Ron McClarty's novel "The Memory of Running" would most likely have remained unread by the public if an audio version of the book had not fallen into the hands of Stephen King in 2003, McLarty told a packed East Providence City Hall Feb. 6. Three years later, McLarty has sold the rights to Warner Brothers to turn his novel into a movie.
King devoted a column in Enter-tainment Weekly to "The Best Book You Can't Read." He compared the protagonist of "The Memory of Running" - the 43-year-old, 279-pound East Providence native Smithson "Smithy" Ide - to "your Hucks, your Holdens, your Yossarians," admonishing the publishing industry for passing up a great work.
Subsequently, McLarty found publishing houses competing for his attention - a far cry from his years of failed efforts. Soon afterward, "The Memory of Running" was published by Viking Adult, a division of Penguin Group, and became a bestseller.
McLarty's hero - a "fat ass," as King called the character - spends his days working at a toy factory, ensuring that the arms of action figures are screwed on so their palms face inward. In the evening, he travels to the Tick-Tap Lounge to drink lager and watch television. Scarred by his memories of serving in Vietnam as well as his beautiful, schizophrenic older sister Bethany's descent into madness, Smithy engages little in life to protect himself from pain.
By the end of the novel, however, after an epic journey, Smithy finds love and regains control of his life.
McLarty's personal Cinderella story mirrors that of his hero. Like Smithy, McLarty is a native of East Providence, and many of the places he writes of would be familiar to any Brown student or Providence resident.
The novel began as an attempt to "avoid spending time curled up with a bottle of vodka" following the death of his father and mother in a car crash, he said. The story begins in a similar fashion, when the shock of Smithy's parents' death in an auto accident disrupts his booze- and television-induced haze. This is soon followed by news that his long-lost sister has wound up in a Los Angeles morgue.
Left unhinged by the loss of his entire family in one fell swoop, Smithy leaps onto his childhood bicycle, a maroon Raleigh, and pedals off towards the Sunoco gas station at the end of his street. The trip evolves into a journey across America toward the body of his sister.
"He doesn't wind up in Los Angeles looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger," McLarty said.
During his journey, Smithy abandons beer and pretzels in favor of tuna sandwiches and fruit. He encounters an assortment of colorful characters, including a flower farmer dying of AIDS, a compassionate priest and a seductive lady cyclist.
The novel cuts back and forth between Smithy's adventures in the present and his memories of the past, and for each pound he loses, he unravels a tightly wound memory and gradually comes to terms with his traumatic experiences.
Along the way, he develops a long-distance telephone relationship with Norma, his paraplegic neighbor in East Providence who has loved him fiercely since childhood. Even though he is shot at, hit by a pickup truck, beaten up and accused of being a pervert, he reaches his destination with the happy conclusion that "most people are really nice."
The Forrest Gump-ish nature of Smithy's revelation is characteristic of the novel as a whole. McLarty's prose is brusque, as evidenced by Smithy's description of his father: "He was a guy who didn't need much of anything - baseball, a few beers - and it was hard for him to be emotional, like it's hard for me, but I think including me in the investigation was his way of saying he loved me and stuff."
However, the writer's prosaic self-deprecation occasionally gives way to tritely sentimental adages, reflecting that though Smithy is taciturn on the surface, he also possesses a childlike, good-hearted and homespun philosophy. For example, he opines, "Good people protect people they love, even if that means pretending that everything is okay."
Writing in a format that is not particularly original and repeatedly offering exercises in redemption that occasionally become self-indulgent, McLarty is most successful at inviting the reader to share Smithy's delight in discovering details that he has long forgotten or failed to notice entirely, such as "the texture and the chewability of bananas." He also successfully introduces humor in his art, which is never an easy task. In one such moment, the laughter of a Brown student - caused by Smithy asking her out - makes coffee shoot out of her nose.
A feel-good novel about losing weight and finding fulfillment in face of great odds, "The Memory of Running" celebrates the power of the small things in life to help us approach larger problems with saccharine whimsicality.
