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Description of The Brightest Moon of the Century:
In The Brightest Moon of the Century, Edward, a young Minnesotan, is blessed with an abundance of “experience”–first when his mother dies and next when his father, an encyclopedia salesman, shoehorns Edward into a private boys school where he’s tortured and groomed. Edward needs a place in the universe, but he also wants an understanding of women. He stumbles into romance in high school, careens through dorm life in college, whirls into a tornado of love problems as a mini-mart owner in a trailer park in Alabama, and aims for a film career in Los Angeles.
Accolade:
The following review is by Grady Harp, Top-Ten Amazon Reviewer
Christopher Meeks has produced up to now two of the finest, most intelligent, entertaining, and socially sensitive collections of short stories (THE MIDDLE-AGED MAN AND THE SEA and MONTHS AND SEASONS). For those of us who have become Meeks devotees based on these short stories, the anticipation of a full-length novel has been both exciting and a bit dubious. It is an entirely different challenge to carry a character and a few ideas, well developed as they are in Meeks’ hands, along a path that justifies a complete novel. But with THE BRIGHTEST MOON OF THE CENTURY Christopher Meeks has crossed that bridge so successfully that his stance in the echelon of new important American writers seems solidly secure.
Meeks deals well with the everyday persons that populate this novel. His characters are all flawed and not afraid to share those flaws. And that is one reason this story of a young lad’s journey from Minnesota through the South and to California spanning the years of his life from age 14 to age 45 reaches out to the reader in a way that offers an honest invitation to relive our own growing years.
Meeks does not discard his unique gift of crafting short stories: each chapter in this novel is framed by a time span and a special growing adventure in a way that at times the reader may wonder if each chapter could stand alone. But that is where Meeks so deftly shows his craft. He sorts through his bag of ideas, dropping a few here and there only to be picked up and transformed later in the book like old memories that come to blossom or gain meaning as life goes on.
Edward Meopian manages to cope with the loss of his mother, survives the changes that his encyclopedia salesman father imposes on him, an manages to leave home for private boys school where he gains some wisdom, some tolerance for the actions of his peers, some knowledge about his inappropriate preparation for puberty and love, fights his way through college discovering he has no talent for the `preferred discipline’ of science, that he loves films, and discovers passion in a relationship that pushes the button to accelerate his maturity.
Things happen and things don’t happen (Meeks has a way of adjusting his characters dreams and expectations with a sense of acknowledging personal flaws and humble talents). And as Edward’s father re-marries, Edward gains possession of a mini-mart and trailer park in Alabama which he rules with his longtime pot smoking friend Sagebrush, all the while finding the idiosyncrasies of several women’s wiles (avoiding the advances of under aged oversexed girls and the vitriol of a matronly trailer park manager). Shaky `failures’ at marriage and screenwriting/directing dreams lead Edward through life changes that eventually result in his finding a touch of peace as a teacher in an arts school. Characters from his past weave through his present and the final touches of his life feel whole – sort of…
For lovers of Meeks’ short stories there are chapters that retain his polish in this format. The chapter called ‘One Hour’ is brief and relates Edward’s moment in time when the fertility question is raised. In this hilarious but tender chapter Edward visits a Sperm Bank to have his sperm washed, apparently making him a better potential for fatherhood. This is one chapter that could stand alone as short story, it is that well conceived and written.
Along the way in Edward’s journey the author takes time to pause and offer some poignant philosophy. As he approaches his Alabama experience Edward muses “By being open, he’d come to understand the way real people worked — versus the pretend, made-up people of Hollywood movies — and that, in turn, would give him a clearer sense of what he should do in this life.” Or in an encounter with a cop “‘Failure seems to follow me around,’ said Edward. ‘You’re no failure, son,’ said the officer, and Edward turned to face him. ‘This is God,’ said the man. ‘Or the disorder of life, if you like. This is what we all have to live with.’”
And as Edward leaves his Alabama trailer park/mini-mart fiasco, Meeks describes his view: “This world could be heaven on earth if only people let it, Edward realized. Every sunset could show you. Take it.”
At book’s beginning the title is explained: during the last month of the century into which Edward was born would occur the brightest full moon “in terms of size and luminosity” of the century. And when Meeks brings us to the closing pages of his novel, Edward, transformed or at least tattered and worn by his life to that time, realizes that the year is 1999 and somewhere behind the clouds he sees that shining light of that promised moon. Meeks leaves us with a passel of memories of a common if extraordinarily interesting guy who just happens to mirror each of our flaws — and strengths. This is a fine novel, an engrossing story, and a group of indelible characters who linger in the mind long after novel’s end. Meeks has done it again! –Grady Harp
Reviews:
The Brightest Moon of the Century currently has a customer review rating of 4.5 stars with 13 reviews! Read the reviews here.
The Brightest Moon of the Century is available to purchase at:
Amazon Kindle for $4.99 or Borrow FREE with Prime!
