The Chester Chronicles Book

Chester "Chet" Patterson, the protagonist- narrator of Kermit Moyer's collection of linked stories, is an Army brat who grows up in the 1950s and comes of age in the 1960s. He has a high-strung knockout of a mother who may be drinking her way into alcoholism, an Army-officer father he both resents and admires, and a younger sister whose high-school popularity he can only envy. Moving every two or three years, Chester is a perennial "new kid" as well as a bookish and movie-besotted romantic who at the age of thirteen falls in love, he thinks, with his own first cousin, Frenchie, a seventeen-year-old "older woman." Each chapter is a discrete story that chronicles a pivotal moment in Chester's life, taking him a little deeper into himself as well as a little farther into the century, in settings that vary from the Far East to the Wild West and during a time that includes the birth of rock 'n' roll, the Civil Rights Movement, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The New York Times Book Review called Kermit Mpyer's first collection of stories, Tumbling, "a work of ringing authenticity" and called the author "an impressive new voice." Publishers Weekly praised Moyer's writing as "controlled and powerful and distinguished by a rare poetic ability."

Publishers Weekly

Moyer (Tumbling) offers an eloquent, stylish novel-in-stories, 16 tales narrated by Chester Patterson, an “Army brat,” who highlights his life from his sixth-grade crush in 1954 through the mid-1960s, when he’s “officially an adult,” and, finally, his father’s interment at Arlington National Cemetery. The lively Pattersons are a military family rounded out by Chester’s kid sister, Janet, a popular, pretty teenager, and his Rita Hayworth look-alike mom, Betty, who’s both a bombshell and borderline alcoholic. They move every few years, to places as varied as Okinawa and Georgia. Sex-obsessed young Chester (“there are whole days when I seem to walk around in a smoky haze of lust”) gets it on with his older, worldlier cousin Frenchie when he’s not reading Hemingway, Mailer, and Kerouac or bungling the beer runs made with his teenage pals. Later, on academic scholarship, Chester attends college in Chicago where he falls in love with arts major and violinist Callie Sinclair, in the most poignant of the short stories in this evocative coming-of-age cycle that, at their best, bring to mind the stories of Lorrie Moore. (Feb.)