The Best of the Backlist: Ron McLarty

A look at worthy authors you may not know, focusing on their entire collection of in-stock backlist titles. The backlist is a great way to meet some new authors and get a sense of their work.

Ron McLarty

Ron McLarty’s overarching theme is men in their 40s, going nowhere. All of his characters and certainly his protagonists are familiar—we’ve met them, or perhaps they are us. In Memory of Running Smithey Ide loses his parents and realizes he’s in his 40s and is going nowhere but up on the bathroom scale. He decides to bike across America, searching for nothing in particular, but finding himself in a host of interesting (and not completely ‘all-there’) folks along the way. Keeping him going are the phone calls from a woman who loves him, despite Smithey’s oblivion to that fact. Art in America gives us the quintessential NY writer-snob (a man in his 40s, naturally) who is commissioned to help the locals “create” a diorama commemorating their small-town history, but steps into the middle of water-war/land dispute (complete with sides, each of which claims its own gun-toting enforcers, despite being set in the 21^st century). Sound serious? It isn’t once McLarty gets a hold of the story and the obligatory love story that goes along with it. McLarty’s best is Traveler, which gives us a Manhattan bartender (or, rather, actor tending bar in between jobs…you know how that goes) who travels to his hometown in working-class RI to attend the funeral of a dear old girlfriend, but also to resurrect a past that includes mysterious disappearances, friends, old haunts, old loves, and the realization that he can travel far from his RI neighborhood but that it never really leaves him. McLarty’s books will appeal to men and women, because they contain truly endearing characters (especially those forty-something men who are never quite going anywhere) and because they are laced with wry, self-deprecating humor.