Jim Dodge, Stone Junction: An Alchemical Potboiler , Grove Press, 1989."Starting with his mother's 'roundhouse' right to a nun's jaw, Stone Junction is a modern odyssey of one man's quest for knowledge and understanding in a world where revenge, betrayal, revolution, mind-bending chemicals, magic and murder are the norm. With a genuinely awesome scope, a stiletto-sharp wit and an array of utterly bizarre characters, Jim Dodge has woven a mesmerising and age-defining tale. Like a river constantly changing direction, Stone Junction is both stomach-clutchingly hilarious and heart-rendingly sad - and utterly compelling throughout. Prepare to step into a world where nothing is ever as it seems."
"A short but remarkable life leads wizard-in-training Daniel Pearse to the "junction" (entrance) of the legendary philosopher's stone, but not before this novel chronicles his extraordinary education. Daniel's unwed mother, Annalee, raises him in a shack that serves as the hideout for an ancient counterculture society, the Alliance of Magicians and Outlaws (AMO). Annalee falls for AMO poet Shamus Malloy, whose plot to steal plutonium results in her violent death. Young Daniel, in pursuit of his mother's betrayer, joins AMO and discovers a faculty that includes Wild Bill Weber on meditation and survival; rancher Mott Stocker on sex and drugs; Willie the Click on safecracking; and Bad Bobby Sloane on poker. Daniel wants to learn who betrayed Annalee, but is distracted by the task of stealing a glowing, perfectly spherical diamond from the White Sands Proving Grounds, an easy proposition for the well-schooled youth. But instead of relinquishing the stone to AMO leader Volta, as he had sworn to, Daniel surrenders to total obsession with its mysteries. Aptly subtitled "an alchemical potboiler," and smartly crafted, Dodge's third novel may be his first cult classic." - Publishers Weekly
"Potboiler," alchemical or not, is an apt description of this book. Pretentiously divided into four parts labeled Air, Earth, Water, and Fire, it chronicles the life of Daniel Pearse and his waif mother Annalee, who run a safe house for outlaws. One of them, Shamus Malloy, a poet and "alchemist" who dramatically wears a black glove over his scarred hand, leads them into an aborted plutonium heist in which Daniel's mother is killed. The counterculture alchemical secret society (AMO) to which Malloy belongs persuades Daniel to steal a prize diamond from the government. He does, and it is indeed the Philosopher's Stone that renders Daniel divine and annihilates the thieves who have used him. A fair idea, but hardly worth 373 pages of sex, violence, contrivances, and obscenities." - Kenneth Mintz
"When Daniel Pearse's mother dies in an unsuccessful plutonium heist, he is left to grow up under the tutelage of a succession of merry pranksters who form a part of an ancient and loose alliance of 'alchemists, magicians, and outlaws'. His teachers instruct him in the arts of forgery, sex, drugs, disguise, meditation, safe-cracking, gambling and, finally, vanishing - real, physical disappearance - before unleashing him on an audacious thieving mission constructed by a man who knows more than he is letting on about his mother's death. A murder mystery, a coming-of-age romance, a pre-techno-thriller techno-thriller: this is all these things and more. Dodge whips characters into life with his customary skill and rapidity: a succession of loony tunes, crazy braves and oversized Mark Twain caricatures populate the twisted highways of the novel, never failing to amuse and occasionally managing to move. The book starts well and tightly but past the death of Daniel's mother it loses emotional focus and spirals quickly beyond the author's control. Echoes of the Illuminatus! Trilogy and Catch-22 abound through a succession of somewhat arbitrary set-pieces which are eventually unified in what appears to be an authorial afterthought.This is an uneven novel, which at time is clearly trying too hard to ape the idiosyncratic style of fiction practised more successfully by Neal Stephenson, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. But Dodge writes vividly and imaginatively, and at its best this is a dazzling and hilarious glimpse intro a uniquely bizarre world." - Kirkus Review
"IF WE ACCEPT THE NOTION THAT USING POWER AGAINST THE powerless is wrong, a clear enough set of corollaries begins to emerge. We become able to distinguish, as populations (thought not always their rulers) have usually been able to do, between outlaws and evil-doers, between outlawry and sin. Not much analysis is needed, because it is something we can sense in all its dead-serious immediacy. "But all they are are bandits," the rulers whine indignantly, "motivated only by greed." Sure. Except that, having long known the difference between theft and restoration, we understand the terms of the deal whereby outlaws, as agents of the poor, being more skilled and knowledgeable in the arts of karmic readjustment, may charge no worse that an agent's fee, small enough too be acceptable to their clients, ample enough to cover the risks they have to take, and we always end up loving these folks, we cheer for Rob Roy, Jesse James, John Dillinger, at a level of passion usually reserved for sports affiliation.
Stone Junction is an outlaw epic for our own late era of corrupted romance and defective honor, with its own set of sleazy usurpers and Jacobitoid persistences - though the reader who's expecting eighties nostalgia or, have mercy, some even earlier-type romp through the pleasures of drugs, sex and rock and roll, should be warned that lurking herein, representing the bleaker interests of that consensus ever throbbing along despite and apart from all the fun and pleased to call itself "Reality," are to be found some mighty evil contract personnel, who produce some disagreeably mortal plot developments. One of the book's manifold graces is its author's choice never to dance away into wishful gobbledygook, remaining, rather, conscientiously grounded in our world as given, where, as Pam Tilli, in a slightly different context, reminds us, Destiny turns on a dime.
The other day in the street I heard a policeman in a police car, requesting over his loudspeaker that a civilian car blocking his way move aside and let him past, all the while addressing the drive of the car personally, by name. I was amazed at this, though people I tried to share it with only shrugged, assuming that of course the driver's name (along with height, weight and date of birth) had been obtained from the Motor Vehicle Department via satellite, as soon as the offending car's license number had been tapped into the terminal - so what?
