felix have a largely sexless marriage, and Margaret blames herself though she can’t think why.
Ryan does a great job establishing this central foursome as fully rounded characters, but things go haywire after the war ends. Characters start acting in big, broad strokes that are harder for the reader to reconcile with the characters we’ve come to know. Many of them become impossible to really empathize with, as they deal with the consequences of their dishonesty and their own selfish choices. In particular, one stunning act comes to define the latter part of the novel, and the huge implications are a little too much for Ryan to handle, frankly.
The prose in Buckeye is smooth and graceful, but the plot and the character work can’t live up to it. Eventually, this becomes an oddly old-fashioned bit of Boomer-esque nostalgia, while also having little of interest to say about the past beyond, “gee, it was hard to be anything other than white, male, and straight back then, right?” True enough, but it’s a little disingenuous in service of a pedestrian piece of fiction like this.