Book Review by Cat Pleska The Pale Light of Sunset: Scattershots and Hallucinations in an Imagined Life Lee Maynard West Virginia University Press, 2009 Lee Maynard’s third novel is based in the world he knows best—his own.  Pale Light is Maynard’s third book, following Crum and Screaming with the Cannibals. Crum and Cannibals are the first and second books in a trilogy, (the third, Scrummers, is a work in progress).  Meredith Sue Willis alluded to the category under which this new book falls: fictionalized memoir. Maynard allows that it’s a fair description, but he prefers to call it a novel. A novel, regardless of how much fact is used, is a moldable thing: fold, staple, and mutilate—it’s all fine. As Maynard stated to me recently in an interview: “The most important thing is the story.” Still, when a book is classified as “fictionalized memoir” it causes an immediate question that’s just human nature to wonder: What parts are real?”  Maynard has said that his first book, Crum, is “about 50% truth.” Pale Light, too, begins in Crum, West Virginia, so maybe the 50% formula holds for this one too. Maynard quotes his friend and author, Chuck Kinder, in thhis book: “All stories are true, if they are well written. The question is what they are telling the truth about.” Pale Light is set up chronologically and each chapter is titled with a year and a title, beginning with the protagonist’ s birth in “1936, The Parlor,” and then each subsequent year of his life through 2005 (Maynard said that the publisher used perhaps 1/3 of the stories he had written). The protagonist is unnamed, but is referred to as Hit Man in one story. As we read the events that unfold, the overwhelming sense is one of longing, of searching for something, perhaps something buried deeply in the imagination—or the protagonist’s hallucinations—and the realization of either longing or searching comes in between lucid imagery written like poetry. These scattershot interludes of peace amid the struggling ones seem as if Maynard is aiming to include all the elements in a life to achieve the larger picture. In this sense, Maynard weaves an amazing tapestry, creating a synergy that leaves you wondering: How’d he do that? We all know people who are born with a heavy load to bear; maybe this leads them to wander, and things happen to them—over and over, mostly bad stuff, like poverty and violence. As a child, the protagonist is battered by life repeatedly even during the times he runs away.  Surrounded by apathy and greed, his mother is an oasis of love that maybe is a saving grace. She tells him after he runs away the first time:  “Real people don’t run away from. That isn’t the way to live your life. But real people can run away to, if there’s something there that’s better.” He takes this message to heart. As he ages, he travels widely, never settling down in one place, struggling for food, safety, and survival, but that survival becomes a drive to challenge himself by climbing mountains, rafting wild rivers, riding a motorcycle from New Mexico to the Arctic Circle, and in a late chapter, he faces a scorpion in a way that will leave you cringing long afterward. A bit of comic relief comes along in some chapters, such as “1977, The Funeral of Cousin Elijah,” who passes away as every man should want to.  And then there are the connections he makes with some people whose path he crosses, like Helen, who he first meets in 1967. And in the middle of graft, smacking and punching, driving to something or away from something, he makes dead stops, like the dead calm in the eye of a hurricane, and notes the beauty of everything around him, such as in the chapter “Where I’m From, 2003”: . . .  mountains that seem to form us and send us tearing along their sides and down and across the ridges to run staring-eyed out into the world like mythical beings charging out of the forests of Valhalla. . . . hollows, those dark, pungent, quiet places that instill   in us a way of moving, a way of seeing, a way of being. Hollows capped with smoke and mist, bottling us up, aging us, keeping us still, our lives clear and silent, like mason jars of crystal moonshine gathering dust on a wooden shelf in a shed long forgotten on the back side of an abandoned ridge-top farm.                Even with a respite here and there, much happens to this protagonist: It is easy to keep turning the pages, which is testimony to a good story. Some places of violence I’m just downright uncomfortable (which I should be), but I mean I almost squint at the words. Read the chapter titled “1965, Faggot” and see if you don’t squirm too. But the reality always bears down upon the protagonist as he moves through his life. It’s like watching the progression of a soul, like a monk in search of enlightenment through the tests that come with an arduous journey. Maynard gives a clue to this choice in a quote from Willa Cather: “The end is nothing. The road is all.” And along that road, we all need a little light, like the pale light of sunset, illuminating just enough for the reader to sense the scattershot magic that exists in every life—no matter the trials—if we permit ourselves to see it.