Stone Junction was first published in 1989, toward the end of an era still innocent, in its way, of the cyberworld just ahead about to exponentially explode upon it. To be sure, there were already plenty of computers around then, but they were not quite so connected together as they were shortly to become. Data available these days to anybody were accessible then only to the Authorized, who didn't always know what they had or what to do with it. There was still room to wiggle - the Web was primitive country, inhabited only by a few rugged pioneers, half loco and wise to the smallest details of their terrain. Honor prevailed, laws were unwritten, outlaws, as yet undefinable, were few. The question had only begun to arise of how to avoid, or, preferably, escape altogether, the threat, indeed promise, of control without mercy that lay in wait down the comely vistas of freedom that computer-folk were imagining then - a question we are still asking. Where can you jump in the rig and head for any more -- who's out there to grant us asylum? If we stay put, what is left to us that is not in some way tainted, coopted, and colonized, by the forces of Control, usually digital in nature? Does anybody know the way to William Gibson's "Republic of Desire?" Would they tell if they knew? So forth.
You will notice in Stone Junction, along with its gifts of prophecy, a consistent celebration of those areas of life that tend to remain cash-propelled and thus mostly beyond the reach of the digital. It may be nearly the only example of a consciously analog Novel. Writers since have been obliged to acknowledge and deal with the ubiquitous cyber-realities that come more and more to set, and at quite a finely chopped-up scale too, the terms of our lives, not to mention calling into question the very traditions of a single author and a story that proceeds one piece after another - a situation Jim Dodge back then must have seen coming down the freeway, because the novel, ever contrarian, keeps its faith in the persistence of at least a niche market - who knows, maybe even a deep human need - for modalities of life whose value lies in their having resisted and gone the other was, against the digital storm - that are likely, therefore, to include pursuits more honorable that otherwise.
One popular method of resistance was always just to keep moving - seeking, not a place to hide out, secure and fixed, but a state of dynamic ambiguity about where one might be any given moment, along the lines of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Modern digital machines, however, managed quickly enough to focus the blurred ellipsoid of human freedom even more narrowly than Planck's Constant allows.
Equally difficult for those who might wish to proceed through life anonymously and without trace has been the continuing assault against the once-reliable refuge of the cash or non-plastic economy. There was a time not so long ago you could stroll down any major American avenue, collecting anonymous bank checks, get on some post office line, and send amounts in the range "hefty to whopping" anywhere, even overseas, no problem. Now it's down to $750 a pop, and shrinking. All to catch those Drug Dealers of course, nothing to do with the grim, simplex desire for more information, more control, lying at the heart of most exertions of power, whatever governmental or corporate (if that's a distinction you believe in).
You look at Windows 95 blooming on to the screen, and you think, Magic. But those who understand the system down to molecular level, nothing magical remains - all is revealed as simple repetitive drudgery, what we might even denounce as a squandering of precious operating time, were it not for Technology's discovery of how to tap into velocity situation prevailing down at the smaller scales - Nnggyyyyow-w-w! like the Interstate down there! -- and leave all the kazillions of brainless petty chores to their speedy new little devices.
Stone Junction's allegiance, however, is to the other kind of magic, the real stuff - long-practiced, all-out, contrary-to-fact, capital M Magic, not as adventitious spectacle, but as a pursued enterprise, in this very world we're stuck with, continuing to give off readings - analog indications - of being abroad and at work, somewhere out in it.
The fatal temptation for a fiction writer who must accept the presence, often a necessity, of magic in his own work, is to solve difficulties of plot, character and - more often than is generally suspected - taste, by conveniently flourishing some prop, some ad hoc amulet or drug, that will just take care of each problem as it arises. Fortunately for us here, Jim Dodge, by the terms of his calling, cannot indulge in that particular luxury. Magic is in fact hard and honorable work, and cannot be deployed at whim, not without consequences. A good deal of Daniel Pearce's character growth comes by way of learning the business and earning the powers - making Stone Junction a sort of magician's Bildungsroman - in which teachers, more or less unorthodox in their methods, appear to Daniel one by one, each with particular skills to pass along, all linked in an organization known as AMO, the Alliance of Magicians and Outlaws, a proto-Web that tends to connect more by way of pay phones, mail drops and ESP than linked terminals, over overseen by the enigmatic, not quite all-powerful Volta.
Through all this meanwhile runs a second plotline - a whodunit, in which Daniel must solve the uncompromisingly earthly question of who murdered his mother, Annalee Pearce, in an alleyway in Livermore, California when he was fourteen, complete with multiple suspects, false trails, the identity of the killer not revealed till the final pages. The story traverses a map of some moral intricacy, sure-footed as Chandler, providing twists as elegant as Agatha Christie, as all the while Daniel's education proceeds.
Will Bill Weber teaches meditation, fishing, waiting. Mott Stocker teaches Dope, its production and enjoyment. Ace safecracker Willie Clinton (yep) instructs the boy in how to get past all kinds of locks and alarms, rendering him thus semipermeable to certain protected parts of the world, setting him on his path to total dematerialization. For a while Daniel teams up with poker wizard Bad Bobby Sloane, roving the American highways in search of opportunities to risk capital in ways that cannot be officially controlled, climaxing in a legendary Lo-ball confrontation with the cheerfully louche Guido Caramba, in a literary poker passage as classic as it is funny, and in its appreciative devotion to a game where the moral stakes are so high, ranking up there with comparable parts of Kawabata's The Master of Go.
The shape-shifting genius Jean Bluer teaches Daniel the arts of disguise - another illicit skill, given it's already forbidden to impersonate policemen, doctors, lawyers, financial advisors, and who knows what all besides, as if someday all varieties of disguise will be statutory offences, including Impersonating an Ordinary Citizen. At last Daniel comes circling back to Volta, by now also one of his prime suspects in Annalee's death, who teaches him the final secret of Invisibility. None of your secular Wellsian tricks with refractive indices and blood pigmentation here, but rather the well-known and time-honored arts of ceasing to be material.
At last Daniel is ready to set off on the metaphysical Quest all these teachers have been preparing him for, which now swiftly unfolds as an elaborate technocaper, with a mysterious and otherworldly six-pound Diamond as its target. Too early in those days for keyboard dramas, emergency downloads, and cyber-fugues to relentless countdowns at the corner of the screen, the technology Daniel goes up against is mostly of analog sort - optical surveillance, strain-gauge sensor grids and thermostatic alarms - his nondigital responses to which include nerve gas, plastique, and invisibility.
