Kerry Shale’s narration is pebble-voiced and compelling. When I hit a line, “This is day. A never ending rehearsal with a cast that changes all the time but never gets it right …” I’m invested, I’m all in. 

Walker is a returned soldier - a Canadian who served in Normandy and other European countries late in the war and who is now in the USA. Initially in New York, he crossed the country and sets himself up in Los Angeles, a growing city that is carving itself by road networks into divisions separated from each other, destroying the orange groves to create concrete deserts. Strangling itself, as a friend of Walker’s puts it. 

The writing is cinematic. An assembly of brief scenes at times. Descriptions are pithy and evocative. There are lists of places in a streetscape, lists of items in a deli, in a market stall, that are somehow better than mere lists. Walker is pursuing work in newspapers and as he is taken around, various stimuli bring back his war experiences, overwhelming him. 

And post-war US history unfolds. Eisenhower, HUAC, Emmett Till and Rosa Parkes, Humphrey Bogart’s death and, recurringly, the increasingly accelerating transformation of LA from a city to a road network. And there is Walker’s  reappearing friend Billy - always a bit worse for wear from the interim period and always speaking some everyman truth. 

The book is said to be a form of narrative poetry. In a physical form that may be far more evident than it was as audio, where its descriptions were vivid but not discernibly poetry. 

There is a form of illustration where many distinct images are reduced in size, say to that of a small postage stamp, and then they are carefully assembled with thought to their tonings. The final work, when seen from a distance where the details of the “stamps” are indiscernible, reveal another image altogether, commonly a face. I found myself pondering that as I read this book of vignettes. 

I found it compelling if not deeply satisfying. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

#areadersjourney