Nostalgia – the wistful yearning for something past, something irrecoverable. We spend the early, frenetic days of youth rushing towards an adult life, eager to see the world with mature eyes and taste it with a distinguished palate. At some point in the middle of our lives, we find that the youthful days, when we experienced the subtleties of life for the first time, stand out as the best days. Call it a mid-life crisis or a turning point or whatever, but what we seek is that irrecoverable feeling, that youthful quickening; we seek to overcome the numbness of experience and recapture an insatiable appetite for life; we seek to live as we lived then rather than to subsist on just the vague memory of those tender days.

In the evening after burying his parents, Smithson Ide, oiled up with liquor and still dressed in his funeral suit, climbs onto his boyhood bicycle for a ride on a once familiar route. Awakening the next morning in a field, hung over and bruised, Smithson decides not to return home but to ride across country, bound for Los Angeles and the funeral home which holds the body of his missing sister. Smithson’s last name itself, Ide, heralds his very place in time, a mid-point or a crossroads. Since returning home from service in Vietnam, he has gained 150 pounds and taken up a deadened existence, numb to everything around him, including the liquor and food he senseless consumes. As he travels, shedding weight, Smithson charts a new course for his life, rich in feeling and taste and experience, opening himself to the possibility of connecting with the world and with people again.

McLarty’s book starts off slow, but that was probably intended to match Smithson’s own pace and rhythm. I noted in reading a couple of other reviews that readers had a hard time with the passive and sluggish beginning. So, McLarty could probably have gotten to the meat of Smithson’s trek a bit quicker. But once Smithson is on his way, so are we, excited to find out about his next encounter and flesh out more of his past. The story rolls along, tinged with aching emotions, at once biting and pleasing.

The characters overflow with human inconsistency, well intentioned fallibility, and hope. Each person Smithson meets, in telling their own story, opens him up to the world around him, both bad and good. McLarty’s hero, Smithson, is the best of these characters, flawed and infuriating but endearing for his ability to reflect our own self loathe and craving for a better, more vital life; a life of which we may only have vague, nostalgic memories.

4 bones!!!!

Bottom Line: A solid, if somewhat slow starting, read. It is worth the trouble, so stick with it until Smithson starts his trek. McLarty’s other books warrant a try based on this first effort. ( )

discusses Smithton "Smithy" Ide's way of dealing with deaths in his family; charming adventure story; he reminds me of Forrest Gump ( )

Smithy Ide's story -- both running away from and running to something -- is told in beautiful, simple prose that entices the reader further into the book from the very first page. And everything that develops from there makes the book better and better as you go in. Smithy is a wonderful creation: unsophisticated but wise; knowing but uncorrupt; imperfect but good. ( )

I loved this book! Smithy Ide is such a loveable character, along the lines of Forrest Gump with his naive and trusting view of the world. The characters he meets on his journey do not always treat him with the trust and compassion that he deserves. MccLarty paints a fasinating and wholly believable view of the wide range of people and views present in modern-day America. A beautiful read! ( )

Read for Bookclub. Brilliant. Loved it from the first page and agree it is a lot like Forrest Gump in that it provides us, the readers, with a snapshot into the 60s, 70s, and 90s. Told as Smithy Ide bicycles his way from one side of American to another to recover the body of his homeless, psychotic sister, it is 2 stories - one of his past and the second is of the now.
His past unfolds heartbreakingly linked to his beautiful sister Bethany, whose mental illness was such that when "the voice" didn't have hold of her, she was smart, funny and dangerously insightful. This held Smithy, and his father and mother in an eggshell existence, just waiting for the next incident - of self-harm, of betrayl and of disappearing. There is also Smithy's own self-harm; his guilt over the shunning of the wheelchair bound Norma, the alcohol, overeating and cigarettes - and the terrible self-pity of being wounded in Vietnam while taking a leak. Fast-forward to the Now (1990s) and Smithy's inability to cope with his Mom & Pop's deaths; his confrontation with Norma and then the awful letter that tells him of Bethany's death - and he suddenly grabs his bike and starts to ride. The journey takes him through the lives of many people - a guilty priest, a man dying of AIDs, a lost boy in a snowstorm, a wife whose husband has turned to alcohol and the streets, and a truck driver whose brother was a heroin addict who killed their father - and he discovers that everyone has problems, and as Norma says, you just "get up and get going" and don't feel sorry for yourself.
I can see why they want to make this into a movie and also I think that it is wonderful that it was an audiobook first and then (after Stephen King heard it) it was published. Excellent.

Note : this book is not suitable for YA as it has lots of swearing, Smithy's obsession with breasts and a rather graphic description from the psych on what he supposedly did to his sister, as well as descriptions of his "first time" in Vietnam.