He takes the Diamond, and then the Diamond takes him. For it turns out to be a gateway to elsewhere, and Daniel's life's tale an account of the incarnation of a god, not the usual sort that ends up bringing aid and comfort to earthly powers, but that favorite of writers, the incorruptible wiseguy known to anthropologists as the Trickster, to working alchemists as Hermes, to card-players everywhere as the Joker. We don't learn this till the end of the story, by which point, knowing Daniel as we've come to, we are free to take it literally as a real transfiguration, or as a metaphor of spiritual enlightenment, or as a description of Daniel's unusually exalted state of mind as he prepares to cross, forever, the stone junction between Above and Below - by this point, all of these possibilities have become equally true, for we have been along on one of those indispensable literary journeys, taken nearly as far as Daniel - through it is for him to slip along across the last borderline, into what Wittgenstein once supposed cannot be spoken of, and upon which, as Eliphaz Levi advised us - after "To know, to will, to dare" as the last and greatest of the rules of Magic - we must keep silent." - Thomas Pynchon
"Stone Junction, by Jim Dodge, is a book that was released at a time (1990) that cusped old and new worlds, divided by the age of modern technology. Set in the vast, wandering outlaw territory of America, the story of a boy's search for personal worth/spiritual enlightenment, is played out amongst a melee of characters as rich in dialogue as they are deep in spirit, all attempting to guide Daniel Pearse through his journey on the rough terrain of USA reality before computers and technology localised the globe.
Plot
The story begins ominously in an Iowa Custodian Institution run by Sisters of the Blessed Virgin. Annalee Faro Pearse, a girl being detained at the ward, gives birth to Daniel. Annalee escapes the ward after a deeply shocking and moving scene of violence between her and a nun, before hitting the road in an audacious bid for freedom.
The pair escape thanks to Smiling Jack, a truck driver who makes his living singing at truck stops for cash. Annalee and Daniel are offered a converted barn for a year by Jack, who lives on the road.
As a year passes, Smiling Jack doesn't return; It’s only four years later that he does, making Annalee a proposition on his return. He reveals his identity as a member of AMO, the Alliance of Magicians and Outlaws, a loose group of so called law breakers across the U.S.A, who all however share a subverted, philosophical, moral code of honour and allegiance.
It is decided by Smiling Jack, with Annalee’s permission, that Daniel will be trained by AMO and educated in the ways of the Alliance. What prevails is a series of characters that will shape and shift Daniel’s view of the world, bringing to the fore questions as miniscule as the everyday foibles of growing up, to the meaning if existence, and reality itself.
Wild Bill takes Daniel into the mountains to learn about survival, fishing, thinking and taking stock of the world around him. Mott shows Daniel the joys and pratfalls of pot, dope and drugs, both cultivation and inhalation. Bad Bobby whips Daniel around the menacing poker circuit of the U.S West, introducing him to shady characters well equipped in the art of both cards and acute psychology. Jean Bluer teaches Daniel the art of disguise, the ability to impersonate anyone on earth with the right techniques.
The stories denouement centres on the heist of a perfectly round diamond the size of a bowling ball. Although it’s whereabouts are known, little else is about this odd, clearly vastly precious gem. AMO believe it to contain something pivotal to understanding, whether about knowledge, self enlightenment or the universe. Nothing is known, only that it glows an ethereal light, and AMO’s hungriness for knowledge will stop at nothing to retrieve the diamond kept in a U.S State owned and protected vault. It is Daniel who must take the diamond, but the diamond is a hard thing to take, as the taker risks being taken by the diamond itself.
Use of Dialogue and Magical Realism
Stone Junction is a book that simply must be read, if not for anything other than its simple, honest, to the core dialogue. Jim Dodge brings characters to life in a sentence. A hilarious poker scene with a dodgy mexican, a trucker blasting his horn with glee at a rude anecdote, telephone transcripts that execute high wit and exquisite banter, he is a novelist that knows his characters and iterates them perfectly.
Another thing that's surprising is the amount the relatively short novel covers. Grief, Love, Hedonism and Decadence, Meaning, all are tackled head on through Dodge’s shapely novel. And its the blurred distinctions between the magic (Daniel learning to become invisible, for example) and real life that call many of these points to question. This is a common technique of South American Magical Realism, a reactionary movement galvanised by the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabelle Allende that blurs the boundaries of the magic and real in a very subtle way. Daniel learning to disappear, Jean Bluer teaching him the art of literally becoming someone else, all are written as if perfectly plausible, and it is this grounding in the earthly, folkish magic, a realm beyond the reach of the cyber age, that adds such a perfect nostalgic backbone to the novel.
One of the best recommendations for a book are being told by someone that although they've read it for the first time, they haven't for the last. This book, is one of those books." - Joe Woodhouse
"First time’s a charm, they always say. But for former West County poet-novelist Jim Dodge, it was more like the second and third time that brought the good luck to launch his newest novel, what he dubbed “my first, and my last.”
Dodge said his latest novel, Stone Junction: An Alchemical Potboiler came out of fifteen years of living in a commune on The (Cazadero) Ridge—which was also the spawning ground, or should one say, the nest, that hatched his two nationally acclaimed novels, catapulting Dodge into the literary limelight.
Translated into eleven languages, Dodge’s first published novella, Fup (City Miner, 1983), a slim story (59 pages) about a 20-pound duck, with a penchance for paddling in post-hole ponds, a wild boar, and an old codger who believes he's immortal due to the home brew whiskey, Ol' Death Whisperer, he religiously imbibes—was hotter property than the Creighton Ridge fire. It landed him a spot on the Today Show. There was talk of movie rights, and according to Dodge, it’s still under option.
Jim said Fup was translated into eleven languages. He showed me copies of Fup in Hebrew, Swedish and Japanese, and said that the bilingual Japanese edition was being used as an American English primer for teaching American idioms and colloquialisms. The thought of poor Japanese students carefully using some of Jim's rather colorful phrases had me in stitches.
Dodge's second novel, Not Fade Away (1987), a smashing story about a white mint '59 Cadillac intended as a gift to the Big Bopper, took off equally well, burning rubber from Meyer’s Grade, across the country, and back again at break-neck speed. The protagonist "Floorboard" George, was supposed to wreck the car for an insurance scam but instead, George runs off with the caddie in an epic journey where On the Road meets Ken Keseyian states of mind liberally laced with rock and roll.
