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subwaythru -> RE: Book Alphabet (5/16/2010 6:17:56 PM)
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The Loop---by Joe Coomer (make sure of your author; there are other books of the same title).
Lyman works "courtesy patrol" along The Loop, a stretch of highway girdling Fort Worth, Texas....which means he cleans up the grease spots and automobile sheddings that are there one minute, gone the next, and never do we give those shredded tires or single boots a second thought. Where do they come from and where do they go?
Lyman himself is the product of a pair of those grease spots, his nameless parents having bit it on this same stretch of road, while he miraculously was spared and orphaned. Lyman moves through life self-contained and solitary, looking for meaning or clarity to make sense of the baffling sense of aching loss and something missing, in his meticulous study and mastery in school of one subject after another, one discovery on the Loop after another.
Suddenly, Lyman's lonely routine is disrupted when a large parrot appears seemingly from nowhere, at the door of his trailer home in the aftermath of a storm. A parrot who ominously spouts biblical admonishmenets, dire literary quotations, and seemingly nonsensical randomness that the bird nonethess repeats emphatically. Lyman seeks to do the right thing and find the bird's owner, but as he looks deeper and deeper into the history and the words, the realization slowly comes that the meaning anything, including the bird, the history, the words, or the events and beings who pass through his life, and, yes, himself and his own life-- is nothing less and nothing more than that meaning Lyman, or anyone, gives to those things as he lives his own experience. Lyman finds himself coming full circle in the loop of his life--literally--- as he comes to understand that anything and all of it matter and have meaning, if only because his existence does have meaning and does matter, because it is his attitude that creates that meaning, and tentatively Lyman moves into acceptance and willingness to not change, but be more like himself than he previously dared. Masterfully handled, this book goes from laugh-out-loud hilarious to aching ineffable wistfulness to the shudderingly and unflinchingly grisly with an admirably effortless touch. I reread this book at least once a year for its seeming simplicity and straightforwardness that, of course, is simple and straightforward, if that is the meaning to which one assigns it; "The Loop" has a special place on my "favorite novels" list.
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