Keith Maillard

The Clarinet Polka by Keith Maillard is Jimmy Koprowski's story. After serving a tour of duty during the Vietnam War, Jimmy returns home to the dying steel town of Raysburg, to the working class Polish-American neighborhood he grew up in. Despite being stationed on Guam for the duration, Jimmy still thinks he deserves a little break before getting started with his life. So he moves back into his attic bedroom, takes the job his father finds for him of working part-time at a small appliance repair shop and begins drinking in earnest. He has plans to go to Texas, but never quite gets going. He ends up involved in an unhealthy affair with an unstable married woman, and in his sister's attempts to put together an all-girl polka band.

This novel is rich with details about Polish-American life; from the food and the language, to the church and the history of the immigrants who settled in this corner of West Virginia, against the Oho river, and worked in the steel mills. One of the girls in the band has parents who were DPs, and the novel explores how this new wave of Polish immigrants fit in with the second and third generation immigrants, as well as what happened in eastern Poland during the war. The Vietnam War, along with the student protests are also a large part of the novel, as well as how the returning vets readjusted to ordinary life.

The Clarinet Polka is dense with information, but it never bogs down. Jimmy is interested in this stuff, so he makes it interesting for the reader. I found myself enjoying pages about the history of polka music, to the point where I more than once had to listen to some of it. I still don't like it at all, but I enjoyed learning about it - which isn't something I thought I would ever say. And Jimmy's story is interesting, too. He's a likable guy, slowly being taken over by his addiction, which was beautifully handled in the novel. All in all, The Clarinet Polka is a book well worth the time spent reading it.… (mere)

Let's call this "Instead of a Review, by Somebody Who Has Some Strong Reactions, But Not the Full Credentials to Write a Full Review". Like mainly, I bailed-out after 75 of the novel's 256 pages. The setting: "Raysburg" (read Wheeling), West Virginia, in December 1972 or 3. The situation: WVa-born Evan Carlyle, having fled the draft and built a new life in Canada, returns to his old home town to see his parents at Christmas. He makes many an excursion, some literal, some mental, down Memory Lane, most of them with his bitter high-school crony Alex Warner, stuck in WVa with a dying business, a deadening marriage, and a major bottle problem It's Bummer Theater at its most predictable. As a reader I want to learn something I didn't know already, if only that the teller of an otherwise predictable and taedious tell, can at-least do new or exciting things with language. Didn't happen here. Incidentally, or co-incidentally, the Publisher may have been showing some ambivalence about the book by doing a sloppy job of proof-reading: without looking, I found three typos in as many dozen pages.… (mere)