[REVIEW] Headlong by Ron MacLean

(Mastodon Publishing, 2019)

REVIEW BY WENDY J. FOX

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Well into Ron MacLean’s Headlong—originally published in 2013, and reissued this year by Mastodon Publishing—Nick Young, needing something to help him channel his anger and worry, does what he says he used to do in the old days to get through it: he writes.

Nick is a washed-up journalist who has returned to his hometown to help his father after a stroke, and it is with a journalist’s nose for uncovering a story that MacLean develops this novel over a hot Boston summer. Middle-aged and divorced, it’s clear Nick would probably not have left his life in LA (despite there not being much to leave) if he thought he had any choice in the matter. He’s unemployed bordering on unemployable, and not a single women enters his orbit without her appearance being commented on. He’s grossly fond of the word “sexy.”

Yet, MacLean’s steady hand manages to balance the floundering, can’t get out of his own way, occasionally lecherous Nick with an important story about activism, friendship, and family.

The novel follows the thread of a labor dispute that ignites into violent protest, pitting radicalized youth against corporate scions, and ups the already high stakes of what it truly can mean for families when workers are striking by weaving in the unsolved murder of two union janitors, a complicated friendship with a close friend’s son, and a police department who protects their own.

Against this backdrop, Nick is coming to terms with what it means to him to be a journalist again, and while he fights it, his muckracker instincts will not allow him to let go of any lead, and he begins to cover the story in earnest, landing a feature and a column. At the same time, he’s sleeping on a futon in his father’s neglected home, the medical bills from the nursing facility are piling up, and his dad, who is not improving, regularly mistakes Nick for Nick’s dead uncle.

Headlong is a kind of modern—and decidedly literary—take on hardboiled crime and detective stories. MacLean’s careful pacing and thoughtful character development lends a novel that could easily veer into the didactic or cliché a layer of empathy, while still keeping the elements of the genre that keep the plot exciting and the pages turning.

Ultimately, though, Headlong is a book about what it means to have idealism, to lose it, and to start to find the thread of it again. It is a novel about having been young and not being young any more, and it challenges readers to consider mortality and their own choices. What do we think justice, whether it is social, environmental, meted out by a judge or a family member, really means? MacLean doesn’t have all the answers, but he pushes us to understand what we’d give, or give up, to get it, and he writes through all of these questions with an assured, steady grace.

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Wendy J. Fox is the author of The Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories (winner, Press 53 short fiction contest & finalist for the Colorado Book Award), The Pull of It (named a top 2016 book by Displaced Nation) and the forthcoming novel If the Ice Had Held, selected as the Santa Fe Writers Project grand prize winner by Benjamin Percy. Writing from Denver, CO and tweeting from @wendyjeanfox.