With Can’t Shake the Dust, C.H. Hooks further demonstrates his dexterity with symbolism and paradox. His second novel examines fate and trauma through one family’s relationship to the dirt track.
The story is narrated by 14-year-old “Little” Billy Lemon, his father “Wild” Bill, and his mother Nanny. From the first sentence, Little’s mind is on his father, even as his car breaks down mid-race: “They say my daddy could’ve been the best racer there ever was, but that didn’t change the fact that I couldn’t breathe.” Potential is one thing, but the family’s poverty and discord seem to be intractable.
Each relationship between father and son is based in some form of servitude. Little’s grandfather, Senior, owns several properties in town and built a successful landscaping business with the help of Wild, who is now constantly drunk and in Senior’s debt. Wild, who runs an unsuccessful landscaping company, depends on his son’s earnings from racing and his weekly bets at the track. Both Little’s love of the sport and the real dangers involved are secondary to his need to provide for the family.
Wild lost his leg in a race years earlier and wears a prosthetic, which he calls his “gone leg,” emphasizing the lost limb over the present, artificial one. His preoccupation with personal failure and “redemption” wars with a tragically felt responsibility for his son. Unlike Senior, Wild admires his son’s sensitive nature, though he is unable to tell him. His chapters are conspicuously poetic, rendering the “busted civilization” around him in a euphonious vernacular: “I felt my teeth grind, smooth white, squeaking slow like glaciers, and I clinched my jaw.” Wild’s motives are shaky. He is never entirely selfless or self-serving, preferring to dodge circumstances too painful to face head-on. In one-sided competition—and physical combat—with his father, he struggles in vain against the past.
Alongside the men of the family is Nanny, whose last name we never learn. As she and Wild were never actually married, she stands apart from the family name that ensures a tendency to malfunction. She recalls the abuse her mother endured and her mother warning her to “run.” Hooks allots Nanny the fewest chapters, underscoring her evasive and untenable role as a woman who wants to be present for her son without the father he is tied to. Little considers her “a ghost” and demurs when she asks him to live with her. “When does a boy become his dad?” she wonders. “Does he have to?”
In keeping with the novel’s religious motif, Nanny works at a pet store called ProCreations that sells dogs in twos, expressly for mating. She is also running a secret “experiment” to breed out the male dogs. “I had a girl dog named Lady under my desk …. She was going to make a perfect breed. She was going to end the whining.” Nanny works on race nights, attempting to break the cycle of “whining” while her ex sacrifices their only son.
Steeply earnest at times, at the expense of plausibility—as when Little accidentally flicks a match at his school crush, setting her hair on fire, and she immediately forgives him and kisses him—the story maintains tension through its rapid pace and, in particular, the action on the racetrack. The chapters are short; everything happens hard and fast. On the outskirts of town, doomsdayers dot the highway with handmade signs, alongside those announcing “Going Out of Business” sales: harbingers of a sudden end.
In a recurring nightmare, Little finds himself in a race with Wild, who pins him to the wall at full speed. Hooks presents the spectacle of their struggle as prophecy, echoing a biblical antithesis of age and youth (in Joel 2:28: “your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions”). Amid his father’s dreams, the ruins of his family’s irreligion, Little envisages a new faith. He becomes increasingly sensitive to changes in the race day routine. On the track, he imagines the car taking control of him. The central paradox of the novel is that Little must recognize his family’s fate as unchangeable in order to subvert it. Whatever the outcome of the race, deliverance is excluded in advance. After being beaten up by two classmates—fellow racers—in the school bathroom, Little considers that it is in his power to resist defeat, ultimately by accelerating it, “[t]hat I could have stayed on the bathroom floor and never gotten up and that perhaps it would have ended there, in a puddle of my blood and urine, that perhaps it would end there anyway, just another time and another place.” This is the basis of a new doctrine, the scatological eschatology of one family’s end times.
Overall, these themes are skillfully handled by Hooks. Clever, colorful, and tightly written, Can’t Shake the Dust extends his textured fictive landscape.
Can’t Shake the Dust, by C.H. Hooks. Raleigh, North Carolina: Regal House Publishing, October 2024. 257 pages. $18.95, paper.
Aidan Loevlie is based in Hackettstown, New Jersey. His writing can be found at: slackreview.substack.com.
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