Local writer E. David Moulton pens a mostly
compelling novel-as-memoir with Prodigal Child
Local author E. David Moulton’s Prodigal Child
is an economical account of a wasteful albeit not wasted life. The title,
which extends from the name of the narrator’s band, stems from his seemingly
misspent youth and adulthood.
Curiously, the 272-page novel isn’t as lavish and
undisciplined as its protagonist, as it manages to be seductive and
non-romantic at the same time. That is, the novel captivates from the
beginning with its rich but at the same time spare writing. The
storyline is delectably winding, but Moulton’s diction and style remain
direct and unornamented. It’s refreshing to read someone who doesn’t spend
more than a small paragraph describing someone’s physical characteristics or
use two pages to convey the various color schemes and components of a house.
The British-born author would have been better served, however, developing
the romantic relationships and evoking romantic imagery from the events, as
the storyline lent itself to a more lyrical dance of words.
Prodigal Child is loosely based on the
life of Moulton, who moved to Charleston after spending many years in Los
Angeles as a songwriter. That career followed a decade plus working as a
builder and designer of racing bikes, an art form he has written extensively
about. The narrator, Eddie Conner, is a Brit whose life entertains a certain
biblical Job quality. The novel follows his seemingly countless hardships
and missteps without sermonizing, however. The book would make for excellent
philosophical discourse at a college — each student would have to decide
whether Eddie is a tragic character, in that he has endlessly bad luck or is
simply stupid. A person could make the case that he is morally culpable.
After all, Eddie is a free agent and therefore able to chart a path clear of
so many seemingly irresistible stimuli.
Okay, here’s Eddie. The guy endures the
Blitzkrieg of Word War II as a pre-adolescent, grows up on the hardscrabble
East London streets and learns to answer problems with fistic requital.
Meanwhile, he deals with a father who is a drunken, abusive, and
stereotypically broken war veteran. Eddie seems to regard female companions
as an afterthought and consequently ends up always estranged from them. For
all his faults, he does possess numerous gifts — singing, songwriting,
welding, and manufacturing — and excels at everything he takes up.
Meanwhile, he keeps getting arrested. Whether as an adolescent, a teenager,
a young adult in England, or as an aging businessman in California, he gets
in trouble with the law. Part of the pathos of the story is how his
burgeoning rock-and-roll career in the early ’60s derails because of a
five-year prison term for a retaliatory, but unproven as such, maiming of
another young man. He sees the rise of the Rolling Stones and Beatles and
wonders if that could have been his lot. He remains wistful for the longest
time but finally gets around to pursue the rock siren’s call as a
40-something man.
The story opens with the more aged Eddie as a
developing rock star being interviewed by a Rolling Stone reporter. I feared
at that point that the first-person narrative would lapse into tired
Interview with the Vampire territory, where the balance of the novel is
recounted to the scribe. Fortunately, Moulton proved tellingly creative
here. The novel represents what the fledgling rock star wouldn’t tell the
reporter. Existentially so, Eddie’s music is definitely informed and
sustained by his numerous fights and travails; however, he opted not to
avail the rock journalist of this information. And in a neatly circular
fashion, the novel ends where it begins, and the reader is all the wiser
about the mean-spiritedness and hesitancy he reflected in the opening pages.
Another dividend gleaned from the novel is
learning about the evolution of rock and roll, and the class distinctions
that went along with it. Each class in England had its particular musical
passion. This ties in well with another of the book’s attributes, the
idiomatic spray of the various British characters. Without being annoyingly
persistent in recording the idiom as current Southern writers do, Moulton
showcases to digestible degree the vagaries of the Cockney dialect. When a
Cockney wants you to abandon your current train of thought or action, he
says "leave it out." We also learn that "starving" means one thing in London
and another in other parts of England.
The chief theme in Prodigal Child is how
different people deal with different setbacks. If the author had even half
the things happen to him that occurred in the novel, then I have a very
sympathetic handshake to extend. And then I would ask him if he kept getting
into trouble and didn’t really drink, why didn’t he try to stand things on
their head and begin drinking more? Or maybe I would just congratulate him
on an attention-grabbing story that reads clean and easy.
This review by George Georgas appeared in the Charleston City Paper, December 10, 2003.