The Memory of Running: a novel
by Ron McLarty
http://www.ronmclarty.com/
Hardcover: 384 pages
Publisher: Viking Books (December 29, 2004)
Rights sold:
Little Brown UK - UK
Goldmann - Germany
Albin Michel - France
Sperling & Kupfer - Italy
Alfaguara - Spain
Shincho-sha - Japan
GimmYoung - Korea
Vassalucci - Holland
Gyldendal - Norway
Otava - Finland
Wahlstrom& Windstand - Sweden
Modan - Israel
"This is a book that can do more than walk; it has a chance to be a breakout bestseller" —Stephen King
***A Warner Bros. Pictures comprou os direitos de adaptação de The Memory of Running, livro de Ron McLarty que recebeu há duas semanas uma crítica positiva na coluna assinada pelo escritor Stephen King. O acordo financeiro bateu os U$ 2 milhões. ***
Book description:
Once in a great while, a story comes along that has everything: plot, setting, and, most important of all, the kind of characters that sweep readers up and take them on a thrilling, unforgettable ride. Well, get ready for Ron McLarty’s The Memory of Running because, as Stephen King wrote in Entertainment Weekly, “Smithy is an American original, worthy of a place on the shelf just below your Hucks, your Holdens, your Yossarians.”
Meet Smithson “Smithy” Ide, an overweight, friendless, chain-smoking, forty-three-year-old drunk who works as a quality control inspector at a toy action-figure factory in Rhode Island. By all accounts, including Smithy’s own, he’s a loser. But when Smithy’s life of quiet desperation is brutally interrupted by tragedy, he stumbles across his old Raleigh bicycle and impulsively sets off on an epic journey that might give him one last chance to become the person he always wanted to be. As he pedals across America—with stops in New York City, St. Louis, Denver, and Phoenix, to name a few—he encounters humanity at its best and worst and adventures that are by turns hilarious, luminous, and extraordinary. Along the way, Smithy falls in love and back into life.
McLarty’s novel has already received significant attention for its unusual genesis as an audiobook. Now, in a major publishing event, we herald the arrival of a major new voice in American fiction with his stunning debut, The Memory of Running.
Reviews:
From Publishers Weekly
Smithy Ide is a really nice guy. But he’s also an overweight, friendless, womanless, hard-drinking, 43-year-old self-professed loser with a breast fetish and a dead-end job, given to stammering "I just don’t know" in life’s confusing moments. When Smithy’s entire family dies, he embarks on a transcontinental bicycle trip to recover his sister’s body and rediscover what it means to live. Along the way, he flashes back to his past and the hardships of his beloved sister’s schizophrenia, while his dejection encourages strangers to share their life stories. The road redeems the innocent Smithy: he loses weight; rescues a child from a blizzard; rebuffs the advances of a nubile, "apple-breasted" co-cyclist after seeing a vision of his dead sister; and nurtures a telephone romance with a paraplegic family friend as he processes his rocky past. McLarty, a playwright and television actor, propels the plot with glib mayhem—including three tragic car accidents in 31 pages and a death by lightning bolt—and a lot of bighearted and warm but faintly mournful humor. It’s a funny, poignant, slightly gawky debut that aims, like its protagonist, to please—and usually does.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Wally Lamb
Riders who hop onto the back of Smithy Ide’s bike and ride America with him will cherish the journey.
Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly
This is a book that can do more than walk; it has a chance to be a breakout bestseller.
Library Journal
Stuck without a publisher for this first novel, actor McLarty did an audio original with Recorded Books that Stephen King raved about in Entertainment Weekly. But how many people know that it was actually librarian Tia Maggio (Middleburg PL, VA) who brought the book to the attention of agent Jeff Kleinman? Maggio fell in love with the tape, used it in a book group (some listeners cried), and even got the author to come and read from the manuscript. "The characters are all so real," she explains of the book’s appeal. Eventually, the book was sold to Viking for $2 million, with a Warner’s deal and the sale of rights to 12 countries quickly following. Not bad for the gentle tale of washed-up Smithy Ide, who takes an impulsive bike ride across America to search for his sister. A 15-city author tour. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
The pain of the loser permeates actor/playwright McLarty’s first novel, part road story, part tragedy. It was released as an audiobook in 2000. Vital statistics: Smithson Ide is 43, but he’s also 279 pounds, having survived for 20 years on beer and pretzels. He once weighed 121, running or biking everywhere. But now (it’s 1990) he’s a couch potato, single, living in a small Rhode Island town, working in a toy factory. As the story opens, his parents are killed in a car accident. They’d been a close-knit family, and he hates it that he’s drunk at the wake, drunk at the funeral. Then he learns that his older sister Bethany is in a Los Angeles morgue, and the shock impels Smithy to heave his fat self onto his childhood bike. His aimless start turns into a cross-country ride, and chapters alternate between his adventures on the road and Bethany’s sad history. Somewhere in her teens, she slipped into madness, posing stock-still for hours on end, or raking her skin, or speaking in a vile croak as if possessed by an alien spirit. Sometimes she’d just disappear. There were shrinks and hospital stays, and she recovered enough to date and marry, only to disappear for good on the honeymoon. Smithy has his own problems. He hates to touch or be touched. His only sex has been with ten-dollar whores in Vietnam, where he was badly wounded. Nam and Bethany were too much for him, and the beanpole became a porker filled with self-loathing. The long ride west is good for him, despite bizarre and improbable encounters (a dying AIDS patient, a gun-toting black man). Smithy stops drinking, loses 50 pounds, and is sustained by long-distance conversations with Norma, a wheelchair-bound former neighbor, every bitas lonely as Smithy. The two lost souls will come together in the Los Angeles morgue. A dreary tale of woe, with none of the dark places illuminated. (N.B.: Stephen King has done more than blurb the book. A year ago, after he heard the audio version, he wrote a wildly enthusiastic piece for Entertainment Weekly. Immediately, there was a feeding-frenzy auction, huge advance, etc., etc.)Film rights optioned by Warner Bros., with Ron McLarty as screenwriter. Author tour. Agent: Jeff Kleinman/Graybill & English
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A Life Transformed
November 04, 2004
If you remember the episode of the American sitcom "Sex and the City" in which Charlotte and Trey go into sex therapy in an attempt to solve their dysfunctional relationship, you’ll already know Ron McLarty. His role--as the therapist--was yet another entry in the long CV of the jobbing character actor who loves his craft but has never made it to stardom.
