One of the best things about reviewing books is discovering authors like Tom Flynn. His spare, focused novel Venable Park (2010) captures a moment in Baltimore just after World War I.
Henry Dawson is an all-American hero whose life hasn’t been all that heroic. A World War I vet, he’s works shoveling coal at the steel mill in Sparrows Point. It’s loud, dirty work, but at least no one’s shooting at him. Most of his pay goes to the company store. When he’s done for the day, he goes home to his company-owned boarding house. Sometimes he goes to a ball game. He’s friendly with both men he shovels coal with, one black, one white. They talk a little on their twenty-minute lunch breaks. Life is harsh, but Henry is one of the few of his Army division who made it back from the forests of the Argonne, and he accepts his lot with no complaints. One day Reginald Spector, the black man, offers him a temporary Sunday gig getting Baltimore’s new ballpark, Venable Park, ready for its big opening day and the big game pitting Army versus Marines. Since Henry hasn’t been much for church since his brother was killed, he accepts.
A white man working for a black one is a strange sight for many people in the 1920s, including Henry’s white coworker and the white boss at the ballpark building site, but Henry is happy to work in the sun, without the belts and steel crashing around him, and without risking his life. He’s proud of the ballpark’s classic facade and being part of an important enterprise. He even starts to save some money in the bank and to consider asking a girl out. He goes to the amusement park at Bay Shore and enjoys an expensive supper. Life is good, but eventually the mores of the times catch up with him. Flynn doesn’t sugarcoat it, or portray an unrealistic change in a workingman’s life. This is how it is for a man like Henry in Baltimore in 1922.
Venable Park is reminiscent of Thomas Mallon’s novels Mrs. Paine’s Garage and Henry and Clara about the ordinary people behind great historical events. Henry’s not a hero for surviving the war; that’s just how it happened. And the rest of his life is what it is, too. Flynn lets his character tell his story without getting in the way of Henry’s voice, which is what makes Venable Park so captivating.
Flynn, a frequent contributor to Field Magazine, self-published his novel, and he’s offering it for the very reasonable price of $8, including shipping, on his website. I hope the book is selling. Without any idea of how it’s doing, I’m guessing that if Flynn sells 2000 copies himself, he’d probably make out better financially than he would with an agent and a commercial house. I love self-publishing. It ensures books like Venable Park, probably passed on by commercial houses for being too provincial (note that books set in New York are somehow never too provincial) see the light of day.
