Ride

Ride is not a novel about major accomplishments. I'm not damning the book with faint praise by any means; the major accomplishment of the novel, in fact, is its deftness in telling a story in which not much of consequence seems to happen, in a way that redeems the importance of small but necessary efforts to do good, to "make a difference", as the insipid slogan goes, in the face of many small but debilitating obstacles. Ray Maddas is a lonely, unmoored man, reeling from series of endings: the dissolution of his marriage, the loss of his job as a history professor, and the death of his father. He looks after his estranged and incomprehensible mother out of guilt; he is tortured by the boxes of notebooks he keeps in his bedroom, each one full of unconsummated ideas for papers; he is apprehensive of meeting acquaintances on the street, for fear of being recognized as a failure. To regain some sense of meaning, he begins volunteering his time teaching mentally retarded adults to take the bus from their group home to their workplace. He tells his friends: "It's a form of minimalism....after years of disseminating the great themes and theses, the great crosscurrents and tributaries of the Western mind, I'm now down to a single letter, one or two digits--the 11A. The 41A West Versailles." He tells himself: "[I]n a materialist age, who but the man who cares nothing for advancement can truly advance?" But he does not believe in these faux kans, not really. The volunteering job is simply a tether keeping him from sliding into total despair. Although much of the novel illustrates that the job's main effect on Ray is to increase his feelings of boredom and frustration. Ostensibly, Ray has one primary task: teaching one retarded man, Elliott, how to get to and from his job across town unassisted. Walton does a masterful job of portraying how his protagonist's active, intelligent mind grapples with the numbing routine of training and overseeing Elliott and several other residents of the group home. He structures the book around repetition and incremental changes--the litany of bus routes and times he constantly repeats to his charges, the appearance and reappearance of drivers and regular passengers, the slow progress of road construction work and the change of season from summer to fall. The plot is peppered with small red herrings, as Ray continually brings his charges' medical issues and other problems to the attention of the group home's staff, only to have his concerns absently rebuffed and forgotten. Every such effort is rewarded only with: "'We appreciate your concern,' and what Ray recognized now was the ultimate staff accolade, `I'll make a note in the log that you asked about Hugh.'" Not much ever seems to happen. And in fact, this sort of premeditated stagnation seems baked in to the not-for-profit curriculum. Here we see Ray, preparing to meet with the woman in charge of another volunteer education project he is involved with:

Mr. Walton manages to capture the essence of amazing within the details of the mundane. His character, Ray Maddas, works for Social Services training mentally and emotionally challenged adults how to ride the bus. Like a brilliant episode of Seinfeld, nothing much happens. But within that daily routine, much is revealed about the sameness of the people involved, both "normal" and not, the challenges that we face maintaining our precarious balance in everyday existence, and the compromises we make to try to stay true to our inner selves.A mere paragraph or two of review cannot possibly do justice to this wonderfully crafted little book. I look fortward to seeing what other gems Mr. Walton has in store for us - soon, I hope!

The book challenges the reader's perspective of people who rely on the services of others to perform the tasks that the "normals" take for granted. At the same time, Walton challenges the reader's perspective of the people who provide the services. Neither a do-gooder nor a cynic, Walton's hero exhibits the humanity, the sensitivity, that must reside in most of us, if only we were willing to discover it. The theme is classic--our sense of our own humanity is often found in our discovering the humanity in others. Walton develops the theme in a creative and provocative manner.