Loose Ends

by Neal Bowers

Overview

A distraught Davis Banks arrives home for his mother’s funeral. Davis teaches poetry at a small college. He loves words — but not himself. His father had died some years before, and now Davis discovers a lot of little things in his mother’s house that don’t seem right.
Where are the keys to her car? In fact, he realizes he doesn’t even know how or where she died. That night he visits his mother’s gravesite, dug next to his father’s. Near the bottom he discovers a man’s arm sticking out of the dirt where his father’s coffin is supposed to be. And when he finds out that his mother apparently died in a motel room with another man, he’s confronted with a myriad of loose ends thrashing about in a quicksand of details.
With a poet’s feel for language, Neal Bower tells a story whose twists intrigue the reader as much as they do Davis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780375506918
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/01/2001
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	222 KB

About the Author

Neal Bowers was born and raised in Clarksville, Tennessee, but has lived the past quarter century in Ames, Iowa. Among his six previous books, the most recent are Words for the Taking: The Hunt for a Plagiarist (nonfiction) and Night Vision (poetry). He and his wife, Nancy, also a writer, are supervised by six very helpful cats.

Read an Excerpt

THE SHORTEST DISTANCE between two people is almost always a lie. Compared to the truth, it has the advantages of a cut flower over a potted plant. You may think you would prefer the plant, but consider the commitment-the watering, the worrying. You can't help expecting it to live; and if it doesn't, you bear most of the blame. A single rose, however, lasts as long as it lasts in its slender vase. Snip the stem on the bias and cloud the water with an aspirin, but still you know this momentary effusion will not become part of your permanent decor.

Davis Banks lived by this philosophy and always traveled with his arms full of flowers-a daisy for the ticket agent, a jonquil for the steward, and for the person seated next to him, an exotic bouquet.

" Yes, I'm the inventor of the mobile bowling alley. You don't see them much in this country, but they're the rage in Latin America. All you need is a pickup truck, a few sections of my patented collapsible trestles for an extension, my simulated polyurethane lane, and you're in business. just drive from town to town and rake in the dough."

Such stories illuminated the daily trench, flashed in dull eyes. And Davis especially liked it when one of his original lies came back to him, like the one about the Barber-in-a-Helmet: simply strap it on, set it for the length of hair you want, and flip the switch. But it distressed him when some of his inventionsthe Bug Zapper, for instance-became real. It wasn't that he regretted not getting the patent and making a gazillion dollars; rather, he felt disoriented, like waking in a hotel room and thinking for a moment he was in his own home. The truth, too, can be a mimic. Sometimes it dims and blinks, a bulb about to blow.

Studying and teaching literature for fifteen years had conditioned Davis to regard everything as subject to multiple interpretations. Struggling to get his students to understand a poem or a story in a certain way had failed, so he gave himself over to their assorted misreadings, accepting them all as valid.

His own life reinforced this approach. Moving from one teaching job to another, he had settled in finally as an academic oddity at a junior college in Des Moines. His actual title was Part-time, Temporary, Adjunct, Visiting Assistant Professor, his professional identity so qualified that he felt edited almost to invisibility. Of course, he pretended he was full-time and tenured. What did the words mean, after all? Even the world is a text, infinitely interpretable. Self-image is yet another possible version among many, the lie a person tells himself, the fiction of identity.

On this trip, Davis Banks introduced himself as Ben Blau to the man strapped into the seat beside him. He liked names that teased, just for the extra risk. Calculating that his chance companion knew no German, Davis said, "Hi, I'm Ben Blau," which in English/German hybrid announced that he was drunk. No recognition, just an extended hand and a name, "Jim Timmerman," which caused Davis to study hard for a moment. Something in the rhyme sounded concocted. Could be a fellow changeling. Surely there were others like himself, probably thousands; but Davis couldn't say for certain he had ever encountered one. As a test, he allowed Timmerman the first move: "at do you do, Jim?

"As little as possible. " A snorting laugh punctuated the man s answer.

Davis waited. "Good work if you can get it," he said with a guarded smile.

"Actually, I'm a motivational speaker." From his inside coat pocket, he dealt Davis a business card embossed with a blue eagle and the words in red: JIM TIMMERMAN, WINNER OF THE CONGRESSIONAL MEDAL OF HONOR.

Davis was momentarily speechless. This man might be one he could learn from, a big-leaguer going for the long ball on every swing.

"I talk to business groups, civic organizations. You know, pump 'em up and get 'em. excited about life. It's a pretty damned good life, after all."

Was the ambiguity intended? Life with a capital "L," or lowercase, as in life as a scam? Davis felt himself wobble with the lift and sway of the plane as he sat transfixed by the card. Why tell a lie that defied belief? Weren't most Medals of Honor awarded to soldiers killed in action, their bravery transcending life?