After the fairytale success of Fup, Dodge's agent asked him if he had something else in the works. Dodge replied, “Nothing other than a first novel that is bad, really bad.” She was interested. So Stone Junction was duly dusted off and trimmed down from a hefty 800-page manuscript to a more manageable 355 pages. Dodge found that rewriting the monster manuscript was harder than starting from scratch.
Signing copies of Stone Junction at Copperfield’s Bookstore in Petaluma last spring, Dodge joked with admirers, saying, “Real men write prose.” He unpretentiously shot the bull: from playing cards, to the state of the environment, and to the proper nurturing and development of middle-aged stomach muscle.
Dodge sold Japanese printing rights, the first translation offer to come in for Stone Junction, released February 1990. Dodge explained his latest novel nearly sold out at 12,000 copies but “if a book doesn’t make it to the best seller’s list a couple of months after publication, it’s dead.” According to Dodge, the book will probably go into paperback edition very soon.
Compared to Jack Kerouac’s Beat classic, On the Road, Dodge's Stone Junction: An Alchemical Potboiler is a story of coming of age with a New Age twist. Stone Junction is a story about Daniel Pearse, “who never had a father, who sees his mother die before his eyes, and who learns a great deal about the impossible task of growing up marked by such a history.”
The book—spanning ten years of Haight street’s pharmaocopias, to New York’s gridlock (with bouts of homing instincts nurtured in the Cazadero hills), is also a story of an alliance of magicians and outlaws (AMO). Daniel’s real teachers were safecrackers, drug connoisseur, card sharks and magicians. The idea for the AMO “comes out of the storytelling tradition” quipped Dodge, “or from playing too much ‘fort’ when I was a kid.”
The writer’s slapstick humor and homespun philosophy abounds as the protagonist Daniel attempts to steal the six-pound Faith Diamond, the world’s 4th largest. No one knows exactly what the diamond represents, but Daniel is addicted. He cannot leave the ultimate crystal ball behind, just like he can’t shake his mother’s murder. The CIA wants the diamond to stay buried deep in an underground in a vault that rivals Fort Knox. Only Daniel finds out if diamonds really are forever...
I like the way the book is divided into four sections: air, earth, fire and water. Dodge’s writing style is distinctive; but I was afraid it would intrude, but it didn’t. The only place where I was ricocheted out of the story line was when Moss’s mule, Old Pissgums was introduced.
Maybe it’s because I had a donkey as ornery as Old Pissgums, maybe it’s because the story was a refreshing vingette from the main story that I was temporarily launched out of the book—or because it reminded me of Dodge’s witty poems.
But don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t trade the scene with Old Pissgums for anything in the world. I liked Old Pissgums. Dodge laughed and said that the hardest challenge a novelist faces is to keep the reader’s interest directed.
Stone Junction: An Alchemical Potboiler is a story about male bonding and paternal rejection, though Annabel, Daniel’s mother opens the novel, and his crazy girlfriend Jennifer, closes it. Dodge commented, though it’s difficult—and dangerous—for a male writer to write about women from a woman's perspective, Jennifer is one character he’s satisfied with.
When I queried Jim about the character of the disc jockey who breaks up the flow of the narrative, he admitted that was the weakest part of the novel. The card game is almost as tediously long as real life itself. (If anyone wants to take up Lo-ball, this is the definitive book). Dodge relies upon his own extensive experience during his salad days as a professional gambler and card shark to give this scene verve and authenticity.
We sipped tea in the afternoon sun and discussed writerly things such as the mutual quest for the perfect sentence, punctuation and endings. I commented: “I wondered how you were going to get out of Stone Junction. So many writers flounder around the end of a novel looking for an ending in all the wrong places.”
But Dodge was able to gracefully slip out of the story in the last few pages of the novel without leaving the reader hanging with a formulaec ending. Which I'm not going to divulge. You'll have to read it yourself to find out what happens.
One writer Dodge greatly admires is Larry McMurtry, (Lonesome Dove, Terms of Endearment ). "Larry is pure storyteller. I’d be happy if I had a couple of novels like his.” Don't be fooled by Dodge's "aw shucks" modesty.
Dodge is a spirited storyteller both on and off the page. I've listened to his stories for years. One of my favorites was the story of the chicken who escaped the Fulton chicken processing plant with Jim rooting for the chicken, "make a run for it!" Then there's the one about the, er, amorous bullfrog and the rock....
Dodge cranks out his novels old school but he recently upgraded to an old electric typewriter. A newfangled Smith Corona word processor made a six-hour trial debut into the writer’s life—until it made a serious faux-pause, telling him, “not a valid entry,” and it was goodbye computer, hello pen.
Dodge gave the cheeky computer to his companion of many years, Victoria Stuckley, who in turn, transcribes his novels into disk format—thus completing the computer age circuit.
Balking like Old Pissgums himself before the camera, Dodge tried to, er, dodge the camera. Jim, who is 44, instructed: “Describe me with words; a middle-aged Gary Cooper...” Right. My editor's gonna love this one.
Jim showed me a photo of his, saying, that as an undergraduate, he had to make a choice between writing and photography. Dodge said he once went through a box of 100 sheets of photo paper in one day to print one negative, “and it still didn’t come out right.” That was that.
Jim said he also spent a whole day trying to perfect a single sentence and it didn’t come out right either. He recounted, “I went to bed and next morning, I got it right. Try that with photography sometime," he said.
Dodge described the New York publishing business as a “jungle.” He said that negotiating contracts is akin to detecting lost land mines with a pogo stick. His agent, whom he’s never met, takes care of the business end of things. The basic rule of thumb he’s learned is to retain as many “rights” as possible, including reprint, foreign language and movie rights.
Dodge recently moved from Sonoma County—following the money. He shares a converted garage overlooking Humboldt Bay in Arcata with a blind kitten he perversely named Lassie.
Dodge said as if by way of apology, “I’m not a cat man,” but our conversation was littered with kitty box potty commands and coochie-coos as we sat in a haphazard garden of a driveway warming our backs in the late afternoon sun. Lassie worked hard weaving figure eights or shackling infinity signs around our ankles
The successful novelist also teaches creative writing at his alma mater, Humboldt State University, filling in for other teachers on leave, etc. In the process, Jim discovered that he liked teaching English courses more than creative writing. Less outside interference. Dodge said he likes teaching better when he’s working on something of his own.
