The Slide by Kyle Beachy (review)

colorado review 152 for Richardson’s connection with his subject. The biographer seems to know a heart as much as a corpus. Emerson’s words “The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent” are to Richardson a stirring cry. Emerson was interested in primary sources—he wanted the in-the-moment, original thought, not someone’s review of the original thought. He would not read the essay I write now, but I expect he would engage with First We Read. Richardson seems to be someone in dialogue with Emerson as a fellow essayist. One gets the sense that when Richardson reads “The American Scholar” or “Nature,” he experiences what Emerson describes: “A good head cannot read amiss. In every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides, hidden from all else, and unmistakably meant for his ear.” First We Read invites the reader into a private meditation with Emerson, to take part in a conversation on language, Goethe, journaling, Plotinus, selfreliance , and ambition, among many other subjects. The book is a compilation of the Concord Sage’s confidences, asides, and marginalia, all of which seem immediately necessary for the writer’s ear. The Slide, by Kyle Beachy The Dial Press, 2009 reviewed by Jennie A. Camp For twenty-two-year-old Potter Mays, life is on hold: College is done and he has returned to his parents’ St. Louis home to live; his job delivering bottled water in a white Ford cargo van proves an odd fit; his college love, Audrey, is traveling Europe indefinitely with her bisexual pal, Carmel; and Potter soon realizes that life on the home front may not be the safe haven he had assumed. With longings he cannot articulate, the protagonist of Kyle Beachy’s first novel finds himself sliding into a coming-ofage abyss of loneliness and misdirection. All Potter is waiting on is Audrey. He has decided he loves her—he thinks—and wants her home. But as the wait stretches from three weeks to an entire summer, life throws Potter one curveball after another for which he is hardly ready. And when he reacts out of haste and without principle, life becomes an 153 Book Notes entanglement of partial truths, misunderstandings, and twentysomething earnestness that hardly speaks to the depths of human relationship and fulfillment. Potter’s passivity leads him to a moment outside a St. Louis batting cage where he is beaten into unconsciousness; when he awakens, he realizes, on some teetering, vertigo-induced level, that decisiveness and character may prove kinder bedfellows than the women he has been courting. Beachy encapsulates the twenties masterfully. Consider, for example, Potter’s anxiety about trying to impress Audrey’s driven and intimidating family. Potter knows they have concluded he is not ambitious enough for her, and although they do not speak of it, Potter knows that Audrey knows. So when she offers a moment of reassurance, Potter is shaken by the danger of his own transparency: “Stop worrying about them,” she said. “Just be Potter. I’ll be Audrey.” Trembling at the sound of her voice, I recognized the girl at my side, epicenter of my world, was capable of mass demolition. That she could disappear, or die, or declare this whole thing over. At any given second she could crush, kill, destroy, with a word. Twin bed, musty guest room, hostile environs: where I came to understand just how much of love was based on fear. Or consider a moment when Potter tries to think of a way to console Ian, the eleven-year-old boy he plays big brother to, despite his own instabilities. Even Ian can see that Potter is only grasping: We drove back to Waldwick Drive listening to one of St. Louis’s four classic-rock stations, songs filling what would otherwise have been nauseating silence. Time was running out. I racked my brain for a fact, some niblet of wisdom to share with this kid whose mother had disappeared. One hundred twenty thousand dollars spent on my education—I should have had facts to spare, wheelbarrows full of excess knowledge. “I never met a problem frozen custard...