Bow's Boy - by Richard Babcock (Paperback)

About the Book

Babcock has written a lovely, profoundly American novel about law and rebellion, growth and loss--and how the 1960s arrived in a small Wisconsin town.

Book Synopsis

Every now and then, a small American town produces someone with such out-of-place talent that he seems to have come from a different world. In the 1960s hardscrabble town of Laroque, Wisconsin, seventeen-year-old Ginger Piper, a high school sports hero and a disarmingly poised and articulate young man, is that sort of figure. Or at least G. Bowman Epps--a rich, lonely, middle-aged lawyer--believes he is.

Bow is something of a town legend too: Ungainly and scarred, brilliant and stern, famous for great inherited wealth, he seems a vestige of a time gone by in a town where the legacy of past greatness--embodied in the ornate, decaying, and defunct opera house--casts a literal shadow. But when Bow discovers Ginger Piper, he is energized and inspired. Where others have seen merely a charming basketball star, Bow spies the seeds of something greater and the drive, intelligence, and passion to carry on Bow's legacy as a groundbreaking criminal attorney. When Bow offers the boy a summer apprenticeship in his orderly practice, it is an investment in a certain future, and the initiation of an oddly matched friendship. But when Ginger is accused of a startling crime that changes the town's perception of him, Bow is not only surprised, he's also implicated, and forced to choose between his fierce sense of logic and his admiration for the boy.

The story unfolds as the first agonizing repercussions of the Vietnam War are being felt and the American people are struggling to comprehend a new kind of war. It inspires a startling division between the generations at home, as politics and personal lives inevitably collide.

Bow's investigator, Charlie Stuart, narrates the events thirty years later, adding a perspective colored by tortured memories of his manic father and his halting pursuit of a young woman in town. Anchored by a compelling mystery, Bow's Boy is ultimately about greatness, heroism, loyalty, and justice, and the pain and solace of family.

Review Quotes

Joe Klein author of "Primary Colors" Richard Babcock has written a lovely, profoundly American novel about law and rebellion, growth and loss -- and how the 1960s arrived in a small Wisconsin town. There are no gimmicks here. "Bow's Boy" has what one of its characters calls Wisconsin values: It runs straight, true, and very, very deep. There is an emotional honesty and intelligence to the characters that is at once exhilarating and sad and entirely memorable; they stay with you, haunt you, change you long after you've turned the last page.

Leif Enger author of "Peace Like a River" What I admire most about "Bow's Boy" is Richard Babcock's honest affection for his people -- every last one of them. Here no reprobate is beyond redemption, no hero safe from failure, and the meek are startled to inherit the earth. Babcock remembers the smell of the bankrupt opera house, the irritated tug of pike on a line, and the potent small-town brew of politics and business and high school basketball. He is an effortless storyteller, and like his narrator, a lyrical archivist of Midwestern tragedy and pluck.

"Bow's Boy is rich in detail about everything from interpreting the Fourth Amendment to fishing for walleye and muskie. Like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, Charlie is an ideal narrator: wry and lucid and detached, yet a man who must acknowledge, in the end, how much of a personal stake he has in the story he tells."

About the Author

Richard Babcock grew up in rural Illinois, earned a law degree, and then chose journalism over jurisprudence. An editor at New York magazine for eleven years, he has been the editor in chief at Chicago magazine since 1991. Bow's Boy is his second novel.