Kickdown / Rebecca Clarren / Arcade Publishing / 2018
As shameful as it is to confess, the first time I listened to Tracy Chapman I couldn’t relate. I may have been in high school or in the sophomoric years of undergrad, where part of me knew I had suffered more than most of my peers and believed it made me special. I definitely suffered more than some, but I had suffered nowhere near as much as I thought I had and it certainly did not make me special. My young self only wanted kicks and snares to treat my eardrums like punching bags. I wanted punchlines to uppercut my guts. There was so much I couldn’t hear in the nuance of a voice, in the careful fingering of a guitar, in the silence. Thankfully, I would later return to Tracy Chapman’s work with a clearer, if wetter, eye.
Once, Tracy Chapman’s music played on shuffle during a card ride, and the poet Leticia Hernandez Linares told me to change the track. She wasn’t up for the brewing of that set of emotions. The more I have sat with my own crushed hopes, my own tender and powerless love, the more Tracy Chapman’s music has made sense to me. The more its strings and hums have cut and calmed my wounds.
I feel the same way about Tracy Chapman’s music that I feel about rural America. Once I hated its silence, its slowness, its empty space, its darkness. I wanted to run back to my train-chugging city, its bright lights and slick rhythm. By extension, Kickdown is a novel I’m not sure I would have appreciated when I was young—but I should have. Written by Rebecca Clarren, a prize-winning journalist who reported on environmental issues in the rural West, Kickdown not only provides good material for discussing the politics of oil, water, and rural life, it also provides a penetrating look into the lives of three characters shaped by the classic rural values of self-sufficiency and hard work.
One of the questions Kickdown asks is how do these values fail and reward its main characters. Kickdown follows a pair of sisters, Susan and Jackie Dunbar, and Ray, an Iraq war veteran and police officer, and begins by capturing what certainly can count as some of their bleakest moments. Susan and Jackie have just lost their father and find themselves in the predicament of failing to adequately take care of his enormous ranch and livestock. Early on, Jackie gets ran over by a cow and Susan goes close to losing her mind. Ray, on the other hand, feels stuck in his marriage and drinks to avoid PTSD flashbacks of Iraq. If the book can feel a tiny bit slow at times, that’s because Kickdown is a book about setbacks.
The novel opens with an impressively detailed description of a cow giving birth, a thrilling scene that shows Clarren did her homework and has earned her rural chops. There are similar moments scattered through the novel that I suspect will make ranchers and rural folk grin with recognition. One of my favorite aspects of the novel includes itsl turns of phrase, such as this nice zinger on page 40: “Shorty Lee has always been a real bee in cheesecake.” All my minor annoyances are now officially bees in cheesecake.
The novel offers this rather jargony definition of kickdown as an epigraph: “a well will kick or kick down when the pressure of natural gas overcomes the pressure exerted by the mud column.” This makes sense as the novel rotates around the rippling effect a kickdown can have on a rural community. The result is much more dramatic than the scientific definition implies. A more casual reading of the title, on the other hand, can refer to the state of the main characters—these folks have definitely been kicked down.
What I love most about Kickdown is its tender portrayal of the messiness involved in getting your life back together after a major catastrophe. Each of the three main character have lost their dreams and face the challenge of rekindling their hope against tremendous power and odds, be it the promises they made to their father, the boundaries of a marriage, or the financial and legal strength of the oil industry. Clarren narrates all the action with the clean, cutting eye of a well-seasoned journalist mixed with the flare of a (good) buzzed poet.
I would strongly recommend teaching this book in a class about the rural West, environmental literature, in a creative writing class focusing on perspective or just writing some plain ole strong prose. If you are looking for a book to help you survive a moment that feels like it just upended your life, this book may be for you.