The Dart League King by Keith Lee Morris (review)

colorado review 162 The Dart League King, by Keith Lee Morris Tin House Books, 2008 reviewed by Nicole Backens It’s hard to know at first how to classify Keith Lee Morris’s novel The Dart League King. Is it a thriller? Slice-of-life drama? Tribute to life’s dart matches, its smaller victories? What begins as the story of a small-town dart league championship evolves, slowly, into a tense mystery. Who will harm whom, how, and why? Ultimately, the novel’s authenticity makes categorization irrelevant, and Morris teaches the reader how the story of an innocent enough evening can suddenly become twinged with menace. One thing is immediately clear, though: the characters of Morris’s latest novel aren’t what you’d call planners. Or, more accurately, their hastily constructed and often abandoned plans help explain why most of them lead static, unsatisfactory lives in their small Idaho town. The best exception is the dart league itself, the baby of “founder/commissioner/team captain/individual champion” Russell Harmon, defending Dart League King and logger who believes that his cocaine-and-beer habit is just a way to achieve the right dart-playing balance. The other main characters include Tristan Mackey, a dreamer with (quite possibly ) sociopathic tendencies, and Vince Thompson, resident drug dealer and repository of anger who chases Russell down because of a missed drug payment. Brice Habersham, Russell’s chief opponent in darts, and ex-flame Kelly Ashton round out the narrative as the town’s more practical—if equally disillusioned —residents. The novel begins simply enough. Russell loves darts, and he wants to win. His preoccupation with the night’s match overshadows even his fear of Vince, whom he suspects may not only find Russell, but try to kill him as well. “Beating Brice Habersham would make the Garnet Lake Dart League legitimate,” Russell thinks. “Local Boy Beats Former Professional, Whole Town Basks in Glory.” With the help of a little coke and beer, Russell attempts to rally his team members (including the aforementioned Tristan) to take the championship by defeating expro Brice and his team. Kelly, Tristan’s now-date, sits at a table in the bar and waits. CRSUM09 nonfiction.indd 162 5/22/2009 12:43:42 PM 163 Book Notes Despite its simple premise—The Dart League King chronicles just one night of the league championships—it takes Morris time to position his characters. Each chapter is told through another character’s perspective and, for the first fifty pages or so, the novel feels like a cacophony of voices held together by a dart match and the vague threat of violence. Once positioned, however, the five main characters’ overlapping narratives enrich the evening’s suspense, and the novel finds its pace. It’s a good pace, too: Morris gives the town’s residents ample space to be pensive; at the same time, their life-altering decisions—to kill or not to kill? which man to go home with?—drive the story. Once the dart game is set up and the various characters placed in motion, the story quickly turns into a compelling thriller. Secrets are revealed; fate is set, foiled, and set again; and the five primary characters learn to no longer trust themselves, let alone one another. And that, really, is Morris’s key achievement: his characters, so conditioned by the whims of circumstance, convincingly surprise even themselves through their reactions. (At one point, Vince “realize[s] with a kind of horror that . . . everything had turned out exactly like he’d planned.” In another novel , such a musing might have been hackneyed. Here, it’s pitch perfect.) This is not to say that the novel feels slapdash in its construction; rather, the characters come off as genuine, sometimes unwilling, participants in a well-orchestrated drama. Although exterior circumstance serves as a catalyst for action —a couple of thinly veiled contrivances allow for the novel’s pinnacle moments—The Dart League King is really about the beauty and pain of the small decisions (good and bad) that define us, and about how something as simple as a mountain lake can contain in equal parts the poetry of the ideal, the...