Right up front, I will admit that any novel that begins with
a boy’s fascination with a Dwight Yoakam song and ends, years later, with that
same young man singing another Dwight Yoakam song to a crowd of a couple of
thousand people, has already scored some major points with me. Jason Skipper’s debut novel Hustle does exactly that. But more importantly, what comes between
those two scenes is one of the most gut wrenching coming-of-age stories that I
have read in a long while.
Chris Saxton was born into a family of con men. His grandfather and his father have, more
often than not, made their living by moving from one scam to the next until it
finally catches up with them.
Ten-year-old-Chris’s introduction to his grandfather comes on the day he
and his father kidnap the old man from his Florida shack so they can drive him
back to Texas to dry him out before his alcoholism can kill him. He has already had to deal with the years his
father spent in prison, but, in a way, the day Chris meets his grandfather is
the day he starts to grow up.
Hustle is told in
a series of vignettes that focus on Chris’s life between the ages of 9 and 18,
years during which the only constant is his love for music and his guitar. His rural upbringing in1980s Texas is not an
easy one. Early on, Chris is expected to
help earn his keep by working with his grandfather selling questionably-fresh
shrimp by the side of the road – even if all his participation does is provide
more hours of free time for his woman-chasing father to barhop. As his family struggles and hustles for its
very survival, Chris often finds himself feeling the brunt of the frustrations
caused by the economic desperation of the adults closest to him.
Jason Skipper |
In Chris Saxton, Jason Skipper has created an unforgettable
character. Here is a young man with more
moral strength and courage than any of the adults in his everyday world. He sees his father and grandfather for what
they are, and does not buy the self-delusional images they try so hard to
create for themselves. Emotionally
closest to his mother, Chris understands that her poor parental decisions stem
from her desperation to create a secure home for herself before she loses her
looks. He understands – but her weakness
hurts him deeply. Through it all, he
sees his music as the best, maybe the only, chance to escape the life into
which he was born.
Hustle is a good
story – and Jason Skipper tells it well.
Having myself spent a bit of time selling fresh shrimp from a pickup
truck alongside an old man, I was particularly taken with the realism of the
scenes in which Chris and his grandfather do the same ( scenes this vividly
painted surely must come from Jason Skipper’s own life experience). Throw in a slew of wild, but believable,
secondary characters and you have a very fine debut novel here, one of the best
reading surprises I have had in 2011.
Rated at: 5.0
You had me at Dwight Yoakam.
ReplyDeleteYeah...it's great that Dwight has reached such a level of "coolness" that he is mentioned in books and everyone is just expected to know who he is. I love that.
ReplyDeleteI'll have to tell you about the first time I saw Dwight in person...at a local record shop where no one had a clue who he was.