Ron McLarty’s “Art in America”

By Jenny Shank, 7-14-08

Art in America
By Ron McLarty
Viking Penguin, 366 pages, $25.95

Ron McLarty‘s new comic novel Art in America begins by listing the “Selected Works” of its protagonist, Steven Kearney, a 48-year-old writer who, despite decades of diligent work, has never published a book or seen one of his plays produced.  All his novels are epic in scope, topping 1000 pages, and his plays are equally ambitious and lengthy. 

As the book opens in New York, Kearney has just lost his girlfriend and his apartment and a car grazes him as he lugs his collected works in two trash bags over to the apartment of his best friend Roarke, a lesbian theater director.  A reprieve comes for Kearney in the form of an invitation to spend the summer in Creedemore, Colorado (a fictional town in the San Luis Valley that resembles Creede), where he will write and produce a play about the history of the town.  Having no other prospects, Kearney packs up and heads West, where he encounters a dizzying cast of characters and takes a shot at true love and artistic fulfillment.

It’s easy to surmise that McLarty has put a little of himself into the character of Kearney.  Until a few years ago, McLarty was a successful actor and audio book performer but had never managed to publish one of his many novels.  He recorded an audio version of his book The Memory of Running, which Stephen King found and praised in 2003 as “the best book you can’t read,” resulting in a $2 million dollar two-book deal for the then 56-year-old McLarty.  And although Art in America is a heartfelt, witty novel, its flaws are the same as those that plague the works of Kearney: It feels much longer than its 366 pages, and because it packs so much in, some of its characters are left as undeveloped caricatures, plenty of material feels extraneous, and the threads of its numerous subplots can be difficult to follow.

But Art in America will win over readers who stick it out by the time it reaches its climax, set amid the production of Kearney’s Creedemore play that, for much of the book, doesn’t appear as though it’s going to come off. 

Just before Kearney arrives in Creedemore, a heated dispute erupts because a man in his nineties named Ticky Lettgo shoots at a group of river rafters who are passing over his stretch of the Upper Rio Grande River.  The leader of the rafting group, “Mountain Man” Red Fields, takes Ticky to court, and the town and the state choose up sides, between those who feel the river should be open to all to use and those who believe property rights are king.  During Kearney’s sojourn in Creedemore, the trial plays out, inciting chaos and violence from eco-terrorists and bumbling rednecks and everyone in between, while Boston transplant and town sheriff Petey Meyers tries to keep the peace.

Meanwhile, Kearney’s got a play to write.  The vigorous Miss Wilma Kirk, who invited him, serves as his guide to the complicated history of the area.  Kearney meets countless characters who want to assure that their pet interests—from the regional geology to the conquistadors to the Hispanic heritage of the town to the role of Kit Carson in its history—are given voice in the final play.  The newly single Steven is immediately attracted to Mollie Dowie, a local artist hired to paint a historical mural for Creedemore that serves as the inspiration for the structure of his play, which he calls a “word mural.” Dowie lost a breast to cancer, and is hesitant to start a relationship; McLarty’s portrayal of her is fresh and touching.

But Sheriff Petey Meyers ends up stealing the show of Art in America, emerging as a stronger, more fleshed-out character than even Kearney.  Meyers left Boston after his partner, a black man named Reedy, was killed.  Meyers is still haunted by the loss, and speaks of and to Reedy as if he were still alive, channeling his partner’s wisdom whenever he confronts a challenging policing situation.  He calls everyone “cockhounds,” a word that ends up entering common usage in Creedemore, and his monologues bring the world of the gritty Boston underbelly vividly to life, somehow perfectly meshing with the Colorado situation at hand.

McLarty also excels at comic description, such as this one of a character named Cowboy Bob Panousus, who winds up playing the role of his hero, Kit Carson, in the play:

“He was five feet five inches tall, with nearly three of those inches indebted to the cognac-colored, lizard Tony Lamas.  His navy wranglers were snug, pressed, and boot-cut.  A Western embroidered tailored shirt in plum was worn sleeves down and buttoned to the neck, finished off with a horsehair tasseled necktie, gold like the colossal oval belt buckle fitted with a genuine black onyx stone that caught the sun just perfectly as he lowered himself out of the Chevy Tahoe and down to the street.”

Art in America is a flawed but enjoyable and ultimately satisfying novel, and although McLarty lives in Manhattan, he seems have firsthand knowledge of Colorado, and has done a fine job depicting a believable (if a little exaggerated) San Luis Valley town.

Ron McLarty will discuss Art in America at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) on Wednesday, July 16 at 7:30 p.m.