I read most of Buckeye during a stretch of nights when I couldn’t sleep, which turned out to be the wrong and right way to meet it. Wrong, because a novel about inherited consequences is not a great companion at 2 a.m. Right, because Patrick Ryan writes the way the house sounds at that hour, quiet rooms, distant trains, a refrigerator humming while somebody lies awake deciding whether to say a thing.
Here is my central claim, and everything below serves it: Buckeye argues that a person’s real life’s work is the repair of their own mistakes, and that this work is nearly impossible inside a small town that refuses to let anyone change. The book’s own line says it best. Cal Jenkins wonders whether a person is fairly measured by what they do with what they got wrong. That question is the engine. So, can a man who spends forty years hiding one mistake ever actually make it right?
Cal is the one who stuck with me. He was born with one leg shorter than the other, and the rejection from military service in the 1940s lands harder on him than any wound would have. He marries Becky, who conducts seances and speaks to the dead for grieving families, and he privately believes the whole thing is theater. That disbelief sits between them at the breakfast table for decades. Then, on the night the war in Europe ends, Cal kisses Margaret Salt, whose husband Felix is at sea. It is a small thing. It is also, as Ryan shows, the kind of small thing that decides the shape of everything after.
I won’t tell you what happens next, partly because the book earns its turns and partly because I genuinely did not see several of them coming. What I will say is that the two families stay in each other’s orbit, and the next generation inherits the bill. Two boys, one from each household, become inseparable, and their friendship keeps the adults circling a secret none of them can name out loud. The suspense is not thriller suspense. It is the suspense of a phone call you know is coming.
Two hundred pages in, I stopped reading it as a family saga and started reading it as a book about a specific, unfashionable idea. Ryan’s characters do not get clean redemption arcs. They get partial repairs, done late, done clumsily, sometimes done to the wrong person.
The novel’s recurring image is the seance, and I think Ryan chose it deliberately. Becky’s whole profession is the claim that the dead are still in the room, still listening, still owed something. Half the town finds comfort in it. Cal finds it fraudulent. And yet the entire novel operates on Becky’s premise. The past never leaves the room. It sits at the table. It wants to be spoken to.
The other image that recurs is the telegram, which arrives in Felix’s story at the worst possible moment and which nobody in a small town can keep quiet. News travels through Bonhomie faster than any character can control it. Ryan keeps using the seance and the telegram as opposites: one is a message from the dead that may or may not be real, the other is a message about the living that becomes real the second it is delivered. Between those two, the whole book lives.
What Ryan does with craft, mostly, is refuse to hurry. He withholds information the way families withhold it, not maliciously, just out of habit and fear. The prose is plain. The dialogue is sparse, which several other readers have noted, and I think it is a strength. These are people who cannot say the thing, so the narration has to carry it, and it does.
The definitive judgment I’ll offer: Buckeye understands that the strongest closets are not built from shame. They are built from kindness, from a wife who doesn’t ask and a friend who doesn’t push.
Where the book gets uncomfortable, and I mean this as a real complaint and a real compliment at once, is how long it lets its characters suffer without intervening. There were stretches in the middle, maybe eighty pages, where the pattern of concealment and near-confession started to feel like a machine. I found myself wanting to shake Margaret, who is the hardest character to love. She was abandoned as an infant, and her whole adult life is a negotiation with that fact, and Ryan is honest enough to make her withholding, difficult, sometimes cold. I respected it. I did not always enjoy it.
Which brings me to who this is for. If you read for plot, this is not your book. If you want resolution in every relationship, be warned. If you grew up in a small town, or have a parent who never quite explained something, or you’ve been the person who kept a family secret out of love rather than shame, this will land. Readers of Elizabeth Strout and Ann Patchett will feel at home here. If you want your historical fiction to put you inside the war itself, look elsewhere. The battles here happen offstage, in letters and in the space of what a man won’t say when he comes home.
What I took away is not comfort. It’s a kind of permission to stop assuming the people who hurt me were careless. Sometimes they were trying to protect me and got it wrong. That is not a lesson the novel states. It is one I walked away carrying, and I have been carrying it for weeks.
This book won’t fix your family. But it will make you slightly less certain you already know what your family is made of. That, I think, is the question Ryan is really asking. What would you do with the mistake you’ve been carrying, if you finally believed there was still time?