Dodge received his Master of Fine Arts in Creative writing and poetry from the University of Iowa Writers workshop in 1969.
Arcata, the alter-ego of straight-laced Eureka, is one of those lively towns where hippies, college students and rednecks collide like crude oil tankers and sea stacks during rush hour.
There are many similarities between Humboldt County, which boasts of the highest per-capita of artists (and dope growers) in northern California, and Sonoma County, which runs a close second on all counts. (Mendocino is also a contender for the heady title). Dodge, born in 1945 in Santa Rosa, CA, has done time in both necks of the redwoods.
Dodge, also a published poet with two out-of-print chapbooks under his belt, stated that more and more poets are turning to fiction. “Poetry is on its deathbed in America,” said Dodge, blaming its demise on writers like Pound and Eliot, who raised poetry to a “mandarin art form, so that only 25 readers in the world could understand it” without a dictionary or an encyclopedia.
However, Dodge's next book will be a poetry chapbook, Bait & Ice by Tangram Press. It will be an extremely limited edition (150 copies). Dodge mused, poetry should be printed on good quality paper, “the letters pressed into the paper, so tangible, you can feel them.”
When asked why he left the Cazadero hills, and did he miss Sonoma County, Dodge said, “I don’t look back very much.” Dodge’s backwoods philosophy is honed by “17 years of being an air force brat” and tenure in “about as many schools,” including the toughest matriculator of all—life.
Dodge's parting colloquialisms to me ran the gamut from “Don’t look back; it might be gaining on you,” to “Life, if nothing else, is an adventure in consciousness.” With that, he gave me a hug goodbye.
The shadows of redwoods were growing long. The road home was longer yet. I climbed into Lazarus, my old blue pickup and pointed its nose south and I never looked back.
I crawled into the darkroom and spent the night trying to get the surreptitiously shot negatives of Jim to come out right. I gave up and dusted off some rather chiaroscuro photos I'd taken of him at Copperfield's last spring. Polished the sheen of my sentences with a fine cloth instead.
NOTE BENE: A version of this story was written for the West Sonoma County Paper in the Fall of 1990. I'm not sure when it ran and I'm sure it had a catchy title knowing Nick Valentine—and I'm sure it was probably rearranged as is the wont of copy editors. I suspect sidebars were also involved to rearrange and picket fence it in.
But just getting my old work into cyber print—without the back up of my tear sheets— has been a challenge as all my pieces were written in Microsoft Works 2 or Appleworks 1 and there are no longer any conversion files for 20+ year old files. Programs are now more polite than Jim's Smith Corona (not valid entry.) Point being, I recently found a Microsoft Works 4 converter and under OS 9, I can for the first time—access these ancient files with a minimum of strange gobbelygook interspersed in every line.
It's too hard to pick up the strings and resurrect old writing—I'm not who I was then. I can't get into that headset. I'm not willing to invest vast tracts of time in revision. So, with the addition of a few transitions and punctuation changes, the story stands—warts and all. If it's too fup'd up, well then, Mea Culpea." - Red Room
"I was drawn in to Stone Junction at the book store because of the introduction by Thomas Pynchon. I didn't actually read Pynchon's introduction, I was merely convinced by the fact that Thomas Pynchon had written an introduction that this would be a worthy read. Unfortunately, as I later discovered after finishing the book, Pynchon's introduction amounts to, "This isn't a very good book. Don't buy it just because I wrote an introduction."
Ha, ha. Just kidding. Pynchon didn't say such a thing. And the book is fine, it just wasn't my cup of tea. The first three quarters of the book read like genre-influenced outlaw fantasy which I was entertained by but did not find enlightening. It includes about a hundred pages of poker playing, which, while interesting, seems unrelated to the real thrust of the novel and served as mostly adolescent entertainment. The last quarter of the book turns to metaphysical wandering, with interspersed sections of rambling bandit DJs, diary entries of an escaped lunatic, and Frodo-like staring into a large, spherical, magic diamond that "may or may not be the philosopher's stone." I put that last bit into quotes because it's what all the reviews say and what the book jacket says, but it doesn't actually mean anything to me or add any depth to the book.
I'm being a bit unfair, but the book just didn't gel for me. I wanted more substance in the beginning and, well, less "substance" at the end. For some reason I feel embarrassed at not having liked the book more. The book's fans will likely accuse me of not "getting it". But I'm afraid I did get it and I just don't like what I got." - MixedMetaphors.net
"It’s time to talk about the best book ever written.
Wow, what a loaded statement. Wars have probably been started over less. Okay, lets bring it down to earth.
It’s time to talk about my favourite book.
STONE JUNCTION by Jim Dodge. It’s a book that goes everywhere with me. When people ask me my favourite book, I don’t even have to hesitate. I probably couldn’t draw up a top ten list; ranking books like that is near impossible. But I do know which book would be at the top.
What’s it about? It’s impossible to describe really.
I’ve tried many times to tell people about it, but I always see their eyes glaze over at the halfway point. It’s impossible to categorise. In my days working in a bookshop, I found that this would sell exactly the same whether you put it in the fiction section, the crime section or the fantasy section.
The main narrative centres on Daniel. He starts the book as a child, travelling America with his young mother. She’s the rebellious sort, cast out for punching a nun, and turns to grifting to get money for her young family.
They get picked up by a truck driver who reveals himself to be part of a secret society, a union of outlaws if you will, and from there the book takes flight on just about the strangest, most eclectic and most affirming journey set to paper.
It’s got sex, it’s got crime, it’s got terrorists, it’s got a jewell heist, it’s got gambling and driving, romance and explosives. It’s got alchemy and genuine magic. It’s the most fantastic book ever set in the real world, as if Kerouac dropped a blotter halfway through ON THE ROAD.
It’s not without problems. The journey has been so magical, and so uncontrollable, that the book loses a bit of steam in the final pages. But there was honestly no ending that would have done toe story justice. The prose is crazy and free, taught and Hammett-like one minute, flowery and flowing the next. It works though, which is a feat in itself.
