2007 Book Challenge 3: The Memory of Running by Ron McLarty

The Memory of Running is a mainstream novel about a middle-age man who takes a cross-country bike ride after he tragically loses his entire family. Basically he just starts riding. It's a little like when Forrest Gump started his three years of running, after Jenny left him, and this story has a lot of similarities to that part of the movie.

He starts out in Rhode Island as a fat, drunken loser with a rundown bike, no money, no ID, and only the clothes on his back. By the time he gets to California a few months later, he's on a completely different bike, has completely different clothes, and still no money or ID. But he has lost several dozen pounds and become fit, stopped drinking, and gotten into much healthier eating habits. In between he nearly drowns, helps take care of a dying man, gets beaten up, rescues a ten year old from a blizzard, gets shot at, gets threatened to be shot at, hitches a ride with a trucker, joins and leaves a biking rally, and hears the life stories of lots of interesting people.

More importantly, he spends a lot of time thinking about his past. The book jumps around from the present (him doing something interesting on the bike ride) to various points of his past. It's very jumbled. Much like the inside of someone's mind, I suppose. Most of it is focused on his childhood, living with his older sister who had schizophrenia and how the family dealt with that. Much of the rest was about his time in the army during Vietnam.

At first when I started reading it, it didn't look like much. I started reading it for the same reasons I read people's blogs. In a lot of ways, the book is like a really long blog. However, it held my interest really well, and I wanted to keep going, so it must've been doing something right.

The most interesting thing that struck me about it early on was how the book breaks a whole lot of the "don't" rules of writing. For example, the opening sentence has his family arriving at a cabin retreat, but then the rest of the page (and most of the next) is a gigantic infodump about all the past times they've been at this particular cabin. However, it works anyway, because the infodump is just as interesting as the story - moreso, in fact, as we eventually find out that nothing exciting happened in the "real" story (he and his parents arrive at the cabin and relax; the end).

Also, I noticed that the story violates just about everything Zette says about first-person POV in the Week 6 material. The MC comes across as being rather dim; he sees stuff happening around him and doesn't ever actually link events to each other. We as the readers seeing the view through his eyes, though, can readily infer what really happened, even if the MC himself has no clue.

It makes me wonder about how other people think. I philosophize constantly about everything. I make links every which way. Just last night, for example, it occurred to me that learning the basics of IDL programming is strikingly similar to learning the basics of organic chemistry, and I had to stop reading the IDL book to ponder that at length before I could continue. So I find it intriguing to see a glimpse into living a life where thinking isn't a terribly high priority, like it isn't for the MC.

The MC doesn't really have any thoughts about anything, either. (Well, aside from the fact that the whole book was a thought.) He reacts passively to stuff that happens to him and will let just about anyone lead him around. Someone says "do this" and he says "okay" and does it. It's how he wound up attending the deathbed of a total stranger. It wasn't until I was about 3/4th of the way through before he showed any signs of intelligence or willpower, and even then it was just a brief flicker. At the same time, though, he couldn't've been that dumb if he successfully rode a bike from coast to coast.

Another thing is that I don't normally care for travel quest stories. Especially the standard fantasy version. I find them really boring, and just want the protagonists to get to where they're going already so they can do the far more interesting (to me) things that they went there to do. For Memory of Running though, the journey is a lot more than just "stuff happens between point A and point B." The MC does have an actual reason to get to California - it's where his sister's remains are, and he's gone to retrieve them, - but the journey is the important part. The endpoint was just setup; not meant to be a major plot point, and not all that interesting in and of itself. One could certainly sum up the whole book by saying "Smithy Ide rode a bike from Rhode Island to California to make arrangements with the funeral home holding his sister's remains." But that's not what the story was about. And it spoils nothing to say that he got there and took care of the paperwork successfully.

Anyway. Just some random assorted musings in no particular order. I liked the book. It's a good, easy read.