A time of absolutes

In 1966, Charlie Stuart, the narrator of Richard Babcock’s complex and satisfying new novel, is 36 years old, but residents of his hometown, Laroque, Wis., know him as “Bow’s Boy” because he is the surrogate son of G. Bowman Epps, a rich lawyer. Charlie leads a double life: as Bow’s chief investigator and chauffeur and as an alcoholic bachelor fishing guide who prowls Laroque’s riverfront saloons.

Charlie’s real father, extravagant and unstable, ran Laroque’s opera house during a long-ago lumber boom. Bow considers Charlie an “archivist” of local history, and Charlie views himself as the only person who properly appreciates Bow -- an ungainly man lamed by childhood polio and hideously burned over half his face, yet one of Wisconsin’s most distinguished appellate attorneys.

Bow’s offices are above a bank that his family owned. He inherited a tract of forest and lakes where he and Charlie camp and fish. He doesn’t have to work, but he does, devoting his lonely life to unpopular efforts to free convicts who, more often than not, are guilty. He is a mass of contradictions: a Republican and hawk on the Vietnam War who’s also a dedicated civil libertarian; a man of deep, if hidden, feelings who is still an advocate of rigorous logic.

Charlie has Bow to himself until a new “boy” comes along, 17-year-old Ginger Piper, whom they first notice when he sinks a half-court shot to win a high school basketball game. Among the other small-town boys, Ginger stands out. He’s handsome, intelligent and mature beyond his years, and he has “a kind of glow, as bright as a new dime, so full of interest and candor.” Bow recognizes something special in him and offers him a job, sharing Charlie’s duties. Ginger does so well that Bow envisions him going to law school and, in time, taking over the practice.

Charlie resents the kid, naturally, and he’s also a skeptic by nature. Observing, for instance, that most convicts “didn’t show any reaction to Bow’s elaborate scar,” he says: “Bow insisted that was because the convict population was more accepting of freaks. I always suspected that criminals simply didn’t care enough about other people to register a response.”

Ginger’s father is a bitter man with a criminal past, and from time to time, Charlie sees Ginger seeming to cross ethical lines. He takes a steak from a grocery store without paying for it -- although under the circumstances, it may be a simple oversight. He twice injects antiwar messages into eulogies for classmates slain in Vietnam. Listeners are divided: Is this sincerity or showboating? He takes an excessive interest in one of Bow’s clients, Gary Fontenot. Bow knows Fontenot is guilty of burglary but argues that police illegally searched his car. Ginger sees Fontenot as an innocent victim of The System.

Babcock (“Martha Calhoun”) has a background in law and journalism, and this benefits “Bow’s Boy,” which is rich in detail about everything from interpreting the 4th Amendment to fishing for walleye and muskie. Like Nick Carraway in “The Great Gatsby,” Charlie is an ideal narrator: wry and lucid and detached, yet a man who must acknowledge, in the end, how much of a personal stake he has in the story he tells.

If Ginger displaces him, Charlie fears, he will lose his freedom to avoid growing up, avoid marrying his girlfriend, Lucy, who works at the bank, and avoid having to choose between his professional and drinking lives. But as the issue of Vietnam splits the nation, painful choices become impossible to duck, even in Laroque. When Fontenot escapes from prison with the aid of a knife that Ginger may have smuggled in to him, Bow must choose between logic and loyalty.

Charlie, looking back three decades, blames the war for subjecting the relationship between Bow and Ginger to unbearable pressure. It was a time of shrill voices and clashing absolutes -- not a time for Bow, who grumbles: “I don’t like absolutes. They’re for people who aren’t smart enough to see the whole picture.” Babcock lets us see the big picture; he makes us, along with Charlie, mourn these characters, gifted and flawed, who “each saw in the other a grace, a sort of beckoning of possibilities.”