What People are Saying About This

Madison Smartt Bell

Loose Ends is a truly arresting debut - remarkable for its startling felicities of language, the unusual qualities of its hero, and the ingenious twists of its plots.

Editorial Reviews

Convoluted, unsettling, and full of wry, comic prose, this first novel marks the debut of a sophisticated talent.

Book Magazine

Arresting...[Bowers's] poetic prose and intriguing plot paint an anxious portrait...Banks is a fascinating character.
— Booklist

Peggy Barber

Neal Bowers's first novel -- he has also written several books of poetry and nonfiction, including Words for the Taking: The Hunt for a Plagiarist -- is a vividly written mystery about the malleability of truth and the unreliability of memory. And there is such a thing as the truth, Loose Ends suggests -- even if nobody is there to hear the tree when it falls.
— New York Times Book Review

Gavin McNett

Davis Banks is returning home from his nearly nonexistent teaching post at a junior college in Des Moines, Iowa, where his official title is "Part-Time, Temporary, Adjunct, Visiting Assistant Professor." He is newly orphaned, severely diabetic and so dissatisfied with his own sad identity that he constantly invents new ones for the benefit of strangers. But as events unravel in the days before his mother's funeral, Davis is shocked to learn that his own small-town past may be stranger than the wildest contrivance. Stooping beside his mother's freshly dug grave, Davis discovers a man's arm protruding from the ground where his father's coffin ought to be. To his horror, he gradually realizes that things in small-town Tennessee aren't nearly as ordinary as he once imagined them to be. Convoluted, unsettling and full of wry, comic prose, this first novel marks the debut of a sophisticated talent. At heart, the book is about loneliness, that most intrinsic of human conditions, and about the desperate lengths we will go to in order to foster a human connection, little matter how trivial. It's a sentiment Bowers sums up perfectly in the novel's opening line: "The shortest distance between two people is almost always a lie."
—Kevin Greenberg

Bowers's previous book, Words for the Taking: The Hunt for a Plagiarist, chronicled his attempts to track down a man named David Jones who plagiarized a number of Bowers's poems and hoodwinked literary journals into publishing them. If only the plot for this first novel from the highly regarded poet and nonfiction writer proved as gripping. Davis Banks occupies the lowest rung of the academic ladder, toiling as an adjunct professor at a junior college in Iowa. He's also a diabetic and a compulsive liar. When his mother dies, Davis returns to Clarksville, Tenn., for the burial. There he runs into Ann Louise Wilson, a high school classmate and now a Clarksville police officer. Taking up residence in his mother's empty house, Davis delves into her life and learns--via a purse filled with condoms and cigarettes--that she wasn't the shy, retiring woman he thought. Meanwhile, the discovery of a stray corpse near the Bankses' family plot sends Ann Louise and Davis investigating a cold murder case. Throw in Davis's ping-ponging diabetes, the inevitable affair with Ann Louise, her jealous ex-husband and Davis's search for his mother's lover, and the book develops more plot lines than it can comfortably handle. Fans of Bowers's poems may find themselves gratified by the imagery, but most of them will hope that Bowers will rededicate himself to poetry. (Mar. 16) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Davis Banks, a part-time, temporary, adjunct, visiting assistant professor of literature at a junior college in the Midwest, has received news of his mother's death and is on his way to Tennessee to arrange her funeral. An amateur con man, he soon finds that his stories pale in comparison with the secrets his mother has been keeping. The first question arises when Banks realizes that he doesn't know where or how his mother died, and his efforts to find out only raise more questions, including the identity of the man in his father's grave. As he travels around Clarksville in search of answers, he meets a man who may have been his mother's lover and is reunited with an old friend from high school, now a homicide detective, who helps him uncover some facts about his mother's life and death. First novelist Bowers, the author of six books of nonfiction and poetry, has a flare for Southern dialog and an understanding of the rituals of family in the South. He has drawn Banks as a less-than-sympathetic character whom the reader still cares about even when he is self-destructive. Recommended for public libraries and libraries specializing in Southern literature. Kerie Lynn Nickel, St. Mary's Coll. of Maryland, Leonardtown Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

A rather underimagined seriocomic novel, the first by the Iowa author of the well-received nonfiction Words for the Taking: The Hunt for a Plagiarist (1997). Bowers recounts the misadventures of college English teacher Davis Banks: 40-ish, divorced, diabetic, and a serial wisecracker (perhaps meant to be an American equivalent of Kingsley Amis's "Lucky Jim" Dixon). Returning to Tennessee for his mother's funeral (and reunions with his homespun relatives), Davis encounters a human arm emerging from a grave, evidence that either or both of his parents were adulterous, and an old female friend who's now a police detective. Neither the central "mystery's" solution nor the eccentric events preceding it are especially compelling. The most interesting thing about Davis, alas, is his unstable blood-sugar level. A disappointment.

Kirkus Reviews