I first read one of Joan Livingston’s detective novels after having finished a couple of Agatha Christie’s books. My head was still filled with images of an erudite Belgian detective poking about in 1930s British high society when I started “Checking the Traps,” the first Isabel Long book I’d read, but the third in the series.
Instead of reading about deceitful, evil people in mansions and fine clothes I found myself reading about deceitful, evil people at a demolition derby and in a redneck bar. What a trip to follow Joan’s detective, Isabel Long, coincidently a retired small town newspaper editor, unravel mysteries in the environs so familiar to those of us living in Western Massachusetts. Livingston, a resident of Shelburne Falls, is the former editor-in-chief of the Valley, overseeing the Daily Hampshire Gazette, the Greenfield Recorder and the Athol Daily News.
While those mysteries are fun to read, they’re not what this review is about. It’s about a different sort of book Joan wrote about a young woman working in Swanson House, a psychiatric half-way house, “The Swanson Shuffle.”
Rather than being a plot-driven novel, it invites us into a stage in Bia, the main character’s, life. There’s a beginning, when the 22-year-old Bia, who had been bouncing between boring jobs after college, decides to apply for a live-in position at Swanson House. No experience needed. And there’s an ending, when she moves on from there to the next phase of her life.
In between we get to know, and warm up to, a group of very human characters, all with their quirks, which we learn to see, is just them being them. And the staff? Well, they’ve got quirks as well. And the one professional psychiatrist who visits occasionally to see how things are going? Yup, him too.
The woman whose place Bia is taking warns her not to get too close, that the residents are all like the dented cans in a supermarket, put on a separate shelf because it’s not possible to get the dents out, but the contents are still good.
The book is set in a run-down Western Massachusetts town, in an old building that was once a fine home and is now set to be demolished. The staff has no training, and are simply there to keep the house going.
So you see a young woman trying to find herself with some sort of work and a building no longer of much value used to provide housing for people on the edges of society neither needing full-time care, nor able to fully function on their own, managed by individuals who fancy themselves as professional care givers, but who aren’t.
None of that is why you should read this book. It’s the characters. Joan brings them all to life, each with their dents plain to see, and each with their inherent goodness exposed as well. The chapters read like episodes in a long-running TV series, like “Cheers,” “Friends,” or the “Sopranos,” where in each episode we see the characters we’ve grown to know and care about deal with what life has served up for them that day. Through the episodes, though, we see the larger threads, as the characters evolve, not to any climactic conclusion, but simply further along in their lives.
It’s not a grim book. It’s more of a compassionate, light book. There is a joy in the small details, whether arguing about who gets which seat in the station wagon, cheering each other on in volleyball games — they named their teams the Nuts and the Crackpots — or seeing who can find the most crabs on an expedition to the sea shore.
The time period is the mid 1970s with Watergate and other then-current events going on in the background. In one scene, Bia is taking them all to see a movie, “The Exorcist.” It’s playing in an old theater in a small town on a cold night. The theater is empty except for them. They all react differently. There’s Lane in the front row hooting and hollering as the girl is possessed by the demon, and there’s Angie who starts throwing things at him to get him to sit down. My favorite is Alice, a gentle, motherly woman who is on a medication that makes her sleep a lot. Bia wakes her up for the most famous scene in the movie where the girl is vomiting pea soup and her head is spinning around. Alice wakes up, sees the scene, and says, “Dear me, the poor thing.”
The staff reacts, each in their kind as well. Bia is doing her best to keep things together (she does), and Paul who fancies himself a therapist (he’s not) notes that the residents really like the movie because they can relate to being possessed by a demon.
It gets out of hand in the theater and they almost get thrown out and run out of gas in the snow on the way home and … Bia works it out, just another day in that epoch of her life.
This is a wonderful book that simply invites you into these people’s lives. Each time you pick it up, it’s like making a phone call to a friend and finding out how their day went, sharing with them all the little ups and downs that keep us all going.
The Swanson Shuffle, and all of Joan’s books, can be purchased online from Amazon, or can be bought directly at Floodwater Brewing in Shelburne Falls.
Dennis Merritt writes stories and opinions in Shelburne Falls. Visit his website, denniscmerritt.com, to see more of his work as well as links to other Shelburne Falls authors.