One of the quotes on the back of my current edition, the well-put together cannongate one, says “A book I put my life on hold for. ” and that sums it up well. It’s been the book I turn to in crisis, along with THE PRINCESS BRIDE. The best quote though probably belongs to the BIG ISSUE; “the kind of book that inspires you to smear yourself in pigs blood and stand butt-naked on the church roof howling abuse at the congregation.” Oh yes." - Jay Stringer
"Stone Junction is another one of those books that have been cropping up in my life. Whether in a magazine or a second-hand bookstore it seems that this novel makes an appearance. As luck will have, when it actually was time to buy the book I couldn’t find it anywhere and I had to order it from our local book chain.
This is not my first Jim Dodge though. That honour was bestowed to Fup and I loved it. An original plot, use of language and despite the zaniness, Dodge has a sense of control and Fup never descends into downright vulgarity. I would say it’s a fun romp more than anything.
Stone Junction is a continuation of the ideas in Fup. It is weird, entertaining and is stuffed with oddball similes. However I would say this book is more philosophical and thought-provoking.
Daniel Pearse is born to an outlaw mother. He is raised amongst thieves. When on a mission, Daniel’s mother is killed and he sets on his way to avenge her. Throughout this journey he joins a gang of Alchemical Magicians and goes under a series of teachers. All of them subject him to meditation, safe-cracking, espionage and even harvesting drugs.
Pearse’s life changes when he goes under the tutelage of Volta, a man who teaches Daniel on how to vanish and tells him about a diamond with mystical powers. Eventually Daniel manages to steal this diamond, wich in turn helps him discover more secrets about his past and prepare him for his future.
Stone Junction is fantastic. There nothing else to say. I had a ton of fun reading it. Something which I haven’t experienced ever since my Brautigan and Vonnegut days back in the late nineties. This is a novel that screams ‘cool’." - deucekindred
Barbelith Underground Forum
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Jim Dodge, Fup, Canongate Books, 2004."In the coastal hills of northern California live three larger-than-life characters: two humans and one duck. There's Grandaddy Jake Santee, 99 years old, an unreformed gambler, cranky reprobate and fierce opponent of the work ethic. And Tiny, adopted at the age of four by Grandaddy Jake, he's a giant young man as gentle as Jake is belligerent. And then there's Fup, an uncompromising twenty-pound hen mallard, whose unique presence imposes a sense of order on the Santee household. Hilarious, heartwarming and magical, Fup is a contemporary fable that inspires an almost evangelical fervour in all who read it. It is a work of enormous originality with a giant heart."
"Between these covers reside a twenty pound duck that won't fly, thirty miles of barbed-wire fencing, and several batches of illicit whiskey. Fup is a classic tale that celebrates all the amazing connections and pitfalls of rustic living. The story is set in the coastal hills of northern California between 1880 and the present. The plot revolves around Grandaddy Jake Santee who believes he is immortal, his grandson Tiny whose passion is building masterfully crafted fences even though they don't have any stock, and Fup, a hen mallard with a prodigious appetite. These three come together in a transcendent tale that has won international acclaim and the affection of thousands of readers."
"Storytelling as storytelling more often ought to be: spare, original, colloquial, and touching, with a streak of raunchy humor that springs from its earthy characters and setting." - Fred Abel
"There was virtually nothing I liked about Jim Dodge’s Fup when it arrived at my door. A blurb from the Independent on Sunday telling me ‘You’ll love it’, coupled with the sub-title ‘A modern fable’, had me close to shredding it with extreme prejudice.
Three things stopped me, though – the peculiarly grumpy looking duck on the cover, the quirky title, and the light weight of the book. It’s a poor way, probably, to weigh up a book’s merits, but physical weight for me always plays a part. It’s not that I’m against big books – far from it – but they have a harder time convincing me they’re worth opening. Life is short.
This is a book that is short, in pages and on pretensions. The opening, with its nicknamed character didn’t grab me, but the language and rhythm of the story was such that it led me on:
“Gabriel Santee was seventeen years old and three months pregnant when she married ‘Sonic Johnny’ Makhurst, a Boeing test pilot and recent heir to a modest Ohio hardware fortune. The ceremony was performed in a crepe festooned hangar at moffit Field, witnessed by a socre of Sonich Johnny’s drunken buddies. The bride and groom exchanged vows while standing on the wing of an x-77 jet fighter. Two months before Gabriel came to term, the same wing tore off the plane at 800 miles an hour over the mojave desert with Johnny at the controls. After a bitter court battle with one of her late husband’s previous wives, Gabriel inherited his estate.”
Short and sweet, signalling no-nonsense in the best American mid-western tradition of ’straight-talking’ – and yet that casual and almost absurd violence, which is followed by more death and destruction by page 3, caused by a duck, signals something else entirely. Dodge, the crafty old story-teller has at a single turn won my trust and started gleefully abusing it.
I dove into the short book, coming up for air every now and then with a bemused grin on my face. The story is of one orphan, Tiny (who obviously is anything but), who is taken in by his moonshine distilling grandfather. Their lives are dominated by games of checkers and the fencing of land, punctuated by a long-running feud with a great big boar (who takes personal exception to being fenced in or out of anywhere). And then fup, a duck looking to be adopted, comes into their lives:
Fup was generally indifferent to Westerns, except for seemingly arbitrary scenes when she would quack excitedly. It took Tiny and Granddaddy Jake about five months to figure out that what all the scenes had in common were horses and after discussing it they decided to buy her a colt for company when Bill Leland’s mare foaled the coming spring. Tiny started roughing out drawings for a ten foot high split-rail corral when they got home that night.
Fup’s favourite movies were romances, whether light and witty or murderously tragic. She watched intently from her roost on the back of the seat, occasionaly tilting here head to quack in sympathy at the problems assailing love. She would not tolerate Granddaddy’s derisive and consistently obscene comments, and after she’d almost torn off his ear a few times he settled for quiet mumbling. Tiny watched without comment.
This unlikely trio becomes utterly plausible within the confines of Dodge’s storytelling, and though it’s downplayed throughout (Granddaddy, for example, points out that very often things just don’t make sense) this is a novel with big themes on its mind told through small and often petty characters. It’s about the relationship between man and beast; it’s about the relationship between man and his environment; it’s about the biggest theme of all, death. And it’s a book that manages to tackle these themes head-on with all the seriousness and resolve of an angered fup duck (“‘That’s a terrible name’ tiny groaned”).
