Author:Dean Salter

ISBN: 0973066318

Genre: fiction/modern American

The following review was contributed by: John Walsh & CLICK TO VIEW John Walsh's Reviews

Jason Seeley is born into a stable, loving family in small town USA. His parents are estranged from their own parents because of their love for each other and so more determined than ever to bring up their children in a warm, open and happy environment. Jason grows up to be an intelligent, athletic young man who, early on, gets the girl of his dreams.

In these early years, the main trauma of Jason’s life is the involvement of his girlfriend with a lowlife drug dealer who leads into a downward spiral from which she is only rescued after extensive medical intervention and the devotion of Jason and her own parents. They are reconciled and he goes off to university in Boston, where his intellectual life blossoms unexpectedly. By the time he is due to graduate, however, he faces the prospect of being drafted into a war which he has come to realise it would be wrong for him to fight. He becomes a draft dodger and spends the rest of the novel seeking to come to terms of his new life, his exile, his rejection of his country and what appears to be his country’s rejection of him. This is quite a lengthy process but it does show a personal journey that mirrors to some extent that of society as a whole. In fact, it would have been a better book if the contrasts and similarities between the personal and the public were more explicitly made. 

This is an interesting and quite nicely written novel. It does have the feeling of a confessional about it to the extent that it sends the reviewer to seek the author’s blurb to see if this is a disguised memoir. As a result of this, there is a tendency for the author to tell the reader about the character of the various people introduced into the narrative rather than showing their nature through the ways in which they interact with each other and the world. Nevertheless, although many of the characters seem a little too obsessed with the importance of personal relationships, others do have some indications of an intellectual hinterland and are capable of discussing and thinking about ideas and events.

I look forward to reading more by the author Dean Salter and seeing whether he is capable of developing themes beyond the personal.

John Walsh, Shinawatra International University, June 2005