Flashes of Panic

The reason I wrote about re-reading last week was that on Thursday I picked up a book I hadn’t touched since I interviewed the author two years ago. Life at These Speeds by Jeremy Jackson was pretty startling the first time I read it, a running book that wasn’t about running, that wasn’t about what some runner wished their running had been like or what some non-runner thought running was like.

This reading, I am being reminded of something I noticed last time, which is how Jackson’s characters talk to each other. They all talk like intellectual college students, but it’s a front; they still act like high school kids, trying to be knowledgeable adults but hurting each other because they don’t really know what they’re doing. Kevin Schuler, the narrator, is like an uncomfortable dream, a spectator in his own body, watching himself as he does things that he knows, somewhere, are poor choices, fighting something in his own head that he doesn’t understand. Jackson absolutely nailed that aspect of adolescence; I didn’t like Kevin because I wanted to be him (though there were moments) but because I remember when I was him.

Minus the van crash that kills all my teammates, of course. And the state-record track times.

This time I focused more attention of Schuler’s “coach” (who seldom gives him much advice, or needs to,) Gregory Altrabashar. Despite his perpetually put-upon bearing, he appears to be the only one who understands just what’s going on from the start, as when he says to Kevin after nearly every race, “Kevin, did you do this for you?” Kevin seems to be deriving no joy from his racing, chasing something he can’t catch, yet when he is forced to stop racing for a year he becomes physically ill, insomniac and even more detached than he had been before.

A problem Jackson had to face was the primary difficulty of centering a novel around running. There must always be a climactic race, even in a biography, and there are really only two ways to conclude that race. It has to be well written to make it worthwhile. The closing race in Once a Runner is so real I once checked my pulse while reading it (120); Jackson found an entirely different way of handling the problem in Life at These Speeds which, unfortunately, I can’t share without ruining the story.

If nothing else, it’s worth skimming the book for the absolutely surreal names Jackson comes up with for his supporting characters, like Altrabashar (which I’m sure I’ve misspelled) or Kevin’s teammate, Boblink Crustacean (which sounds like a Googlewhack, but isn’t, partly due to the book.)

Now playing: Can’t Make a Sound from Figure 8 by Elliott Smith