An excerpt from The Brightest Moon of the Century:
The Hand
(1968-69)
Near mid-century when Edward was born, the full moon was years from being the brightest. That would happen—in terms of luminosity and size—in the last month of the century. As a child growing up, however, Edward found much splendor and mystery in the moon. It kept changing and following him around, a rock with its own rhythms, much like girls, and he knew he was years away from understanding girls.
Now in eighth grade with his mother gone, Edward felt he’d finally done something right. His father, Stanley, stood at the kitchen sink reading one of Edward’s English papers. Edward smiled, waiting for his father to see the letter grade of “A” at the end.
“What’s this quote?” asked his father, who then read the quoted line aloud. “‘The moon on the river looked like a dented hubcap floating on a cesspool. I hated rivers, and my grandfather, Elihu Twain, hated them, too.’ You say this is from Mark Twain. Where’d you find this quote?” The man frowned.
“I don’t know,” Edward said. He had to pause his breakfast spoon in mid-flight, knowing his cornflakes, bathing in the bowl’s milk, were about to turn into corn mush. “The encyclopedia?”
“Don’t you know that there were no hubcaps in those days? And Mark Twain’s real name was Samuel Clemens, so his grandfather would be named Clemens, for crissakes, not Twain. And Mark Twain, for your information, had been a steamboat pilot, and he loved rivers—compared them to pearls and opals! Where did you get this quote?”
“I was running out of time, so I had to— I mean—”
“You made it up, didn’t you?”
“It was due,” Edward said. “And I still got an ‘A’.”
“I didn’t raise you to be a cheater.”
“She mostly just wanted to see that we can write an essay, and—”
“It’s not even that great of an essay,” said his father.
“You’re always harping on grades so—”
“Don’t you blame this on me.”
“It’s a good grade. What’re we arguing about?” Edward stood, turning to the sink with his bowl.
“And what kind of English teacher couldn’t catch such a thing?”
“I don’t know.”
“Education is the asphalt for the road of life.”
“What? Asphalt?”
“The point is next fall you’re not going to that waste dump of a school.”
“Because of one lousy high-graded paper? Come on!” Edward dumped his now-soggy cereal down the garbage disposal.
His father shook his head. “I’ve been thinking about this awhile. I want you to have more opportunity than I had. You don’t want to be an encyclopedia salesman, do you? I want you to go to McCory.”
“But I love where I’m at! It’s good asphalt.”
The fact was Edward did not love his school, but no one bothered him there. At Eastbrook Junior High School, Edward Meopian was not a wallflower but more like a hearty, imperceptible weed. The girls looked through him, the guys he passed in the hallway nodded once in a while, and the teachers didn’t find him distracted or daydreaming so did not pounce on him. He was not someone who was teased, for he wasn’t nerdy or outwardly vulnerable. Rather, he came across to most people, certainly to himself, as something of an ottoman or sofa: existing and acceptable. His grades were just above average—not good enough for the jocks to ask him if it was okay to copy his homework. If he were to become a mass murderer down the road, no one would know him well enough to tell the blond TV interviewer, “Yeah, I knew him in junior high, and he was so friendly. Who knew he could turn people’s pelvis bones into ash trays?”
Rather, he was “Edward Who?”
On Saturday morning two weeks later, his father drove Edward to the McCory School to take the entrance exam. The high-class private school for boys was in a bleak brick structure above the train yards of Minneapolis, Minnesota.
His father said while dropping Edward off, “Do well on the test or else.” Or else what? Would his father force him to go to the public high school where Edward wanted to go anyway? Or would his father allow no friends over for a month? Edward had no friends. What do you take away when you have nothing?
Edward nodded and exited the car. Inside the school in the dim hallway, a thin man with a nicotine face led him to a small paneled room where a test waited for him on a wooden desk. Edward sighed, flipped the test open, and did as well as he could on the entrance exam, math and English, because he did not want to be thought of as stupid. At the end of the test was the question, “Why do you want to attend McCory School?” He wrote, “I don’t want to. My dad wants me to go.” To the question, “What appeals to you about McCory?” he penned, “Nothing. I want to go to a school with girls. There are no girls here.”
A week later at breakfast, his father said, “I got a call yesterday.”
What was that supposed to mean? His father looked serious.
“From Aunt Barbara?” he tried.
“McCory.” He broke out in a grin. “You made it in.”
“But I don’t want to go to McCory. How can you afford McCory?”
“That’s my problem.”
“I promise to do better at Eastbrook.”
“It’s McCory. We’ll go shopping for suits soon.”
“Suits?”
“You have to wear coats and ties there.”
Edward gasped.
“Don’t give me that look,” said his father. “You’re going to be a businessman someday, so you may as well get used to coats and ties now.”
“What if I want to be a welder?”
“Then you’ll be a gentleman welder. Oh, and one other thing. Because of what you wrote at the end of your test about not wanting to go—they felt you had a maturity issue. You’ll be starting in the eighth grade.”
