“Carrying Albert Home”
Author: Homer Hickam
Publisher: William Morrow
Pages: 432
Price: $25.99 (Hardcover)
“Carrying Albert Home” is in some ways familiar Homer Hickam territory. Beginning with “The Rocket Boys” (1998), Hickam gained his first successes with memoirs of home, Coalwood, West Virginia. “Albert” might be considered the fifth in that series. But there are big differences.
Where his depictions of life in a mining town, including “The Coalwood Way” and “Sky of Stone,” seemed almost photorealistic—after all, mining is serious, dangerous business—“Albert” is a fantasy, an imaginative, free-wheeling romp. And where Hickam’s Coalwood books were humorous in small scenes of misunderstanding or confusion, “Albert” is a self-consciously comic novel, a confection built around a spine of truth, the tale as Hickam’s parents, Elsie and Homer, Sr., enriched and embroidered it over the years.
Hickam is not a writer famous for comedy, but it works.
“Carrying Albert Home” is in the tradition of the comic picaresque, so much so that Hickam has borrowed his overall structure and the form of his chapter titles from British eighteenth-century masterpieces like Henry Fielding’s “Tom Jones.”
The heading for Chapter 11 of “Tom Jones” reads: “Containing Many Rules, and Some Examples, Concerning Falling in Love.” The heading for Chapter 8 of “Albert” reads: “How Homer, Elsie, and Albert Endured a Hurricane, A Real One as Well as the One in Their Hearts.”
Hickam learned from his parents, over a period of many years, that while living in Orlando in ‘33 his mother knew, dated and fell in love with the actor Buddy Ebsen, who left for New York City to pursue a career as dancer and actor. (Yes, this is the Ebsen who played Georgie Russell, Daniel Boone’s sidekick and then Pa on “The Beverly Hillbillies. ”) Elsie moved back to Coalwood and, a little reluctantly, married reliable, solid, but unglamorous coal miner Homer Sr. Shortly afterwards she received, from Ebsen, in the mail, a 5-inch alligator she named Albert.
Albert was, to Homer, an irritating reminder of Ebsen, whom Elsie apparently never got over, and the day came when the pet grew too large to keep. Returning the now 4-foot long, two-year-old gator to Florida would require an epic road trip in their 1925 Buick.
Ebsen, Albert and the 1935, Depression-era journey were real. Hickam allows himself huge and delightful liberties with the rest of the story.
For example. In North Carolina they come upon a workers’ strike at a sock factory and become acquainted with John Steinbeck, there to observe and later to write up the events as “In Dubious Battle.” (Steinbeck was in California, probably, and his novel about an agricultural strike is set there.) Homer recognizes that the situation is turning violent, and where Steinbeck says “This is exciting,” Homer, a veteran of the union wars in West Virginia, advises him “John, I’m thinking you haven’t seen too many bloody heads.”
In conversation, one striker suggests Steinbeck’s work could use more “blood and guts,” reminding Steinbeck that Hemingway writes that way and “I bet he sells a helluva lot more than you do.”
Late in the novel Homer and Elsie will have dinner with Hemingway in Key West and Homer will be present at the catastrophic hurricane that drowned so many rail workers/vets at Matecumbe Key. In this case, Hemingway was present, having sailed there in his boat, Pilar, to help survivors. He would write it up in a furious article “Who Murdered the Vets?” published in the leftist periodical “New Masses.” The Hickams were probably not there.
In between times, the adventures pile up. Homer and Elsie act in a Tarzan movie at Silver Springs and get advice from a fortuneteller named Souffle. Elsie accompanies a bootlegger on Thunder Road and speaks with the dead, and Homer gets involved in a bank robbery and plays professional baseball, experiencing “that odd, peculiar, and somewhat un-West Virginian sensation called fun.” Both get involved with smugglers and the U.S. Coast Guard.
Throughout, we are reminded what a lively, very attractive and somewhat romantically confused young woman Elsie is. We also come to sympathize with Homer’s dilemma. He is strong, athletic, virile, good-looking and loves Elsie but can’t seem to drive that dancing man Ebsen out of her head.
The story may be fantastic (after all, it is a love story) but as Hickam says “an embedded truth was revealed” about his parents in the writing of it. Hickam, exercising his wry wit in a new way, is very clearly having a great time and the pleasure is infectious.
This review was originally broadcast on Alabama Public Radio. Don Noble is host of the Alabama Public Television literary interview show “Bookmark” and the editor of “A State of Laughter: Comic Fiction from Alabama.”