The Liquidators and Tom LeClair

Categories: Local Interest , Fiction

Tom LeClair, one of my English professors when I attended the University of Cincinnati, has written his fourth novel, The Liquidators.  In this story, Tom Bond, of Middletown, Ohio, operates a mobile salvage enterprise, Midwest Liquidators.  Bond’s caravan of independent truckers hauls a varied inventory of remaindered and discontinued goods on a circuit of tertiary cities of the Midwest.   

Business is good, but Bond wants to recruit a successor.  His son refuses (“I don’t want to live off failure”); his daughter sees the business as a cult of economic defeat; and his truckers aren’t interested.  He considers the ephemerality of his enterprise and wonders, “What lasts?” That’s when Bond has a dream to build an enduring memorial to human industry and folly in his hometown.  The Liquidators is a discerning character study and a blackly comic fable written partly in homage to Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom.

Tom’s first novel was Passing Off, a sports thriller set in Athens amid the competitive action of the Greek Professional Basketball Association.  Narrator Micheal Keever is an American player lacking NBA skills, but hanging on to the game as a point guard for Panathinaikos Athens.  Keever lies about having Greek ancestry in order to make the roster, leaving him vulnerable to blackmail by an Athens journalist involved with an eco-terrorist group.  Keever's kinetic narration and revealing depictions of life in the smog-shrouded Greek capital are rewarding and memorable.  

Well Founded Fear, his second novel of intrigue, is cited as the first novel in English about the plight of Kurdish refugees.  Cincinnati lawyer Casey Mahan works as an interviewer for the U. N. High Commissioner of Refugees in Athens.  Casey works to rescue a Kurdish political prisoner, only later to realize that the man is not what he seems to be.

Passing On is my favorite among Tom's novels.  In this sequel to Passing Off, Michael Keever is retired from playing and officiating basketball, following artificial hip replacement surgery.  Almost by chance, he founds Terminal Tours, a business based on escorting dying or terminally ill clients on final road trips and journeys.   In a career shift, Keever becomes a point guard for the dying (he never loses his playmaker's eye or mental reflexes) on their final possession of life, as it were, with the clock running out at game's end.  Always reliant on physical skills and instinctive movements, the former jock is challenged now by weighty metaphysical issues of life, death, and spirituality that confront his clients.   Keever’s journeys are, by turns, comic, poignant, and tragic, but ultimately, restorative and transcendent.