Buckeye by Patrick Ryan is a beautifully written novel about a fictional town in Ohio (Bonhomie), not far from Toledo.  If you’ve ever lived in a small town, it may feel like home to you. The span is immediate pre-World War II through the 1970’s, and the focus is on three generations of each of two families.  What a reader might assume to be a paean to America in a simpler time – a goal of “Make America Great Again?” – evolves to display all the underlying fissures and dysfunction that were glossed over or repressed in mid-20^th century America and became increasingly manifest as the years passed.

Both of the families have secrets, lies which damage them before and after their revelation. There was family dysfunction with grandparents modeling behavior with negative effects on their children. And those children who, as adults, individually seek to mitigate those effects on their own children or, in at least one case, replicate wrongs visited upon them. As members of wartime generations (post WWI, WWII and the Vietnam War), there are tragedies and losses. There are stigmas from physical disability and repressed homosexuality. The two families that Ryan focuses on are intriguingly revealed to have one secret that is shared between the two, a buried scandal that is key to driving the narrative.  

Most importantly, perhaps, this story is told with empathy, each character made understandable and relatable in the most human ways.  The author, who spent eight years on this book,  explores the many ways that love expresses itself, the wounds that we inflict on each other, the growth of understanding, compassion and forgiveness.  Buckeye has an epic sweep to the narrative but is intimate in a most profound way, and all of this is set against a magnificent re-creation of what life looked like in small-town America in the 20^th century, details rendered in a most comprehensive and painterly way.  Buckeye is one of those special books that, when the last page is turned, you want to savor longer.

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