I'm feeling so cooped up these days that I sometimes find myself getting in the car and taking aimless rides to nowhere. Maybe that's what prompted me to finally check out an on-the-road novel that came out in February, right before the pandemic brought life-as-we-know-it to a hard stop.
Nancy McKinley's novel — constructed out of a series of interlocking stories — is called St. Christopher On Pluto. Note that odd title: It summons up, first, a Catholic saint who was demoted because of questions about his historical veracity, and Pluto, once a planet but now demoted to a dwarf planet.
Demoted or diminished is how you might think of the Northeastern Pennsylvania setting of this novel: Once the area around Wilkes-Barre boasted industry, family farms and coal mines; but in recent times, the region has been scarred by unemployment and the opioid epidemic.
In McKinley's novel, two hometown gals ride around this terrain in a vintage Buick nicknamed "Big Blue." Mary Katherine (MK for short) is a quiet woman who inherited the Buick from her grandmother; Colleen is the madcap troublemaker. In the opening story here, Colleen cons MK into helping her commit insurance fraud by ditching her own Honda hatchback clunker in a remote ravine. St. Christopher on Pluto drew me in by its humor, but, like the best comic fiction, it's constructed out of insider social observations that sting as much as they amuse.
We learn early on that MK and Colleen first met in the 1960s, when they were students at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Elementary School. They'd lost touch, but ran into each other again in late midlife, both working at the local mall. Colleen has a job at the Hallmark store; MK works as a manager at Waldenbooks, which, over the course of this novel, is bought out by Borders, which, in turn, is bought out by Books-A-Million, until the entire wheezing mall itself is bought out by foreign investors who plan to gut the space for a fracking truck depot.
Bossy Colleen prides herself on being a do-gooder, always ready to push MK and Big Blue into volunteer work, which takes the two white women — and this novel — on road trips deep into the less-traveled corners of Northeast Pennsylvania.
Some stories here grow out of the casual relationships the women form through their jobs at the mall. For instance, a teenager named Tiffany, who works at the food court, stars in the poignant penultimate story where she runs with MK and Colleen in a Thanksgiving "Turkey Trot" charity race. She's psyched, because she got a lead on a waitressing job at the Jersey Shore. And, then, approaching the finish line, she trips, and you get the sense that she's never going make it.
Other stories take notice of old-timers like "The Pumpers," a group of senior citizens who've survived heart attacks and power walk at the mall; they've been left behind, as their kids moved away.
It's the newer residents of the Wilkes-Barre area, however, who inspire McKinley's most unexpected weddings of screwball humor to social criticism. In a standout story called "Navidad" the two friends volunteer at a church Christmas party. Here's MK describing the hare-brained beginning of this particular car ride:
The tone shifts when the women arrive at the church, where the kids, all Latinx, are jammed into the church hall. Because of the sometimes violent local resentment against the newcomers, the church is keeping quiet about this party. As MK tells us, "[T]here will be no human-interest clips on [the local news]. ... Leave it to Colleen to involve me in a covert Christmas party."
"Covert" is a good way to characterize how this droll novel-in-stories delivers its social commentary. It's so entertaining to go along for the ride with MK and chatty Colleen, and, because of their wry, sometimes bumbling, suck-it-up resiliency, it's also possible to take in these hard-luck landscapes and see some possibility amidst all the losses.
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