Olympus, Texas

 Olympus, Texas

By Stacey Swann

Finally got a school-year book under my belt. Been a bit slow going now that I'm back to work. So little
brain power left at the end of the day.

I picked up this novel almost solely based on the fact that it had an endorsement blurb on the front from  Richard Russo, whose Straight Man I still remember as laugh-out-loud funny -- and which I just learned is about to be turned into a television series. Go figure. Anyway, based on Russo's "Wildly entertaining" comment, I thought maybe this was a book in his vein of humor.

I can't say it was that, exactly. The book shines a spotlight on a prominent family in the tiny Texas town of Olympus. The family is dysfunctional. Peter, the patriarch, was in his past a serial philanderer who fathered several children with women other than his wife, June. She lives in a constant state of anger and wondering about whether the choice to stay with him was the right move for her and, more importantly, her family. One daughter, Thea, clearly thinks it was not. She has moved to Chicago in an attempt to escape her family and seethes contempt when around her mother. Others say it contributed to the horrific choice by her other son, March, to sleep with the wife of his brother, Hap, whose reputation as kind and forgiving some call a sanctimonious relic of his mother's silent suffering. And then there are Artie and Arlo, twins by Peter's affair with a spineless woman named Lee.

All of these issues come to a head when March, exiled after his affair, returns to town, which seems to set into motion an otherwise unthinkable tragedy. Arlo, jealous of his sisters newfound relationship, dares her to shoot at a faraway object in the river, which he knows to be her beau but which she thinks might be a rabid skunk. Before Arlo can reveal his subterfuge, the shot is taken -- and it hits its mark. Who is to blame, really? Peter? June? Arlo? March? And what does it mean to forgive? And what does it all have to do with the ancient Greeks?

I did appreciate this novel, though I will say it caught me at an inopportune time. The beginning of the school year is not a time to pick up a Greek tragedy, particularly if you are expecting it to be a comedy. Then again, maybe the difference between the two isn't as much as we all might hope.