Now in his late 50s, McLarty has several such television roles to his name: the judge in cop show "Law and Order"; Spenser’s doughnut-eating sidekick in the private detective series "Spenser for Hire". And he’s done huge numbers of voiceovers, broadway shows, Off-Broadway shows, (and "off Off-Broadway shows", he jokes).
But in the background, McLarty always had another, secret, life. He’d been writing for years, mostly plays, but also several novels: novels that had never succeeded in finding a publisher. His lack of success became something of a family joke: his three sons took to calling the basement where he went every day to write, "the pit of despair".
McLarty himself took it in good part. "The first couple of books and plays I wrote to be famous and rich. Then after that, writing became a way for me to explain the world to myself, it had nothing to do with fame and fortune. As a matter of fact, I’d stopped submitting my work. I’d give a novel or play to my friends to read, then go on to the next one."
Stephen King steps in
It was a routine acting job that changed everything. Reading audiobooks is a staple of McLarty’s work; he is the voice behind books by Danielle Steel, Bill Bryson and Thomas Harris. Finally one outfit he read for, a small audio company called Recorded Books that sells over the internet rather than through the bookshops, agreed to let him do an audiobook version of the latest novel he had written, one which he had felt particularly proud of.
Titled The Memory of Running, it was the story of Smithy Ide, a grossly overweight, emotionally stifled man who goes on a bicycle ride across America to retrieve the body of his long-vanished, mentally ill sister, who has at last been traced--by dental records, after her death.
One day, as McLarty was driving to Los Angeles to film an episode of legal drama "The Practice", there was a development he could never have anticipated. "I got a call from Recorded Books saying, ’We’ve just heard that Stephen King has listened to your book on tape and is going to publish an article about you in Entertainment Weekly,’ which is a huge magazine over here."
The words of the article were read out over the phone, and McLarty was stunned to hear King’s description of The Memory of Running as "the best book you won’t read this year", as part of an article attacking the conservatism of contemporary publishing.
"I couldn’t believe it, I thought, ’I’m finally going to be published, I’ll get a paperback out of this!’ By the time I got to Los Angeles, my agent (and before then, I hardly knew I had an agent), had set up an auction." The book was bought in a two-book deal worth $2m by Penguin Putnam. Screen rights have since gone to Warner Bros, with Alfonso Cuaron--director of Y Tu Mamá También and the latest Harry Potter film--slated to direct.
McLarty is still astounded. "At 56, you walk around going ’What happened?’ It’s hard to take it seriously. My actor friends know they don’t have to worry about me getting a swelled head, because all the ego has been knocked out of me by audition rejections, but I am still stunned."
The Memory of Running (UK publication by Time Warner, 3rd February 2005, h/b, £12.99, 0316728608) is itself a version of a classic transformation theme, a sensitive and sincerely touching tale of grief and renewal. It is a subject that, sadly, McLarty knows well: his parents were killed in a car crash as they drove back from a visit to his home; and his wife of 32 years died of breast cancer in 2002. (Earlier this year he married for the second time, to a fellow actress.)
An awkward, lonely hero
The novel gains much of its appeal from its awkward yet strangely sympathetic central character: Smithy Ide, obese, alcoholic, incapable of close relationships. Slowly the reader comes to understand the family tragedy that has overwhelmed Smithy, changing him from the whippet-thin adolescent runner he once was: the tale of his adored sister Bethany, whose bouts of mental illness got worse and worse until one day she just disappeared and never came back.
"It’s like his life stopped right there," McLarty says. "He became a sort of emotional drop-out, someone singular and separate from the world."
The story of Smithy’s journey back to life on his bicycle trip across the US, meeting all sorts of characters along the way, is gripping and by no means too overtly heartwarming for sceptical English tastes. McLarty says the fact that he was writing the story for himself, in his quiet basement study, with no expectation that it would see the light of day, was helpful in some ways. "That kind of selflessness meant it was easier to get out of my characters’ way.
"I always believe that everybody has a story, and while the stories we see in the news, on the TV, are nasty and small, most ordinary people’s stories as they go about their lives are good and big. Smithy’s gift is to be open and able to listen to people’s stories with some compassion, and not to judge them."
About the Author
Ron McLarty is an award-winning actor and playwright best known for his appearances on television series, including Law & Order, Sex and the City, The Practice, and Judging Amy. He has appeared in films and on the stage, where he has directed many of his own plays.