“But I passed the eighth grade!” said Edward.
“You shouldn’t have written what you did.” His father finished his coffee and put his cup in the sink. He beamed at Edward. “You’re going to be a McCory boy. Someday you’ll thank me.”
#
As the summer ended, his father took him to the Foursome, a men’s store across the bay in Wayzata. With stern looks that demanded silence from Edward, Dad bought him one blue blazer and one pin-stripped double-breasted suit, as if Edward were a thin, gawky banker. His father had never spent such money on him before. His father asked him one question: “Do you know how to tie a tie?” Edward shook his head, wondering how his father expected such a thing. They never went anyplace that demanded a tie, so how was he supposed to have learned? By the same method he had learned about girls: from boys talking in line at gym?
“I know just the trick for you,” said his father, and stepped away. Edward would have followed, but he noticed a college-age woman, very pretty in a flowered dress, adjusting the tie of her smiling, husky boyfriend in what must be a new blue suit. There was something about her touch, sure and casual, that made Edward stare. As she gazed at her man up and down, the way his mother had once looked at him and his father, Edward wondered if he would ever share such a moment with someone again. Would he ever get a girlfriend?
“Here you go,” said his father, carrying two pre-tied ties. “These are called clip-ons. You’re slow enough in the morning as it is, so this should help you.” His father clipped it on just under Edward’s throat as easily as a horse was attached to a tether.
Weeks later, walking stiffly in his blue blazer and clip-on, Edward walked the half-mile to the corner where the McCory bus would pick him up. The bus was orange like other school buses, but when he stepped on, only boys in coats and ties stared at him, looking like miniature accountants.
“Who are you?” said the first kid, about fourth grade with eyes resembling a gerbil’s.
“Edward.”
“Oh,” said the kid. “Got gum?”
“No.”
A half-hour later, the bus pulled into a long tree-shrouded drive that took them up the hill to the school. The three-story building called the Upper School technically had no grade levels, but rather “forms,” as in English schools. Seniors were Form Six, Juniors, Form Five, etc. Edward was in Form Two, the youngest in the Upper School. The Lower School, a smaller, one-story building a long block away, held grades three through six as well as Form One. The athletic fields lay between. The three wings of the Upper School formed a U, which backed its open end against a berm, giving the central, grassy area in back the feel of a prison yard.
The rooms inside, most of them built for fifteen or fewer students, were small with chipped blackboards and wood floors that had nearly seventy years of yellowed varnish, the color of dead men’s fingernails. The rooms echoed the confinement that Edward soon felt. Between classes, the olive green cement stairs that led to each floor flowed with students, the only time that Edward experienced, in his first days, any sense of positive energy, mainly because each step was that much closer to the final bell. The school motto, “Far from noise and smoke,” which was perhaps meant to suggest healthy isolation and the flowering of minds in a quiet, smogless atmosphere, did not take into consideration the horn blasts and diesel exhaust from passing trains below. As Edward would learn, the world was an ironic place.
Within the first week, one of Edward’s new classmates, John De Bernieres, a husky kid from his English class who walked as if he had a cigar up his butt, beelined right up to him. “What’s your dad do?”
“Why?” said Edward.
“My dad runs a big law firm,” said De Bernieres, “Maybe he knows your dad.”
“Mine’s in publishing.” That was a stretch. His father sold encyclopedias.
“Oh.” De Bernieres yanked Edward’s tie, and when it pulled off, he shouted to no one visible, “Hey, you’re right. The new kid has a clip-on!” Word spread quickly. In the olive drab hallways of McCory, his tie was being yanked off dozens of times daily by an equal number of classmates, including Lee Boatswain, son of the president of Northwest Banks, Robert B. Dalton, whose parents later named a large bookstore chain after him, and Reese Freely, son of the CEO of Dairy Queen.
On Sunday night after his first week of McCory, in bed early, Edward wondered what to do about the ties. His stomach felt as if it were a washrag wrung and twisted so hard, soon there would be no more liquid. Maybe his whole body would dry up and disappear.
Staring up into the darkness beyond the deepest moonless night, Edward realized maybe his father wasn’t the best person to get him through things. His father no longer understood what it was to be a kid. Edward was simply a responsibility. Edward then thought of the time their Sunday dinners had had three placemats, not two. He remembered how he could be with his mother alone, and with a quick hug and a laugh at something Edward said, the world was made right. Maybe she was a ghost, and he could find her. He really wanted to find her. But even if she came to him now, could she help him with a tie? No. The sense of aloneness overwhelmed him. Edward would have to learn how to tie a tie on his own. But how?
The Brightest Moon of the Century is available to purchase at:
Amazon Kindle for $4.99 or Borrow FREE with Prime!
Connect with Christopher Meeks:
Website: http://www.chrismeeks.com
Blog: http://www.redroom.com/author/christopher-meeks
Publisher site: http://WhiteWhiskerBooks.com
Facebook Author Page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Christopher-Meeks/212382392140974