Tire Grabbers: John Bennett's new book

One of the things I’ve been doing for the last few weeks is reading John Bennett’s book,

Tire Grabbers.
Publisher:Hcolom Press
Cover Design:Trey Smith
ISBN:097767830X
Publish Date:May 2006
No. of Pages:388
Cost:$19.95
Purchase From:John Bennett
Business:Hcolom Press
Email: dasleben@elltel.net

I finally finished it. It wasn’t a difficult read. It’s just that my chosen activities leave me with discretionary reading time of about 20 minutes a day. I was first introduced to Tire Grabbers by Gene Fowler. He CC'd me in a series of emails that he exchanged with John Bennett and others about the book (those discussions are interesting in their own right). But, the discussion went over my head because I hadn't yet read the book. Well, now I have and I have deliberately not gone back to read the earlier emails touching on the book because I wanted to approach the book with no preconceptions. One of the things I did remember is that it began as a book for children (the age group that could read a Harry Potter book without too much problem).

Old maxims aside,I do begin evaluating a book by judging its cover. My reaction to the cover was that it looked professional, but it didn’t give me any clue as to its contents. I flipped the book over and the back cover with Bennett’s picture was off-putting. It didn’t exactly give me a lot of confidence in the book. A first novel with the author’s picture covering the bulk of the back cover suggests “vanity press” to my possibly jaded bookstore browsing mind. I wouldn’t have bothered to open it if I didn’t know Bennett’s work already. But I was still curious. I’ve never read anything by John except his Shards, and although I am an admirer of them, they don’t give any hint that Bennett could handle a novel with it’s sustained complexity. I mean, the man can sketch, but can he paint?

I still hadn’t begun to read the book because I was trying to get a feel for it. I thumb through it, and noticed there is a glossary at the back. That’s a real head smacker for me. The book would go back on the shelf with a slight shudder. I don’t read fiction books that have glossaries at the back. If the learning curve is going to be that steep, I don’t have time. So I set it down and didn’t come back to it for a few weeks.

When I did pick it up again, I started reading it. I had forgotten about the glossary at the end. I didn’t need it. The characters and situations were easy enough to figure out in the context of the narrative. I don’t go looking for deeper meanings when I read a novel for the first time, and I am not particularly bothered if I don’t get what’s going on right away. I figure if I stay with the book for a while it will either become clearer or it won’t.

There's a nice mix of protagonist(s) and antagonists, enough to keep me reading to find out what was going to happen next. The otherworld/time qualities of the setting are consistent enough for me to be able to suspend my disbelief. I was a little annoyed by some of the names; they felt a little bit too much like labels (allegorical). The forces of good and evil were fairly clearly drawn (as they should be in a novel written with the younger reader in mind, Moby Dick et al). I don’t want to do an explication of ideas in the book other than to say they were very much like the kinds of visions created by William Bake in his little read prophetic poems where he created his own mythology.

I thought it very successful for about two thirds of the book, then the narrator shifted to a character introduced from out of nowhere, a little girl who was an ancestor of the protagonist for the first part of the book, and it seemed to me that book was trying too hard to become meaningful in some philosophical literary way at that point. I kinda liked the creeping moloch influence at the end; God’s material/commercial peer as it were, but for me the narrative switch was more irritating than enlightening.

My overall reaction is that it’s a good book written by a poet/writer who has honed his observational skills and knows how to use them to create scenes that seem alive and real (even when they are fantastical) as part of a complex narrative. But the ending seems tacked on and forced in to a shape that “means” something in much the way George Herbert took his first book, Dune, and stretched it into a ponderous seminar for his philosophy.

Buy it. Judge for yourself. Novels by poets are by definition, collector's items.

Best,
Stephen Morse