29   Kansas – Wichita – Thad Ziolkowski – November 2015 (Score 5.86)

Written in the present tense, therefore with a feeling of immediacy and urgency, this book opens with Lewis and his mother Abby driving to a tornado devastated farm. We are in redneck country, seeing a lorry with a bumper sticker reading “Where’s your Baghdaddy?”, with a picture of an attack helicopter,

There is a smashed metal shed where a meth lab was, surrounded by police ticker tape. Lewis has gone back to Kansas to the family home after a break-up with his girlfriend. Abby doesn’t seem entirely switched on. We hear about Lewis’ brother Seth.

As this episodic story progresses it certainly gives us a good idea of how (at least some) people live in Kansas. This, after all, is why we joined this book group – to travel the world and see other people’s lives, so different from our own.

Several of the characters are totally bonkers, in an entertaining way.

On page 102 I was surprised that a young man of Lewis’ apparent background would have heard of Robert Musil. Having reviewed his CV I believe he had read widely at some stage, and not just when he was doing his degree in English.

There are many interesting metaphors scattered throughout the book such as, when thinking about a local sand quarry, Lewis describes “hulking machinery playing dead in the moonlight”.

Towards the end, when Abby has set up a tornado chasing company, they take her first paying customer out. We see, with them, a massive tornado forming and, with them, get caught as it changes direction straight towards them. Crazy Seth has ridden his moped straight towards the twister, determined to enter its heart.

They are caught by the wind. The others manage to get into the car but Lewis, opening the door, is smashed against the windscreen, his head cracking it. They manage to escape.

fter Seth’s funeral Lewis sees him, and talks to him. He blames Seth’s drug-taking friends for having slipped something into his drink.

When the book nears its end we find Lewis working as a guard in a privately owned art museum in Brooklyn. The book ends as Lewis, and his and Seth’s father Virgil, achieve some sort of closure by scattering Seth’s ashes on the Hudson River, nearly getting a fine in the process for illicit dumping of ashes in the river.

I enjoyed the story, in particular the zany humour, and gave it a score of 8.0.