MAMA WATCHMAN READS: THE MEMORY OF RUNNING

In Ron McLarty’s novel The Memory Of Running, Smithy Ide is a man of many vices. At 43, he lives alone in an apartment that he has never liked. He overindulges in food, alcohol, and tobacco. He has a dead-end job at a toy factory. He’s a man whose life has just happened to him, without any effort on his part to make it his own.

Then his parents meet a tragic end in an automobile accident.

 

When he goes through their mail after the funeral, he finds a letter from San Francisco that sends him into a tailspin. Thus begins the story of a 279-pound man on his childhood bicycle who, for reasons he doesn’t yet understand, starts pedaling across the U.S. to the morgue where his long-missing, much-loved, beautiful (yet emotionally damaged) sister lies.

While on his quest across America from Rhode Island, Smithy begins remembering the childhood that the alcohol has evanesced: the ordinary boyhood days that were darkened by his older sister’s mental illness. While at the same time, he starts seeing his life for what it is. What starts out to be another form of running away ends up being his salvation.

The Memory Of Running is really two stories in one, and, while I was entertained by the events that happened along the way on the bike trip, I must admit to rushing through those parts to get back to what happened next in the flashback chapters. The flashbacks seemed so much more real, the details richer and crisper; they had so much more dimension.

There’s a story behind the publishing of this book, as well. The author is an actor who wrote the book back in the Eighties, but was unable to get it published. He ended up working as a voice actor, and eventually released it as a book-on-tape. Stephen King heard it and did an article about it in Entertainment Weekly magazine titled \"The Best Book You Can’t Read\". A bidding war ensued, and it ended up being published by Viking.

The Memory Of Running is not a perfect book. The ending was satisfying, if somewhat predictable. But it was definitely a good read, and one of the best books I’ve read in a while. I guess we owe Stephen King a \"thank you\" for this one.