It succeeds where bigger books have failed, and I momentarily find myself agreeing with some of the book’s blurbs (though not with that of The Face whose ‘if you fell in love with Babe then you’ll love Fup’ misses the point so completely that it’s almost slanderous), in particular that of the San Francisco Chronicle which declared rightly that the book is “Stupendous – a jewel, a gem, a diamond in the cesspool of life.” - P. Murphy
"It’s difficult with a book as short as Fup to provide afterthoughts of any great length or depth without giving too much of the story away, so unusually for me my afterthoughts on this one are going to be brief and succinct. I’ve also already said a fair amount about this new reissue from Canongate Books in my forethoughts, so if you haven’t already skimmed those, then that would be a good place to start.
As far as my afterthoughts go though, I guess the question I really need to answer is whether Fup lived up to my rather high expectations, which have built up because of all of the glowing praise that’s around for this story? Well in answering that I’d have to say ALMOST, but not quite!
It’s irrefutable that what there is of Fup is good, really good and it shows Jim Dodge off to be the talented author that he so obviously is. However the crucial phrase in that last sentence is ‘what there is of the story’ because Fup is all over way too quickly. I guess a great analogy would be to compare Fup to a roller-coaster ride, and not because it’s full of ups and downs (although there are certainly a few of those), but because it’s a thrilling ride which comes to an end all too soon. Just like a roller-coaster ride though, Fup is a story that one is eager to return to time and time again.
So a real shame that Fup is so short-lived, and a shame too that Dodge has felt compelled to drop a few ‘F Bombs’ into his narrative, making it inappropriate for all age groups. Putting those two things aside however, Fup is still a worthy little read, enhanced greatly in this new reissue by Emma Dibben’s superlative artwork. Perfect for those who like their reading fixes short ‘n’ sweet!" - robaroundbooks.com
"Granddaddy Jake Santee has, after six and a half decades of riotous living, found the secret of immortality. It is in the distilling and drinking of Ol' Death Whisper, a moonshine recipe given to him by a dying Indian outside a gambling hall in Nevada City. Jake has never settled, he's been married three times, has one daughter he hasn't seen since she was a baby, followed the gold rush, made a fortune, lost it, made another, won some land which suits him well, but has spent most of his life an itinerant gambler, sometimes lucky, sometimes not. But something in that dying Indian's eyes and his promise of immortality held Jake's attention, and he took himself and the recipe back home to his dilapidated ranch. He hasn't moved since:
The whiskey helped him keep still. One hit of Ol' Death Whisper would drive most humans to their knees; two produced a mildy hallucinatory catatonia. His neighbours used it for tractor fuel, blowing stumps, and, diluted by a drop to a pint of water, as a treatment for almost anything that ailed their stock, from scours to lungworm.
No wonder he stays put! Fifteen years into the perfecting of the art of distilling of Ol' Death Whisper and fifteen years into his immortality Grandaddy Jake hears news that his daughter has drowned, leaving a small son, Johnathan Adler Makhurst II, otherwise known as Tiny. After a fight with the fostering agencies and Miss Emma Gadderly, the county social worker, and a run of luck at cards which pays for the lawyers, Jake successfully adopts his grandson. Tiny is well named; like Topsy he just growed and growed and growed. He's 6'5" standing in a hollow. They get along wonderfully well together but Jake and Tiny are like chalk and cheese:
Tiny, fortunately, was as amiable as his Granddaddy was ornery, as placid and benign as the old man was fierce and belligerent. Tiny enjoyed the open, linear purity of checkers. Granddaddy favored games with hole cards, where your strength was in your secrets and you flew into the eye of chaos riding your ghost.
While Granddaddy Jake drinks himself into immortal oblivion, Tiny spends his time fence-building. He builds fences all across the ranch, the straightest, truest, most wonderfully-built fences that there ever were. He builds picket fences, post and rail fences, and wire fences. He has offers to build fences for ranches up and down the country, but Tiny prefers to busy himself with fence-building at home. Fences are his passion. His worst nightmare is Lockjaw, a local wild pig who continually disrupts the order and neatness of his fence-building. Pigs are the natural enemy of fences. Sometimes, it feels as though Lockjaw is his nemesis. One evening, after days and nights of frustrating rain, and no fence building, Tiny finds a baby mallard close to death in one of his sodden fencepost holes. It is clear from mess of earth around the hole that Lockjaw has been there, after the tiny, folorn little thing. Tiny takes the bird home, where it is revived by Granddaddy and a drop or two of Ol' Death Whisper. He calls her Fup. (You get it? Capisce? Fup Duck, FUP DUCK).
Fup is like both of her benefactors: thanks to her voracious appetite, she grows as large for a duck as Tiny is for a man. Fup could eat for her country, and she's not particularly fussy what she eats as long as there's plenty of it. She's also sharp, touchy and temperamental, just like Jake, and is not afraid to make her feelings of disapproval clear by a judicious peck or two. She shows no interest in learning to fly, despite Granddaddy's best efforts to teach her: she is happy accompanying Tiny on his fence- building endeavours and trying to help him sniff out Lockjaw on regular hunting expeditions, and eating at very regular intervals, of course. Together this odd trio rub along tremendously well. Odd they may be, eccentric they may be, but they fit together as a family should.
And if you want to find out if Granddaddy Jake is truly immortal, if Tiny ever does manage to rid himself of Lockjaw and if Fup Duck learns to fly you'll just have to read it. I've said too much already. It won't take you long, for Fup packs it all in to just a hundred or so pages. Oh, do buy it, do. Fup is a very, very funny little book and it will suit everyone: I spat my tea all over the place; my childrenlaughed out loud; my mother said "aww" a lot. What more recommendation could you want? The part where Grandaddy Jake tries to teach Fup to fly and ends up losing the few teeth he has left is hilarious, and the one where financial ruin for our threesome is luckily prevented by the foolishness of a nirvana-seeking hippy left me in stitches. Oh, go on then, have just one more little bit:
The longhair, though visibly shaken after the first swallow, managed to get down six or seven quick more gulps before he collapsed on the front porch and began writhing in such a way that Boss, Tiny's cantankerous and ever-horny Beagle, had tried to come over and hump him... He immediately bolted for the walnut tree in the front yard, went up it in a single, gigantic bound, and spent the next three hours sitting among the bare limbs hunched over like a sick buzzard. The first hour he wept. The second hour he laughed. The third hour he was silent. The fourth hour he pitched forward and fell like a sack of wet grain. He broke both arms. On the way into the hospital, he offered to buy Granddaddy's stock on hand and all future production for $20 a pint in exchange for sole distributorship.
