Patrick Ryan’s epic Buckeye is a sweeping family saga set in the fictional small town of Bonhomie, “founded in a northwest pocket of Ohio in 1857 by a small group of merchants and their families, on land transformed by the Last Ice Age, when a glacier nudged its way down from Canada and melted, creating not only Niagara Falls and the Great Lakes, but also a vast swamp across the top of Ohio and Indiana that took thirty years to drain and left behind soil densely ripe for farming”.
The novel opens in the 1940s and follows more than three decades of American life, from the final days of World War 2 through the optimism of the postwar boom and into the uncertainty of the Vietnam years. The turning point is an impulsive kiss stolen on V-E Day. In a basement office of the hardware store, as shouts, whistles and car horns filter in from the street above, Margaret Salt grabs Cal Jenkins by the shoulders and kisses him. For Cal, the moment is intoxicating and unsettling. As Ryan puts it, “The duality their involvement required meant he was constantly at odds with himself.” That moment of wild celebration becomes the seed of a hidden affair that will plague two families for generations.
Cal is a man defined by what he has been denied. Born with one leg shorter than the other, he grows up with Everett, an eccentric, reclusive father forever scarred by his service in World War 1. When America joins the fight against Germany and Japan, Cal is rejected by the recruitment office. He resigns himself to working in his father-in-law’s hardware store, but the rejection eats at him: “Sometimes he wondered if he would ever discover what his ‘special thing’ was — his purpose, he’d decided — especially in the face of a world war that wouldn’t have him. He was so conscious of not being overseas that he found his limp worsening all by itself. He told people about his leg, people who hadn’t asked and didn’t care.”
Becky Hanover, the store owner’s daughter and now Cal’s wife, is practical, good-humoured, and trusted by her neighbours. She also has an unusual gift: she can speak with the dead. “Mostly because they still had something to say, though a few also showed up to listen,” she says, half apologetically. Ryan has described her as “the good heart of the book”, and she becomes the novel’s moral centre.
Margaret Salt, “a gorgeous, confused redhead”, abandoned at birth — in a basket — and raised in an orphanage, lives with a persistent fear of being unwanted. Her marriage to Felix brings some stability, but she cannot shake her overwhelming sense of loneliness.
Felix, disciplined and outwardly strong, serves aboard a navy cargo ship. Yet his letters home reveal the pressure of living a double life. Ryan writes that Felix “harboured the unarticulated hope that marriage might render his same-sex desires dormant”. He’s one of the book’s most poignant characters, a man trapped by the expectations of his time.
Ryan locates this family drama within the larger story of mid-century middle America, from rationing during the war years to the prosperity of the 1950s, the social shifts of the 1960s, and the unrest of the Vietnam era. Both couples raise sons, Skip Jenkins and Tom Salt, who grow up under the threat of the draft. Ryan draws a line from Normandy to the Ia Drang Valley, making the point that every generation is haunted by duty and sacrifice.
Becky’s spirits may tell her that “all is swell”, but she cannot escape the impact of the betrayal. Cal too is afflicted: “Every time he thought of Margaret, he also thought of Becky, and in that thought was the most uncomfortable truth: he loved them both, differently, unevenly, but he loved them.”
The writing is grounded in small-town realism. The pace may feel slow to some readers, but Ryan’s steady, detailed prose builds to a powerful climax. The New York Times calls the novel ambitious but intimate, reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson’s expansive cross-section of small-town America, Winesburg, Ohio: “But what Ryan has to say about infidelity is far more nuanced and humane than anything the meme-judgment generation might offer. Even the relatively uncomplicated Cal reflects at one point that ‘the duality their involvement required meant he was constantly at odds with himself’.”
Ryan credits his mentor Ann Patchett with helping to shape his approach to Buckeye. She advised him to “keep the point of view very close” when writing about experiences beyond his own. The result is a story that reflects the empathy and intimacy she has always championed in fiction. She calls it “a glorious sweep of a novel, full of love and war and the perilous intimacies of small-town life”.
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