Novelist Dexter: From Beer Truck to Book Award

Pete Dexter has moved around almost as much as a milkweed seed in a tornado.

A blurb on his latest novel--”Paris Trout,” which Tuesday night won the National Book Award--notes, “He was born in Michigan and raised in Georgia, Illinois and eastern South Dakota.”

He has worked on newspapers in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., Philadelphia and Sacramento, where he now lives with his wife and daughter. He once “tried to sell” baby pictures door-to-door in New Orleans but quit after the owner of the baby picture business demonstrated--on him--how a cattle prod works.

He has worked in lots of gas stations, in a hardware store for “about a week,” and he almost found his mission in life driving a beer truck.

“That’s actually not a bad job, by the way, driving a beer truck,” he said the other day. “Everybody’s glad to see you. At the end of the day you know you’ve helped mankind.”

Fight With Angry Readers

But things worked out differently.

Dexter gave up a job “trying to sell Jaguars” and--after an interlude writing poetry--went to work for a newspaper. He became a columnist at the Philadelphia Daily News where he worked for 12 years. He made a pretty good name for himself there--and nearly got killed in a fight with angry readers armed with baseball bats in what has become known as “the most famous street fight in the history of South Philadelphia.” He then made the leap to novels because “it was time.” Which seems to be about as close as Dexter ever gets to explaining why he does anything.

People who know Dexter, 45, aren’t much clearer about his motivations, but they speak with respect for his talent--and with amusement about his behavior.

F. Gilman Spencer, Dexter’s boss at the Philadelphia newspaper and now editor of the New York Daily News, said in a telephone conversation: “Nothing Dexter does would surprise me. . . . Dexter is different, very different.” Spencer added: “Dexter is crazy. He’s less crazy now, which is saying a lot, than when he was working for me.”

Dexter has “a brilliant sense of humor,” Spencer continued, describing his writing as “a combination of S. J. Perelman and Mark Twain.”

“I think he’s just a natural writer,” said Betsy Carter, who edited a column Dexter wrote for Esquire magazine and who now edits New York Woman magazine. “Some people don’t feel comfortable in the morning until they’ve had their orange juice. Pete doesn’t feel comfortable until he’s written something.”

Whatever the loss of Dexter may have been to car dealers, beer distributors and emergency room physicians, book critics and fiction readers have gained. In the last five years he has published three novels, including “Paris Trout.” “God’s Pocket” is about working-class Philadelphia. “Deadwood” is about the life and sudden death of Wild Bill Hickock, gunned down in Deadwood, S. D., in 1876.

Of the three, the uproarious “Deadwood” seems to be his favorite. People continue to write to him about it and related matters, including a man who recently said he had found proof that Hickock was bumped off in a contract killing. Dexter also admits that a character in that book--a buddy of the famous gunfighter--bears some resemblance to himself. In fact, it is easy to imagine Dexter as an actor in a Western. His lived-in face, dead-steady eyes and mustache are just what a director would love to put under a hat and behind a six-gun.

“Paris Trout” (Random House: $17.95), however, represents a long jump in his reputation and, potentially, in his audience. It is a dark, yet often comic novel set in the 1950s in a small Georgia town where murder and obsession seep like a slow-acting venom.

Called a ‘Masterpiece’

In the hackneyed phrase of the book business, it is a “breakthrough” novel, the kind that elevates a writer from the minor leagues to high literary seriousness. The novel was called “a masterpiece” by Richard Eder, the Los Angeles Times book critic. It was nominated for the National Book Award against such heavy hitters as Don Delillo, Anne Tyler and J. F. Powers.

Naturally, Dexter was pleased to win the National Book Award. He was particularly glad that his wife, Dian, and daughter, Casey, were in New York with him to attend the awards ceremony, he said in a telephone interview Wednesday.

“I couldn’t get to sleep last night until about 4 a.m. I was just lying there smiling to myself that I had thought ahead enough to bring them along,” he said, noting that he “felt kind of lucky going in.”

Dexter then joked that his 10-year-old daughter may be a big help if his memory fails. “When I go senile next year, I’ll have her come in and tell me about it, how I stood up in a tuxedo and how they clapped.”

None of this means that Dexter substituted his casual clothes and athletic shoes for tweeds, a pipe and literary pontification, though.

While he probably could make enough from his books to quit working, Dexter continues to turn out three columns a week for the Sacramento Bee--just to keep busy, he says. He works in an untidy kneehole-sized office unadorned with mementoes of any sort--unless a souvenir or two are buried somewhere under the loose stacks of paper.

Novel-writing “takes 2 1/2 hours in the morning. . . . What do you do the rest of the day?” he said. “You walk around the mountains telling chipmunks you’re a writer? You go to a bar and tell somebody you’re important? . . . I don’t want to be isolated. I think that’s a big mistake, hole yourself up in a cabin or something and forget how people talk and what people really do. I mean, I would.”

Those mornings he devotes to art, Dexter makes it sound as if he were galvanizing sheet metal. “I’m trying to write 900 words, that’s about 80 good sentences,” he explained, “and trying to put locks on both ends and give a sentence some strength and make sure it’s not ambiguous. . . . There’s enough ambiguity. If a sentence has got some meaning, you ought to try and make it clear what that is. Things are hard enough to understand in this world. To me it’s no enhancement to fiction to make it harder to understand than it already is.”

So Dexter finds it mildly bewildering that “Paris Trout” has been compared to the work of a great--but often turgid--Southern writer.