Don't talk to Granddaddy Jake about absinthe! He's been there, seen it, done it, most certainly drunk it, probably orbitted the moon and got a better t-shirt for it to boot. So there. Ohhh, I just want to tell you it all. You'll love the marathon checkers tournament. And the cinema trips. And Johnny Seven Moons, man of few words. But I'm stopping, I'm stopping!
Fup is one of those little fables you could read again and again and again. It's funny, it's sweet, it's joyous. And it's over before you know it, and somehow, with a story like this, that's a good thing, do you know what I mean? Half the fun is in the brevity. Dodge writes in a colloquial and down-to-earth way, packing an awful lot of things into a very few words. Reading Fup you'll find some raunchy, earthy humour, some naughty sarcasm, and an awful lot of wisdom, joy and fun. It's just packed full of life and energy and humour. It's a bit like reading the philosophy of Johnathan Livingstone Seagull mixed up in the style of a beaty writer like Kesey with some vivid pictures from a sharp observer like Steinbeck thrown in, but it's both less and more than those things: it really is just a lovely, short little story-come-parable filled with a bit of magic, a bit of truth and an awful, awful lot of clear-eyed humanity. It's uplifting to read and hilariously, tea-spittingly funny. And I think that's enough, don't you? I shall stop now, or I'll write more than Dodge did, and that wouldn't be a good thing at all. You just read it.
At the very least, as Granddaddy Jake would tell you, It's better'n whacking it.
Oops, did I just say that?" - Jill Murphy
Jim Dodge, Not Fade Away, Grove Press, 1998."Not Fade Away is a rock 'n' roll road novel with rhythm to burn, traveling in time from the Beat era to the dawn of the sixties. George Gastin is a San Francisco tow-truck operator who wrecks cars as part of an insurance scam. One of the cars Gastin is hired to destroy is a snow-white 1959 Cadillac that was supposed to be a present for the Big Bopper, who dies in a plane crash with Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens. Instead, Gastin takes off in the car and heads for Texas, where the Big Bopper was buried. Armed with a thousand hits of Benzedrine, Gastin navigates a road trip that will cover many miles and states of mind between the coffeehouses of San Francisco's North Beach and the open plains of the Midwest. Along the way Gastin picks up some extraordinary hitchhikers -- the self-proclaimed "world's greatest salesman," the Reverend Double-Gone Johnson, and a battered housewife with a box of old 45s. As the miles and sleepless hours roll by, Gastin's trip becomes a blur of fantasy and reality fueled by a soundtrack of classic rock 'n' roll."
"In his second novel, the author of Fup relives an era that spanned the Beat Generation and the beginnings of the '60s. We accompany the mysterious yet amiable George Gastin in a stolen 59 Caddy as he travels across America to Big Bopper's grave, where he wants to deliver a "heartfelt crazy gift meant to celebrate music and the possibilities of human love." Hallucinogenic drugs offer fantastic diversions, and roadstops result in both comedy and poignancy. The sad and strange Mira Whitman is particulary memorableshe decides against suicide because she was "so terrified nobody was there inside her to die," and only after George hears Mira's "warm, full-throated, belly-rich laughter" does he resume his quest. Dodge's wonderful imagination, eye for detail and command of language along with a delightful backdrop of rock-and-roll make a somewhat absurd plot flow with grace and rhythm." - Publishers Weekly
"In early Sixties San Francisco, George Gaskin, tow-truck driver and seeker of higher truth, becomes intrigued by the story behind a car he is to demolish in an insurance fraud schemea mint-condition `59 Cadillac intended as a gift from an eccentric old woman to an early rock star, the Big Bopper, and never delivered because of his untimely death. Gaskin decides symbolically to complete the delivery and perhaps find something of himself along the way. What ensues is a drug-drenched pilgrimage through the Southwest in search of the Bopper's grave, a series of alternately comic and nightmarish adventures involving a motley group of dreamers and con men. Animated by Gaskin's manic energy and rich vernacular, this hallucinatory, foot-to-the-floor journey through the lost soul of a nation is a wild ride, but one well worth taking." - Lawrence Rungren
"Reads like Kerouac's On the Road as it might have been written by Hunter S. Thompson." - Plain Dealer
"A wild paean to rock 'n' roll, the freedom of the open road and the powers of the unfettered imagination. Dodge pushes language to its outer limits. He stretches credulity and expands the boundaries of the novel itself. His surreal voyage into the chaos of night carries him into the heart of America's darkest psychological landscapes. Not Fade Away shakes, rattles, and rolls." - San Francisco Chronicle
Read it at Google Books
Jim Dodge, Rain on the River: New and Selected Poems and Short Prose, Grove Press, 2002."While Jim Dodge is internationally known for his fiction, his first and abiding passion is poetry. After eighteen years of publishing anonymously and reading only to local crowds in the Pacific Northwest, he began to issue occasional limited-edition letterpress chapbooks with a small press, as well as occasional broadsides and, since 1987, a winter solstice poem or story, most given as gifts to friends. Rain on the River contains work collected here for the first time, as well as three dozen previously unpublished poems. Dodge's poems and short prose offer the same pleasures as his fiction - a splendid ear for language, great emotional range and subtlety, a sharp eye for the illuminating detail, and a sensibility that encompasses outright hilarity, savage wit, and tender marvel, all made eminently accessible through writing of uncompromising clarity and grace."
"Like being at a nonstop party in celebration of everything that matters." - Thomas Pynchon
"A rollicking, frequently surprising adventure-cum-fairy tale. It also has a sweetness about it and an indigenous American optimism." - The New York Times Book Review
"Diverse, savvy, passionate... Poetry should be a pleasure, and Jim Dodge's work is just that." - Gary Snyder
