Goodbye, Goodness
by Sam Brumbaugh, reading at Powell’s City of Books, Thursday June 30, 7:30 pm
When a book is especially awful, I tend to take it on an almost personal level, like the book is both an affront to literature and an insult to me as a reader. Sam Brumbaugh’s Goodbye, Goodness isn’t insulting, but neither is it particularly good. I was on page 92 when I realized why I was having such a hard time getting into this debut novel–I didn’t care about the characters one bit.
Brumbaugh sounds like a pretty interesting guy: He has been in the music biz for a pair of decades, toured with cool bands on the Matador label, produced a series for PBS about rock shows, and recently completed Be Here To Love Me, a documentary about Townes Van Zandt. So it is with no enthusiasm that I knock his debut novel, but here goes.
Goodbye, Goodness is a semi-autobiographical story about Hayward Theiss, a dude in the late ’90s who works on a television series about musicians and is a descendent of Annie Oakley–just like Brumbaugh’s bio claims. Hayward is squatting in a posh Malibu beach house, trying to reassemble his memories in order to figure out how his life turned into such a despondent, laconic mess. Most of the book is told in these remembrances, which skip around haltingly and confusingly. There’s an ex-girlfriend, Helen, whom he left after she suffered a severe mental breakdown, and two junkie friends that orbit his life despite the fact they aren’t “friends” in any conventional sense. Flashback episodes of Hayward’s relationships–the downward spiral of Helen, and memories of his remote, cryptic father–shuffle in and out of his consciousness, although none of the characters are particularly bright, compassionate, funny, or self-revealing. Throughout the text, Hayward interweaves the biography of his great-grandmother, Annie Oakley, in hopes that her trajectory will help illuminate his own. Although these passages are the book’s most interesting, the two narratives never come together to create anything larger.
I admire anyone who sits down and plugs out a novel, particularly an ambitious one. But, at least in this debut novel, Brumbaugh’s ambition outruns his talent.