Buckeye by Patrick Ryan review – behind the American dream

This luminous and tender 20th-century saga of wounded souls and small-town secrets has a deep melancholy

I am not the kind of reader who naturally gravitates toward slice-of-life Americana. I’m an enthusiast for the sort of American fiction where cowboys make dolent pronouncements while staring into fires, sure – but less the kind where people are generally nice, and go to places called things like “Fink’s Drugstore” to drink “root beer floats”.

So when Buckeye – the new novel from American author Patrick Ryan, whose collections of short fiction have garnered comparisons to William Faulkner and JD Salinger – clunked obstreperously on to my doorstep, I thought “you’ve got to respect a 440-pager”, and somewhat reluctantly pulled my little socks up for some Norman Rockwell-type business. And you know what? I now think slice-of-life Americana is good, actually.