FOLLOWING TOMMY by Bob Hartley, review posted 28 October 2013

FOLLOWING TOMMY
BOB HARTLEY
Out of Print; various prices from multiple sellers

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: FOLLOWING TOMMY tells the story of the O'Days, two young brothers living in an Irish American, wor king class neighborhood on Chicago's West Side in the 1960s. As thieves they are the bane of the neighborhood until the arrival of the first African American family.

"FOLLOWING TOMMY is a powerful, mesmerizing debut novel by Bob Hartley. Sharp-edged and honed to perfection, this novel takes us back to the Irish ghetto of the West Side of Chicago in the early '60s. These characters pack-a-punch to the gut: tough, perceptive and shrewd. An unforgettable read."—Meg Tuite

"In Hartley's novel, set in the heartland of America, we dive deeply into disturbing pathos of intriguing and relatable characters. His keen narrative balances so the lively dialogue, and we feel we know, or at the very least, can relate to so much of his book. I urge you to read this remarkable debut, FOLLOWING TOMMY."—Robert Vaughan

I RECEIVED THIS BOOK FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA THE SMALL PRESS BOOK REVIEW. THANK YOU.

My Review: This first novel has the virtue of brevity. The language that Bob Hartley, whose MFA was awarded by the University of Pittsburgh, deploys in service of his story is a model of concision. The story the author tells is, to my ears, honest and true and quite devastatingly probable. The two O'Day brothers are mildly violent, badly educated petty criminals. The working-class Chicago they inhabit is divided between churchgoers and wise guys, and they are the latter, to their mother's despair. Her early death deprives the boys of nothing in the way of guidance, as they are in their late teens at the time. Her contribution to the story is minimal, so the reader doesn't miss her either. This is probably a function of the shortness of the book.

Perhaps my less-than-ecstatic response comes from my inability to relate to Jacky, our first-person narrator. He's a straight teenaged hooligan whose desire for and discussion of the girls he imagines while masturbating grated on me. It might also be that I internalized more completely than I'd like to examine the class prejudices of my family and regard the "family" of drunks and hooligans that the O'Days represent with lips pressed firmly together so as not to curl them while dismissing these common-as-pig-tracks people with labels like "white trash" and "bogtrotting shanty Irish bastards."

Whatever the source of my absence of goodwill towards the book, it took me a month to read its 104pp and I was angry the entire time I was reading it. I suspect that Hartley deserves praise for this, because I responded to the characters as real people, and the story as more of a confession than a novel. Jacky and Tommy commit acts of idiot violence, they get caught and suffer at the hands of a casually brutal neighborhood cop (nicknamed "the Giant"), and while I don't like the cop any better than I like any of the other people, I at least felt he had some purpose in his viciousness that I could relate to if not condone.

The evocation of the early-1960s changing world, the one in which African-American people like the O'Days' new neighbors on Menard Street, were at last imagining a better and fairer world was within sight, was painfully spot-on. Hartley gets the sociopath Tommy's response to an African-American family moving into the Irish neighborhood chillingly accurately, at least from the people I've known over the years who had this experience. The fact that I experienced none of it, as I lived in a lily-white world of privilege and watched the race wars on our 26-inch color TV, makes that observation suspect. But Hartley brings me close enough to these yobbos that I can smell their greasy hair and cigarette stink, so I trust that he's got the responses down pat.

Encountering the O'Day brothers, then, wasn't in any particular a homecoming experience. It was an outrage. Jacky's passive, follow-the-leader nature caused me the kind of pain that sucking on an alum stick causes...puckery-lipped, tongue-curling, bad-tasting spitlessness. Tommy, the sociopathic shitheel older brother that Jacky follows, evoked the kind of nauseated disdain that I find myself prone to when confronted with blank-eyed hate-filled people. That Tommy's violent actions, escalated to new heights, lead to the conclusion the novel presents is a grim reality of life lived on those terms. That Jacky makes his decision about what kind of life he wants to lead in terms of Tommy and his actions is sadly believable.

Hear my passionate disdain for the people brought to life here and decide for yourself what kind of reading experience this short novel will be for you. One thing I am quite sure of: You will not be left indifferent. Angry, perhaps. Not indifferent, not bored. That is a lot more than I can say for most books I'm exposed to. If this debut is a reliable indicator of Bob Hartley's intended career path, his writing will earn him a following among the Jim Thompson and Donald Ray Pollock fans.

***
I first reviewed FOLLOWING TOMMY for The Small Press Book Review, specialists in bringing attention to the underknown and often unsung writers and publishers doing some of the best work in fiction publishing today.

Small presses, ones with editors and designers and passionate owners, are doing what we most need done in the Groves of Readerly Delight. They are using their critical faculties to decide what kind of work they want their own names associated with. They are making editorial changes, guiding writers to the best book that the story they want to tell can make. They are surviving on sales that make Amazon's shrinkage (theft and damage) allowances look like titanic bestselling sales department wet dreams.

I feel about this the way I feel about censorship: Don't let some witsy-teensy group of strangers make your aesthetic decisions for you! Find books by first-timers AND BUY THEM. Find small presses that publish things you're interested in AND BUY THEM. Vote for diversity and choice the only way that matters in business: with your dollars.

It matters, and it matters a lot, that us real readers who love our chosen hobby do this. Even if it's taking a chance with our scarce reading allowances. One purchase a month from a small press and/or a first-time author! Give the writers, the publishers, the editors whose labor is at best meagerly rewarded some much-needed practical support.

I already do. And I promise you I'm poorer than you are.