Avenue of Champions.
Clay Blancett. Hysterical Books Press: Tallahassee, FL, 2017.
In Clay Blancett’s first novel Avenue of Champions the reader is taken on a fascinating odyssey through, not Homer’s Mediterranean Sea, but the streets and back alleys of Richmond, Virginia.
Our vessel is not Odyssey’s Homeric galley but one of the many stake body grapple trucks in Richmond’s fleet of municipal solid waste collection vehicles. The book’s narrator doesn’t spear cyclopes but instead stabs at tall piles of garbage with his pitchfork. Blancett gives us a true insider’s glimpse into this strange and striking world, exotic in its own weird way.
The novel’s first-person protagonist is a stranger here too. A home construction carpenter before the Great Recession hit, he desperately needs a job to maintain custody of his two children; his ex-wife would like him permanently out of the picture. However, he gets hired as a temp for the city’s waste management crew and bravely faces this culture and characters, allowing him to eke out a living and enjoy weekends with his young son and daughter.
His love for his kids shines powerfully in the narrative. In the chapter titled “River” he takes his kids on a little adventure to a nearby wooded waterway where the three of them enjoy a picnic lunch. Blancett’s ability to write vividly about the natural world mightily shows through here:
“About halfway up a fallen tree trunk it sat, blue and fierce and big as a cat: a perching Kingfisher. . . . It eyeballed us, electric blue Mohawk flaring. . . . We got inside twenty-five yards when he issued his machine gun call again and took off. . . . Finally in a shocking blue burst, he went straight up between the tree limbs and disappeared into the sky.”
In great contrast to this landscape Blancett, of course, also immerses us completely into the world of garbage, its smells, textures, sights, and sounds. With his crewmates on any given truck, he wrestles with piles of refuse as bravely as any Greek soldier in the Illiad fought on a battlefield:
“The sun cut long knives of shadow and light sideways through the vaulting trees on either side of the opening. . . . We’d stopped by a pile of treated fencing which had obviously not come from the house it was behind. . . . I spotted couches, mattresses, televisions; various piles. Karl had mounted the seat above the cab, cigar smoke billowing above his ball cap like a halo and swung the boom around; he dropped it open on top of the pile and crushed it like a sleeve of saltines in a child’s fist. Shards of green salt-treated pine and shattered spruce flew everywhere. The claw rose up in the air and into the back.”
Avenue of Champions may have what some readers might call a “memoir-shape” instead of a class tension-driven plotline; nevertheless, the details here about life behind the scenes for these rugged and feisty sanitation workers create a page-turning momentum that becomes more and more fascinating chapter after chapter. Clay Blancett has made a strong debut with this gritty novel; readers will be pleased to ride along beside him in Richmond’s ragged but steady garbage trucks.
–Michael Trammell