My name is Tracy “Smith.” I am twenty-six years old. I’ll be twenty-seven in April. I have been driving for several days, with no particular destination in mind, maybe someplace warm. After what went down in NYC I knew I had to clear out of town, but I had nowhere to go, no one I felt I could safely turn to. So I have adopted a new mantra. Let the dice roll. I threw my stuff into the car and started driving. I let the dice roll. They rolled south.
I kept driving south until there was no more south left. The road ended in Miami. I parked the car in front of the first bar I saw, the Flying Horse, and not knowing what else to do with myself proceeded to get drunk with the last of my funds, which meant I wasn’t able to get very drunk at all. The entire time I had the feeling I was being watched, but then I’d had the same feeling for weeks now, so I decided to ignore it and watched a game playing on a television above the bar for a while. The red team was winning.
Welcome to the diary of Tracy “Smith,” a guy on the run, who manages to simultaneously run away from and toward trouble. This excerpt from Wes Pierce’s gritty novel in progress prompted a thoughtful discussion of what to do when the character you create dares to defy the author’s plans for him. Here’s what we had to say about chapter three. It has a title, but we are sworn to secrecy on that detail:
Hey, Wes,
As I already told you, I opened the first pages of chapter three to take a glance and was so immediately drawn in that I read the entire excerpt right there and then. My first thought was: brilliant. Tracy’s first-person narrative voice is stellar in the way it hooks us in and keeps us entertained. We meet him while he’s driving, which isn’t such an original situation, and yet the way he tells it is original and pulls us right in, including perhaps my favorite bit where he decides to roll the dice, and the dice roll in a particular direction that seems to set the course of his unfolding fate.
Tracy is a complex and fascinating guy, and in him I can see hints of Huck Finn, Addie Pray, and Camus’s Meursault. At times, he seems to have the take-it-as-it-comes approach to life that we sometimes ascribe to Huck, although both Tracy and young Huck have an underlying agenda even as they take advantage of immediate opportunities to advance their goals. Then at times we get a more youthfully innocent point of view underscored by street smarts we might associate with Addie Pray, as when Tracy follows Claudia outside but then takes matters into his own hands after she abruptly departs. And finally, we occasionally see the apparent indifference of a modern-day Meursault in some of his choices and reactions, although Tracy ultimately seems to wear his heart on his sleeve both in response to Claudia’s femme fatale behavior and Emil’s (ultimately faux) fatherly demeanor. I didn’t want this excerpt to end, and I’m delighted to know that the chapter continues and we’ll get to follow Tracy around a while longer.
Tracy willingly goes off with two men who are strangers to him, and there’s a delightful sense of danger and sexual undercurrent to their initial encounter, where we see Emil and his companion drunkenly fawning over Tracy, at least until his new friends all of a sudden sober up in the cab. Continue reading
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