War Memorials

By Clint McCown

Nolan Vann is not having a good time. The trouble all started with insurance. Even though Nolan worked in his father's insurance agency in a small town in Tennessee, when he built a new addition on his house he neglected to inform his insurance company and then when a huge tree fell on the new addition, demolishing it, it wasn't covered by his insurance. To compound his stupidity, Nolan tried to back date his insurance policy and was caught by his father and was fired. Then he failed to tell his wife about the addition to the house not being insured and he also didn't tell her he had lost his job, instead choosing to struggle by with a series of crumby jobs, the latest being a repo man.
But things were off in Nolan's life even before his big screw-up. His wife is seeing another man, although Nolan doesn't tell her that he knows this, and she is pregnant by that man, something Nolan also knows. His marriage is not strengthened when he accidentally kills his wife's pet lizard that she loves. Nor is it strengthened when Nolan starts up a flirtation with a beautiful would-be zookeeper, whom he meets when repossessing her washer and dryer. Nolan just goes from bad to worse, but he is not a bad guy, he has a good heart: he is just your typical loser trying to get by. His part of the country is lousy with war memorials, commemorating every war from the Indian wars to Desert Storm. But Nolan wonders why there isn't a memorial to the ordinary guys on the homefront who struggle everyday to hold things together. Because it's a war, it's just not fought with guns and bombs.

I really enjoyed this book. Nolan comes off as a real dope right from the beginning. But he is gradually revealed as a guy who is basically sweet at heart. He just messed up but he is trying to get things back on track without damaging either himself or his errant wife in the process. It's a good, quirky, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic story of a smalltown guy just trying to cope.