Wire to Wire

Starred review from February 28, 2011
When rail rider Michael Slater gets smacked in the head by a power line while riding a train through Detroit, it sets his life on a course no boxcar could follow. A few years later, working as a speed-popping video editor in New York, Slater is cursed with watching his past unfold on the screens in his editing suite. He watches the story of his fellow stowaway Harp Maitland and how the two of them—along with a cast of characters torn from an especially good police procedural—outrun drug dealers, crooked cops, and smalltown creeps without ever being particularly sympathetic: as Slater concludes, "the doomed... have no need for guilt." Sparling's debut is well crafted and thrilling, tying together an obvious love for both Michigan and railroads with an expert sense of timing and plot. The world he has created is both overwhelming and exhilarating, thanks in no small part to a large ensemble of memorable characters and a relentless pace. Indeed, hardly a page goes by without some sort of fantastic calamity throwing Slater and company into further turmoil—when the most peaceful passages of the story are speed-addled, that's saying something—but it's done so well that hopping off this runaway train would never cross a reader's mind.

May 15, 2011

A dizzying, speed-laced debut novel from Portland-based writer Sparling.

With Dexedrine-slamming rail riders, a glue-sniffing femme fatale and a lead protagonist whose point of view is skewed under the best of circumstances, the book is a worthy combination of Bob Seger nostalgia and dope-fueled noir, but it's not always the easiest story to follow. The framing device: video editor Michael Slater's editing suite, where the pill-popping film slicer screens scenes from his own life. Michael has never been quite the same since a peculiar, life-altering incident. While riding on top of a hurtling freight train with his amigo Harp Maitland, a power line zaps the young adventurer with 33,000 volts to the forehead. Now Slater has a head full of holes, and he sometimes sees people who aren't there. From there, it's a hallucinatory road trip from Arizona to Michigan, which Slater describes in loving detail. It's a blistered postcard of passing Americana, stitched together with diners, pool halls and pickup trucks, not to mention the freight trains that Sparling himself rode. Technically, it's a crime novel—there's violence and sex and things on fire. But it's obvious that the author is more interested in what's bouncing around in his hero's fractured head and spilling it out onto the page than he is in tidy endings. Slater explains his peculiar interests to a fellow traveler as a train narrowly misses a cow on the tracks. "I was disappointed," he says. "I wanted to see the cow explode. Things start to go wrong and I like to watch."

A strange, formidable novel about crossed signals and damage done, with plenty of peek-between-your-fingers moments for good measure.

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