BUCKEYE

Two couples confront the consequences of infidelity in small-town, post–World War II Ohio.

Over a span of more than 30 years, the small fictional town of Bonhomie provides the setting for this quiet story about the lives of two families irrevocably changed by a brief affair. Cal Jenkins, precluded from military service by a congenital orthopedic condition, marries hometown girl Becky Hanover and takes a job managing her father’s hardware store. Becky discovers that she possesses the power to communicate with the afterlife and conducts free seances in the couple’s home. Their otherwise unremarkable lives are forever upended after a brief encounter between Cal and Margaret Salt in the store on VE Day leads to a romantic entanglement. Margaret and her husband, Felix, arrived in Bonhomie in 1939, when his employer brought him there to help manage its aluminum plant, but as the war in Europe reaches its end they’ve been separated for more than two years by Felix’s decision to enlist in the Navy and his assignment to a cargo ship in the Pacific. Ryan skillfully explores his characters’ emotional vulnerabilities, among them Calvin’s insecurity about his physical impairment and his disappointment over his inability to serve his country; Becky’s ambivalence about her spiritual gift; Margaret’s psychological scars from having been abandoned by her mother mere days after her birth and a childhood spent shuttling between an orphanage and foster homes; and Felix’s issues with his sexual identity. The fallout from Calvin and Margaret’s brief affair reverberates through the lives of these families in a booming postwar America as each goes on to raise a son who must face the prospect of serving in the Vietnam War. In subtly different ways, Ryan creates considerable sympathy for each of his characters while taking care not to tip the scale in favor of any one of them. The novel’s only flaw is a deliberate pace that may leave many readers wishing it had proceeded more swiftly to its undeniably moving final scenes.

An earnest and empathetic family drama.