“A lot of the reviews have mentioned Faulkner,” he said, “which is flattering to me because I know William Faulkner is a great writer, but I never understood the Cliff Notes back when I was supposed to read that, much less get into the books themselves. It was probably more my fault than Faulkner’s. The problem I was having is that they (Faulkner’s often long and complicated sentences) weren’t clear. . . . People who know me say I’m smart enough to understand William Faulkner now. I’m not sure I am.”

Violence Always Implicit

Whether he knows it or not, Dexter shares with Faulkner a familiarity and understanding of violence. In “Paris Trout,” violence is always implicit and often explicit, beginning with the first chapter in which a 14-year-old black girl is murdered over a car loan by the demented white shopkeeper whose name is the book’s title.

For Dexter, the understanding of violence is often personal, not clinical. For years his favorite relaxation was sparring with professional boxers. He reportedly has been in a number of car wrecks and minor scrapes. But his knowledge of violence stems perhaps most tellingly from the episode for which he is best known in newspaper circles, that notorious 1981 South Philadelphia street fight.

Dexter had written a column about a drug killing that infuriated residents of the neighborhood where it happened. He went to a bar to discuss the matter with them and reportedly was punched a couple of times. He left and came back later with a friend, heavyweight boxer Randall (Tex) Cobb.

Without Cobb, the betting is that Dexter would be long dead. The patrons had armed themselves with baseball bats, and when Cobb and Dexter backed out of the bar and onto the street, a brawl of epic local proportions began. Dexter suffered head injuries and a broken back and hip. Cobb’s arm was broken.

Genesis of Violence

Today, the fight reverberates in Dexter’s discussion of the genesis of violence in “Paris Trout.”

Explaining the novel’s brutal, mesmerizing opening section when the girl is murdered, Dexter said: “. . . I know that’s how something like that happens. I understand how it grows, sort of, and where it comes from. It sprouts real fast and it never comes from exactly the place you think it will, in my experience. You look around when all those people in the room have bats and you’re trying to figure out which one is probably going to be the first one to take a swing and you’re invariably wrong. You just don’t know.”

But Dexter also acknowledged that the violence in “Paris Trout”--based on an event that actually happened in the town where he spent part of his childhood--grows from a more sinister, twisted and imagined rage than a punch-out.

“The violence in this book comes from some place deeper, and it’s meant more thoroughly. It has its origins in strange places, and that’s why it comes out strange,” he said.

‘Something Profound’

Some events in the novel hark back to his boyhood, including the book’s climax during a thunderstorm. “I was just a kid, you know, downtown, waiting for a parade and this storm broke, the worst storm I can ever remember and there was a horse right in front of me and it went up. My understanding is that at that point the fellow shot the first attorney. . . . I didn’t understand what had happened except that something profound and upsetting had happened.”

When he began to explore his past, Dexter was surprised at the detail and pungency of his memories. “I began remembering whole days, in unbelievable detail,” he said. “ . . . I was coming down to the front yard of my sister’s home and the plum tree and you put one of those plums in your mouth and it’s so hot it burns your mouth almost when the skin breaks, it’s been out in the sun all day. . . .”

Nonetheless, Dexter isn’t sure how his imagination created many of the incidents in “Paris Trout.” For instance, in one episode, the main character covers his bedroom floor with heavy plate glass, the better to detect the footprints of intruders into his paranoid isolation.

“It’s hard to say where those things come from,” Dexter said. “I don’t know if I had heard something like that once. I could see it. I could see them carrying the glass out of the truck. I really could.”

Plate glass also figured in Dexter’s own life while he was writing “Paris Trout.” After three months of composing the central section of the book, his computer malfunctioned, erasing about 120 pages and three months work.

In an unhappy frame of mind, he sped to the store where he had bought the microchip marvel. “I almost drove into the guy’s showroom,” he recalled. “I mean I stopped at the last second. I don’t know why. I’m just blind I’m so mad. I stopped the truck about that far from the plate glass. . . . Boy, I wasn’t a good sport; I’ll tell you that.”

Yet, Dexter ultimately behaved like an adult. “You get through with the tantrum and then you sit down and say, well, you’re going to write 900 words again this morning just like you were before,” he said.

Dexter also strikes mature chords when he talks about the connections between reality and his fiction.

Researching “Deadwood,” he returned to that former boom town three or four times, he said. “When I say it takes 10 minutes to walk from someplace to someplace, I want to make sure that was right.” Fiction, he added, “ought to be real at some point. There ought to be some foundation there that speaks to something that’s at least as serious as you are.”

And beneath the one-liners and the persona, Dexter does have a serious code.

“You try to tell the truth and live some way that doesn’t make you disappointed in yourself,” he said.

A Private Law in ‘Paris Trout’

“Paris Trout would refuse to see it, that it was wrong to shoot a girl and a woman. There was a contract he’d made with himself a long time ago that overrode the law, and being the only interested party, he lived by it. He was principled in the truest way. His right and wrong were completely private.

“Harry Seagraves had been around the law long enough to hold a certain affection for those who did not respect it, but his affection, as a rule, was in proportion to the distance they kept from his practice.

“A man like Paris Trout could rub his right and wrong up against the written law for ten minutes and occupy half a year of Harry Seagraves’ time straightening it out. And a man as important as Paris Trout, it was difficult to pass the case to a junior partner. . . .”

From “Paris Trout” by Pete Dexter, published by Random House.