BORN ON MONDAY
by Richard R. Becker
In Becker’s novel, a group of estranged friends uneasily reunites in their small Maine hometown.
In Augusta, Maine, high school students Billy and Dustin are the best of friends. Both standouts on the football team, they’re popular and are slated to earn university scholarships to Division 1 football programs. That is, until Billy sustains a freak injury—or what seems like a freak injury—at practice, fracturing his tibia and ending his football dreams. Tragically, the player who injured Billy is none other than Dustin. The boys’ friendship never recovers, and when they break up with their respective girlfriends—Billy with Jessica, whom he never gets over—the members of their friend group officially go their separate ways. Dustin leaves to play football at Baylor, and Jessica heads to New York to pursue her studies. While his friends flourish in their adult lives, Billy languishes in Augusta and earns a reputation as a nice guy with a bad drinking problem, someone the locals feel bad for but don’t want to meet outside the bar at the end of a long night. (“He would have taken a drink from any of the water bottles decorating the coffee table, something to sweep away the cotton in his mouth, but his stomach flipped at the thought. It didn’t sympathize with what had become an all-too-familiar condition. Hangovers are the sentences of trials lost the night before, his boss at the quarry liked to say”). When Billy discovers that Jessica has returned home to be with her terminally ill mother, he can’t help but pine for—and pester Jessica with—his hopes of reconciliation. But Jessica isn’t the only one back home, as Billy’s old pal Dustin has also reemerged. After Jessica finds a drunken Dustin passed out on the side of the road, it seems a romance may spark between her and Dustin instead. Billy doesn’t learn any of this until Andrea—another old friend who is now an intrepid investigative journalist—tells him. She happens to know that Dustin never finished college, and the reason why is disturbing (even if it’s not as shocking to Billy as one might hope). And Dustin isn’t the only one hiding something—a secret of Jessica’s has followed her to Maine, too.
Readers who enjoy small-town dramas will find no shortage of interpersonal intrigue here, as each of Becker’s characters is adept at keeping secrets from one another. The relationships feel real—the friendships are as authentic as the romances, and some of the novel’s best moments occur during the interplay between Billy and Andrea. Moments of larger social observation abound, as well: “When people were allowed to vote with their dollars, they inevitably voted for their own annihilation.” The elements readers expect from an idyllic, small-town setting are all at play, including the local diner, the struggling hometown paper, and the deep wounds from barely-forgotten high school legacies. These combine in a novel that feels both familiar and fresh, comforting and challenging. As Billy navigates his own disappointments and watches as his friends’ disappointments slowly float to the surface, readers will ponder the question of whether we can ever truly leave our origins behind.A compelling yarn with fresh characters and classic literary themes.