Its title taken from a song by the late, great John Prine, “The Big Door Prize” by M.O. Walsh is a delightful romp through small-town Louisiana on the cusp of its bicentennial celebration. The fictitious town of Deerfield is populated by a likable bunch of mostly good-intentioned but misguided people whose lives are turned inside out when a mysterious machine appears in town that purportedly determines a person’s true calling from a swab of saliva.
Overnight, lines for the DNAMIX machine are out the door at Johnson Grocery, and townspeople are beginning to consider possibilities they’d never before imagined for themselves.
Convinced he’s meant to be a cowboy, Mayor Hank begins dressing like a rancher and dodging meetings to convert his garage into a saloon. Principal Pat resigns her job at the high school to pursue her destiny as a carpenter, despite her lack of knowledge on the topic. Jazz musician Geoffrey Mallow suddenly wants to don a top hat and perform card tricks as a magician.
One of the few people in town not taken in by the machine is high school history teacher Douglas Hubbard, a jovial, heavyset man with a balding pate, who is perfectly content with his life, especially since he recently embarked on his dream of learning to play the trombone.
But his wife Cherilyn, whom Douglas adores, is a different story. The community-minded homemaker — who makes birdhouses from Popsicle sticks and routinely marks the end of her husband’s workday with “wine time” — discovers she’s destined for royalty. She goes overboard indulging in a fantasy that provides a distraction from her mysterious physical ailments that include headaches, dizzy spells and fatigue.
As tensions and miscommunications mount between Douglas and Cherilyn, the happy couple begins to wonder just how happy they really are. Meanwhile, Douglas' nemesis Deuce Newman, who’s boldly made his affection for Cherilyn known, devises a plan to exploit the chink in what everyone had always assumed was a perfect marriage.
In an alternate storyline, high school student Jacob — a socially awkward, Pokemon-obsessed introvert — struggles with grief over the recent death of his twin brother, Toby, a gregarious, well-liked, star athlete. When Toby wrecks his car while driving drunk, Jacob can’t help but feel that the wrong twin died.
Complicating matters for Jacob is Trina, a troubled teenage girl from a dysfunctional family who seems to have transferred her crush on Toby to his twin brother. Jacob is mystified by Trina’s intentions, especially when they start to take a dark turn. Paralyzed by indecision over how to de-escalate the situation, Jacob finds himself hurtling toward a desperate denouement.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Rounding out the cast of characters is Father Pete, whose late-in-life calling to the priesthood was prompted by his wife’s death, and Tipsy Rodrigue, a former alcoholic who seeks redemption from his past transgressions by giving the townspeople of Deerfield free rides in his luxurious Lincoln Continental.
All the various storylines reach a crescendo on the night of the bicentennial, but none of them play out the way you might think because the closer the book comes to the end, the more it veers down a potentially tragic path. Despite the playful, frothy nature of this mostly humorous book, there are some ugly truths festering beneath the surface in Deerfield, particularly as they relate to the night of Toby’s death and the origins of the DNAMIX.
Initially, Walsh paints the town of Deerfield as a literary construct devoid of real-world concerns like racism, political polarity, economic disparity, etc. There is racial diversity in Deerfield, but no one is identified by skin color and everyone is treated just the same. But eventually, some all-too-familiar ills of modern life such as substance abuse and violence begin to surface, reminding us that with the good always comes some bad.
The ability to take what is primarily a funny, engaging, leisurely paced look at Small Town, USA, a la Fannie Flagg, and turn it into a breathless, high-stakes page-turner in the last 60 pages speaks to the mastery of Walsh’s storytelling skills. But what makes “The Big Door Prize” most appealing is its deeply humane characters who are primarily sweet and kind-hearted, but who get drunk and fight and act a fool just enough to give them a bit of an edge. Weaving it all together is a gentle sense of humor conveyed through comic events and clever observations that make us laugh not so much at the characters but at the sight of ourselves within them.
Who can’t relate to this description of what it’s like to have survived a grueling workday? “By the time the three-o’clock bell rang, Douglas Hubbard felt like a much older person than he’d been that morning. … It was as if he’d gone to work that morning as ‘Jailhouse Rock’ Elvis and emerged Las Vegas Elvis.”
If ever there was a time for an uptick in literary humor, it’s now. There’s no better antidote to a global pandemic and a fractious presidential campaign than a good laugh, and “The Big Door Prize” delivers plenty.
In the most simplistic terms, the message of “The Big Door Prize” is some variation on the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. But the more profound lesson is the realization that the possibility for change is always present, it’s just a matter of being receptive to it and a willingness to take the first step.
FICTION
By M.O. Walsh
Putnam
384 pages, $27
About the Author
