Sing, Ronnie Blue

by Gary D. Wilson

Fiction. Gary D. Wilson's long-awaited debut novel--set in Bartlett's Junction, Kansas, "An All-American City" and proud sponsor of the state's largest 4th of July fireworks display--details the lives... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 097920917X
• ISBN13: 9780979209178
• Release Date: August 2007
• Publisher: Rager Media
• Length: 191 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Nothing's Gonna Stop this Train Wreck

Gary Wilson's Sing, Ronnie Blue grips you from the get go with the inevitability of small town destiny. We've heard it before-- best friends take different paths--but you've never felt it like this. Wilson's terse, almost poetic language propels his characters toward their unavoidable destiny, with a tragic climax written in the script of their youth that must be played out in the present. The characters are so well-drawn that you track with them on this collison course hoping they can change, that a circumstance will save them, that they can overcome what their Bartlett's Junction heritage simply will not allow. In the end, if you have a heart, it will break.

Wilson is an exceptional storyteller

Ronnie Blue is an anachronism. He still looks the same as he did in high school and still drives the same car. He is "not the most wholesome person you could be spending your time with." He is a junkman's son. It is the Fourth of July, Ronnie's 23rd birthday. He has recently lost his job at Carl's garage. Feeling persecuted, he decides to return to his hometown. With his girlfriend Charlene, he climbs into his anachronistic car and heads off towards Bartlett's Junction, Kansas, a small town that "came to a dead stop, where it has rested for eighty-eight years." Back home in Bartlett's Junction, it is inevitable that Ronnie's path intersect John Klein's. John now works in his father's bank but during high school he and Ronnie sang duets at assorted club meetings and parties. In Sing, Ronnie Blue Wilson explores small town life at different social levels. He examines the pressures placed on Ronnie Blue by an abusive father who has constantly told him he would amount to nothing. He also examines the pressures placed on John Klein by a father who has always wanted him to follow family tradition and become a banker. The predictable, inevitable clash between the opposing social levels is fated to happen in Bartlett's Junction when Ronnie returns to discover that there is no longer harmony between him and John Klein. Sing, Ronnie Blue suggests that contrary to Thomas Wolfe's adage, not only is one able to go home again, but one is never able to leave home, a person is defined by one's home. Ronnie can no more not be a junkman's son than John can not be the banker's son. Wilson's short novel is compact and concise. His language is as solid and forceful as a rabbit-punch to the kidneys. The book has echoes of stories that have become part of American culture. While reading it, I could not help hearing, with the same tragic irony, Jimmy Cagney in the movie White Heat yelling, "Made it, Ma. Top of the world." Armchair Interviews says: Everyone has a story of people in their hometown.

Singing Praises for "Sing, Ronnie Blue"

Gary D. Wilson's debut novel sold out its first printing right away. As a result, I had to wait for its second printing nearly three months before I held its handsome paperback copy in my greedy hands. "Sing, Ronnie Blue" was worth the wait. Its publisher's jacket copy compares the book to "The Great Gatsby." Rather than Fitzgerald, the book seems to me to more closely resemble Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men." To be sure, the characters in "Sing, Ronnie Blue" aren't migrant workers. Wilson's conflict between a local junkyard dealer's 20-something son, Ronnie Blue, and his former best friend in high school, now the heir of all-American small city banking fortune, John Klein, pits a working-class grease monkey against a young man with money. Because Blue is the main character, however, this book seems to have its roots in 1930s Great Depression fiction moreso than in that of the Roaring Twenties. If John Klein and Ronnie Blue are no George Milton and Lennie Small, neither are Wilson's characters Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby. The wonder of this taut, riveting novel is that Wilson creates a believable, if not lovable, protagonist. Ronnie Blue, who formerly teamed up with John Klein in a singing duo, returns years later with a hayseed teenage girlfriend after being fired from his job as a car mechanic in Witchita, to Bartlett's Junction, Kansas on Independence Day. In a series of hot-headed shenanigans - break-ins and burglaries reminiscent of the misdemeanors in a novel like Denis Johnson's "Angels" - Blue carves out his name and declares his independence in spades. Nowhere does Wilson bemoan Blue as a lost son or an unsung hero. Instead, the reader follows Blue's hell-bent journey as a revenant, disproving the platitude that you can't go home again. Blue comes back home all right, with a vengeance we understand, given his steely dad and cringing mom, his self-aggrandizing meanness. Throughout, Wilson manages to turn his novel into a paean for what must have been the stomping grounds where he grew up on the prairie. No matter that there is no actual Bartlett's Junction in Kansas. Wilson has lovingly sketched in its streets and fields, its carny fairground, as a kind of personal paradise lost. I won't give away the plot of this spellbinding thriller. I'll only point out Wilson's extremely coy use of two authors' names as monikers for his fictional creations. Josh Billings, a renowned humorist back in Mark Twain's day, comes up on Wilson's page 37 as a local yokel, "a mean and cranky old man." Ron Padgett, a member of the so-called New York School of poets, comes up on page 53 of "Ronnie Blue" as an employee in John Klein's bank. Are these coincidences? Is Wilson playing games with us? Perhaps he knows Ron Padgett the poet personally. In Josh Billings's case, perhaps Wilson wants us to peel back the layers of his mid-American tragedy to see its comic underpinnings. Overall, I can't sing the praises of "Sing, Ronnie Blue" loudly enough. As Stephen Dix

Sing, Ronnie Blue

Excellent read! Explores the friendship of two men, class-structure in small town America, (mis)perceptions of who we are and who we will become, and, ultimately, the inevitable outcome. Masterfully written. Hauntingly real.