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(More customer reviews)Mr. Hoppe's biggest weakness in this novel is describing efficiently in print what a good film director could put on the screen with great effectiveness. An example is an instance of eco-terrorism in a small Eastern New Mexico town involving a nut case, a fertilizer bomb, a feedlot, our hero Mr. Lauderback, and assorted local residents. There is some fear, some farce, and some fine visuals involved, but it takes the author a full 50 pages to get the afternoon's events concluded. As a reading experience, it is hard to follow and it drags. In a film, it could be hilarious. Much later in the book there is a political event that goes very wrong, followed by a prairie fire that threatens the community. While both incidents require fewer than 50 pages each to conclude, seeing these events on a big screen could be wonderful, while reading about them is just not as dynamic. Do my criticisms mean that this is not a good novel? Whoa, don't jump to that conclusion. "The Thomas Ladies Club" is one of those books that begins without much promise, and day-by-day gets better and better. The main character, known only as Lauderback, is a person with whom I can fully identify. He is a grown-up but not a success. He moves from town-to-town, usually smaller and smaller, getting hired as the sole reporter on newspapers that are published less and less frequently and are on the edge of extinction, like the communities they serve. I've been there and done that, and Mr. Hoppe's depictions of the reporter, the publisher/editor, the advertising woman, the local retailers, the small-time radio guy, etc. are spot-on. I've known those people well. The reporter's start is quite unsatisfying, his life empty, but something magical happens after the big feedlot bomb plot fizzles. He is adopted by the ghosts of several ladies who were important cogs in the civic life of the town 60-80 years ago. He can't explain why or how or even tell anyone about it, but his connection to this grander past leads the local paper to new life, to internet fame, and Lauderback maybe even to love. Speaking of the latter, there is a sexual interlude in this novel which is done perfectly, considering the parties involved. Not very graphic, but quite convincing, and an essential moment which happens at the exactly right time. If you, prospective reader, never worked for money-losing weekly papers, or never lived in a stagnant rural town, or never moved from place to place, mostly alone, mostly reluctantly, mostly underpaid and overworked, perhaps you won't have much sympathy for Mr. Lauderback's trials and triumphs. I saw myself in a great many of the scenes. If this world is foreign to your experience, you may want to learn about it. "Journalism" is not really the point...there are lonely nomads such as Lauderback who manage small department stores, or cable TV companies, or who take x-rays in 11-bed hospitals, or who are patrolman number three on a force just that size. This novel gives people like that, like I was once, some hope that the jobs are actually important, the people we meet were really meant to meet us, and the last town was vital to what we'll learn and grow from in the next one. There are several typos in my copy of this novel, and it sure isn't perfect, but damn, it's good enough so that I am happy I spent some hours with it. The ending, especially, although not absolutely joy-filled, rings true and is beautifully composed. This is Bruce Hoppe's second book. It earns him a right to give us a third, even better one.
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Picture Lauderback, a 21st century itinerant reporter, laboring in self-inflicted obscurity for dying country weeklies across the Heartland. He is down...but not out. (The only reason he's not out being it would never occur to him that he's down.)Picture the Thomas Ladies Club, a relic of a building, all that is left of the dust bowl blighted town of Thomas. And its long gone club members, the keepers of high spirits and side-splitting one liners with which they raged against the darkness of their times. There was Fern Sisk, who once met Emma Goldman, the affable Nell "Sissy" Childers, and, former Harvey girl and wing walker extraordinaire, Emmaline Blankenship. Picture Lauderback hearing their voices. And that they can talk, Lauderback and the women. For the Thomas Ladies, those sirens of the steppe, have plans for Lauderback.And those plans have little to do with Lauderback's quixotic quest to revive the Heartland via the much disputed power of his pen, nor with his all time historical hero, the agrarian populist, "Sockless" Jerry Simpson. Picture only these things (The love story? Don't even think about picturing that.) and you will have nibbled at a story as enduring as legend yet as current as the latest Wall Street Ponzi scheme. While this book is about surviving one's own existence, neither a feedlot ecoterrorist nor the fusion band, Rasta Cowboy, neither the southwest monsoon frog wizard nor the antics at the annual Buckaroo Cotillion can deter Lauderback from keeping such weighty pursuits, if only in his view, firmly on the festive side.
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