To the Dead Already

Bruce K. Filson was a freelance writer and critic residing in Chesterville, Ontario.

This, Patrick Leahy’s first book, is a novella about a football coach and a couple of other guys, one of whom is the narrator.

The story takes place in California and Mexico, in bars and on football fields, but there’s a sense that it takes place in the empty no-man’s-land of America. As a portrait of American macho men, Hemingway it’s not. True, these men are shallow, false, and drunk at all times; but there’s nothing in that per se. The blurb on the back cover claims that Leahy’s style is like Raymond Chandler’s, but, since there’s no strong plot, no murder or intrigue, it comes off turgid and soup-like. It also imitates On the Road byJack Kerouac, showing what kind of trivial letter-writing Kerouac would have been doing it he hadn’t woven in larger themes of America, Zen Buddhism, and the beat of a new-thinking American generation.

Obviously, I got very little out of To the Dead Already. It’s a read, with lots of words, and lots of phrases thrown in between commas, like this. It’s full of casual similes, adjectives, and references to American life; but it just doesn’t amount to anything. What Truman Capote said of Kerouac, although unfair to Kerouac, is true of Leahy: “This isn’t writing, it’s typing.”