Good grief! Another book!

The Blue Star is Tony Earley’s sequel to Jim the Boy, a book my wife recommended I read after it was first published in 2001. She had to push hard for me to read it, as I was at that time buried deep in a history/non-fiction phase, but she kept promising me that I’d “love it.”

She was right. I think Jim the Boy is a quiet masterpiece.

The Blue Star picks up a few years after the first book left off. Young Jim is now a senior in high school. It’s the fall of 1941. War is coming to the small town in North Carolina where Jim Glass lives, and everyone knows it. Two of the boys from the previous year’s senior class have already gone off to the service, including Jim’s dreaded rival in all things (but especially baseball), Bucky Bucklaw. Jim has recently split from his girlfriend, and the lovely and feisty Norma – who Jim’s mother is crazy about – is treating him appropriately: like dirt. And now Jim finds himself drawn to the mysterious Crissie, the half white, half Indian daughter of a woman once loved by one of Jim’s beloved uncles. It’s “the uncles,” as they are known, who, along with Jim’s mother, have raised him, in the absence of his father, who died so young that Jim never knew him. Jim is trying hard to become the man he thinks he wants to be, but becoming an adult and becoming a man aren’t always the same thing. And when tragedy brings Jim’s rival back home again, Jim realizes just how hard being a man really is.

This novel contains not one serial killer, not one explicit sex scene, not one use of the “f word” or the “n word.” But that doesn’t mean it isn’t about real life. These are some of the most richly real characters I’ve ever read about. The dialogue crackles: real people do talk this way. These are people who work with their hands, who live on and tend farms, who get up early and labor in textile mills all day, who come home exhausted but proud. They make quilts and roast chickens and go to town dances and listen closely as the darkness being described on the radio each night creeps closer toward their lives. It’s a novel about “coming of age” in an age gone past, one that echoes like a passing freight train late at night, of gentle, decent people whose lives can suddenly become chaotic and frightening and filled with ghosts. More than anything, it’s about this one short passage:

“You have to choose to be a good man,” Uncle Zeno said. “You have to choose every minute of every day. As soon as you don’t, you’re lost.”

Jim the Boy and The Blue Star are two of the best-written pieces of contemporary fiction I have read in the last ten years or so. Read them both, in order. They’re relatively short, so read them slowly. Savor them.

Because when you’re finished, you’ll be sad that you have to leave these fine people behind, for now.