Book Review: THE SILVER GHOST by Chuck Kinder
 |
The Silver Ghost by Chuck Kinder |
| Braddock Avenue Books, 2016 $16.95 |
It is the late 1950s and America is a lush, electric, song-filled garden for teenage truelove, and Jimbo and Judy fully expect that their own truelove will grow and grow until the end of time, until the twelfth of never.
Jimbo Stark lives in a place somewhere between reality and fiction, where the events of his life trickle into movie scenes in his head. The reprint of Chuck Kinder’s forgotten novel, The Silver Ghost, marries the nostalgia of Hollywood golden era movies with the bittersweet experience of growing up. Kinder’s coming-of-age novel showcases his easy style of writing and evolving voice as he follows Jimbo on the most important adventures of his young life.
The Silver Ghost begins with Jimbo’s exile to his grandmother’s house in the middle of nowhere. This sentence is inflicted by his father after he sells his father’s prized collection of war figurines to buy a ring for his girlfriend. Jimbo loses both his family and girlfriend in one fell swoop after his girlfriend, the fickle Judy, decides she would rather be going out with somebody else. He struggles with his feelings for Judy throughout the story, but is never really able to overcome his love for her – even after Judy decides to marry another man.
Jimbo’s troubles don’t end with his personal relationships. While running away from home and Judy, he tangles himself with a criminal who goes by the name Jake Barnes. Kinder captures the dark, charming character of Barnes and models him into a cool-guy role model that Jimbo looks up to by framing Barnes as a movie star himself— Barnes is the Humphrey Bogart to Jimbo’s James Dean.
The scenes in this novel are like fish underwater. They are shimmery and blurred but every few moments, one surfaces and sparkles in the sun, fully exposed. For instance, Kinder fleshes out the character of Jake Barnes by first alluding to his exciting life, then giving specific details about his adventures:
Jake Barnes had been about everyone and done about everything all right. As they drove south that night and the following day, taking turns behind the wheel, Jake told one story after another about his wild youth. When they passed a chain gang chopping brush beside the road in the early morning, Jake told about the six months he had once spent on just such a chain gang before finally escaping…
Kinder’s style frames his mysterious, foggy characters in the terms of Hollywood actors and actresses of the period. Jimbo’s internal struggles are described in vignettes of James Dean smoking cigarettes and tangling with boys from school, then disappearing into the dust in his silver Porsche. The narration blurs reality with the perfection of misunderstood youth that could only be conveyed by the silver screen. Jimbo Stark is not just a troubled teenager – he is “old Captain Rebel Without a Cause On the Road, steely eyed, grinning tightly, his soul whopeeing.”
Kinder’s protagonist captures the weighty confusion of growing up mixed with a movie-styled implosion. Jimbo is not intended for some sort of wholesome redemption or solution to his familial troubles. In fact, his only chance for happiness means running away from everything that he has ever known, or else he faces a depressing future of unsatisfying late-night drinks at the bar by himself. Like James Dean, Jimbo ends the narrative in the car, “as he pushes the pedal relentlessly down, as he tries with all of his heart to hit 110, escape velocity: as he tries with all of his heart to become perfectly himself: as he tries with all of his heart to blast off that great starfield in the sky.”