Experience, even if it hurts

If you read enough Keith Maillard novels, you start to believe Raysburg, West Virginia really exists. This time around Maillard returns to his fictionalized hometown with Running (Brindle & Glass $14.95), first of his four-part Difficulty at the Beginning series that follows John Dupre from high school in the 1950s to the psychedelic underground of the late 1960s.

Dupre is a middle class kid, kept busy by a half-crazy Polish friend, a high-maintenance rich girlfriend, a painful determination to become a decent runner, a new-found penchant for booze and a secret yearning to be a girl. This whirlwind of themes is distinctly Maillardian: religion, music, philosophy, sexuality, class struggle and alcohol.

Dupre is hungry for experience, whatever the cost. "As a child, I'd wanted to know what it was like to be shocked, so with my hands dripping wet, I'd played with the light switches and electrical plugs-doing everything I'd been told I must not do. I got shocked.";

Dupre pushes himself by running track, then drinking too much. "If, on Monday morning, we were not bleary-eyed, drooping, weary-in short, totally demolished... we thought we hadn't had a good time over the weekend."; Ever the extremist, he starves himself in his desire to be a girl, resolving to "match the weight-height charts for teenage girls.";

To create this series, which he says "exists independently of me, has gone on, and will continue to go on, however I write about it or whether I write about it,"; Maillard has re-visited two previous novels, The Knife in My Hands and Cutting Through, revived unpublished manuscripts and added new writing. Part two of the quartet, Morgantown is scheduled for release next year. By Jeremy Twigg.

1-897142-06-4