New West Book Review

Don’t Ask Why: Tim Sandlin’s ‘Lydia’

By Matthew Irwin, Guest Writer, 4-22-11

Jackson Hole residents share this trait with comic-book superheroes: their origin stories tend to be more interesting than their immediate circumstances. That may be why the bulk of Tim Sandlin’s new book, Lydia (Sourcebooks Landmark, 432 pages, $24.99), rests on a centenarian’s life-tale, while the arc compelling the novel rides on a Gotham City street-level villain with the determination of Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men. The title character connects these storylines in the narrator’s quest to understand human behavior.

“Why do we treat those we love so much worse than those we don’t like?” the narrator, Sam, writes. “Lydia would starve before not tipping a waitress. She’d go back home if the alternative was parking in a handicapped slot, yet she lied to and browbeat the family she loved.”

Lydia begins on Mother’s Day 1993. Lydia Callahan steps out of a federal prison in California after two years hard time for mailing President Regan’s dog a poisoned chew toy. The commander-in-chief had irked Lydia by ignoring her demand that he appoint a woman attorney general. Previous to her arrest, Lydia ran a publishing house for feminist literature in GroVont, Wyoming, the fictional town north of Jackson where Sandlin has staged three previous novels (collectively called “The GroVont Trilogy”). Her son, Sam, runs the Virgin Birth Home for Unwed Mothers, aka Madonnaville – it’s a safe place for pregnant young women to give birth, coupled with an adoption service.

Sam’s also a former writer of young adult novels, detective stories and a “Plucky Women in Jeopardy” romance. Though all three genres are generally formulaic, Sam chooses to tell us about some of the strict rules for romances: the woman must rescue herself, and the sex scenes have to be lengthy and explicit. “Harlequins don’t skip parts,” Sam writes. Sandlin fans—or “Sandlinistas,” as he calls them on his website—might appreciate the reference to the first GroVont book, Skipped Parts.

Lydia steps out of prison and calls her granddaughter, Shannon, to pick her up from the Jackson Hole airport. Though initially reluctant—seeing as she lives in North Carolina—Shannon concedes, using the occasion to get out of her own prison, namely a bad relationship. Lydia pretends to be hard and selfish, especially in her dealings with Shannon; however, she is not only a destroyer of illusions (“The hooker’s heart of gold is a male fantasy,” she tells Sam. “Ninety-five percent of all whores think men are scum.”), but also an catalyst for the other characters, in stasis with their misery (“You’re content because you think you have no hope, so you may as well eat and read your life away,” she tells Shannon).

In accordance with the public service required by her patrol, Lydia begins interviewing longtime Jackson Hole resident Oly Pedersen for his 100th birthday. Originally from Montana, Oly came to Jackson Hole via Yellowstone National Park, where he was a ranger for a number of years. When he tries to start his tale at the beginning, Lydia cuts him off: “We don’t need the filler material,” she said. “You should skip growing up and start when you first came to Teton County.” Fortunately, Oly persists, because his real life existed in the journey that ended in Jackson Hole. His wife dying in Yellowstone wouldn’t mean anything to us if we didn’t know about his first love, his frenemy Bill, the bank robbery, the prostitute Swamp Fox, his days fighting for Canada in the Great War and Armistice, nor his time as a drunken artist in Paris. Oly’s tragedy is a too-late cautionary tale for the other characters (“Let that be a lesson to you,” he says), and his story confirms Sam’s warning to readers that history repeats itself.

Meanwhile, our comic book villain, Leroy, has begun his journey to track down Roger, the 20-something ranch hand who has become a sure thing for certain unwed mothers, one of whom calls their activities “scrogging” or “bonking.” Occasionally going by the nickname Freedom, Leroy’s a filthy, cruel agent of destruction with a twisted sense of universal harmony, positioning himself as the fulcrum. I take the nickname to be both a commentary and a joke about one of our country’s founding principals. The commentary is on the emptiness of a society that values autonomy over compassion; the joke is on the kind of miserable, cruel drifter who would use the ideal of freedom to justify his selfishness. Here’s how Leroy justifies himself: for a while, he ran a hippie/druggie compound in Oklahoma. One day, his son, Hawk, whom he treated cruelly, ran away. Leroy blamed Mary Beth, so he forced her to help him kidnap a boy from a campground on Jackson Lake. (How they got from Oklahoma to Jackson Hole escapes me.) Mary Beth, in her guilt, returned the boy to the region from whence they took him, dropping him off at Madonnaville.

Roger doesn’t remember any of this, because he has a blank space in his memory. But a local man in Jackson wrote a novel based about his stepson’s kidnapping and wife’s subsequent suicide, called Disappearance, then the man moved to Southern California. Lydia, feigning benevolence, offers to take Roger to meet this novelist who just might be Roger’s stepfather. It doesn’t hurt that the man lives close to Lompoc federal prison, where Lydia’s hubby still resides for attempting to help Lydia escape punishment for trying to kill the president’s dog. The guilt of his imprisonment weighs heavily on her. Also along for the ride: Oly, who threatens to rat Lydia out if she doesn’t take him along, and Shannon who has decided that Roger is the cure for what ails her. Leroy is on their tail.

Sandlin’s style is wry and clever. Like Kurt Vonnegut, he writes out of a genuine desire to understand humanity; like Tom Robbins, he attempts a sincere articulation of the female plight; but Lydia suffers from lack of an authentic crisis. By relying on archetypal characters—a man surrounded by women, a comic book villain, a bawdy matron, a story-telling old-timer, a woman-in-crisis and a mysterious ranch hand, Sandlin misses the opportunity to describe the difficulties of living in a remote place—the way loneliness tears into people, causing them to fight with loved ones over the smallest gestures, the way they seek conflict to remember they’re alive, or the way they cling to the past to prove that they had lived.

While Leroy is a melodramatic device the book could do without, Oly’s history is a testament to Sandlin’s ability to tell a compelling and empathetic tale full of insight, compassion and patience. And even without his memory problems, Roger is a complex character. He’s generous, expressive and funny. “Talking about the purpose of life is the single biggest waste of time in human society,” he says. “It’s worse than television.” Maybe purpose is too much to ask, but stringing together the past can be comforting when trying to understand why people do the things they do. The origin stories in Sandlin’s book provide us the cause to the effect, restoring our sense of balance, even if they don’t offer many answers.

“For the past twenty-five years, whenever I’ve had a question I couldn’t answer, I’d write a hundred-thousand-word novel in which people acted out my problem, and by the finish of the book, the question was either answered, or it had vanished into the pages,” Sam writes. “But this time … I’m no closer to understanding.”

Tim Sandlin will visit several regional bookstores, including Valley Bookstore in Jackson (April 23, 7 p.m.), Boulder Book Store (April 25, 7:30 p.m.) Barnes & Noble stores in Fort Collins (April 26, 7 p.m.) and Colorado Springs (April 27, 7 p.m.), Denver’s Tattered Cover (Colfax, April 28, 7:30 p.m.), and Cheyenne’s Barnes & Noble (April 29, 7 p.m.).

Matthew Irwin is editor of the alt-weekly JH Weekly and editor-in-chief of the recently revived literary journal JH Review.

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