Buckeye, by Patrick Ryan: A Sweeping but Intimate 20th Century Epic

Both of my grandparents on my mother's side were born, raised, lived their entire lives, and died in Tiffin, Ohio -- a small town in the northeast about an hour from Toledo. Dick and Dorothy Puffenberger were front and center in my mind as I read Patrick Ryan's debut novel, Buckeye.

Covering a half-century of the lives of two couples and their families, Buckeye is set in the fictional town of Bonhomie, Ohio (though real places I know well from visiting my grandparents, like Findlay, Fostoria, and yes, even Tiffin make appearances). Margaret and her husband Felix, and Becky and her husband Cal are the same generation as my grandparents, so it felt like I was reading a sort of fictional version of the lives of their friends and neighbors.

But even if you're not lucky to have had grandparents who lived in a small town in Ohio, if you enjoy a good multi-generational saga chock-full of secrets, lies, regrets, deception, and drama, you'll dig Buckeye. 

At once sweeping and intimate, Buckeye is about how life even in small town America is not insulated from the effects of massive world events. Beginning with World War II and ending in the 1980s, Ryan tells us the story of the uniquely American 20th century through the eyes of these two couples who become inextricably intertwined. 

One of things that Ryan does well here is making it possible for readers to continue to empathize with good people who make bad decisions. That's such a difficult thing to pull off in fiction -- and especially given how we're programmed these days to write someone off for a single indiscretion. Sometimes good people do bad things. How they respond to those poor choices is the meat of this novel, and Ryan seems to be saying, how they really should be judged. 

My biggest complaint about this novel is that, even at 450 pages, it feels too short. We spend more than two-thirds of the novel on just a few years. But then we sort of do the "fast forward montage" thing and skip ahead too quickly. It felt like there was opportunity to really flesh out the relationships between the couples' kids and give them more room to grow on the page. I'm probably in the minority on this -- no one likes long books anymore. But I felt like this could've been a 900-page masterpiece in the vein of David Wroblewski's Familiaris or Abraham Verghese's The Covenant of Water. 

Still, what's here is fantastic -- and it's already become a huge word-of-mouth hit. Grab your drink of choice, your coziest sweater, and lose yourself in this story.