Long before novelist Pete Dexter poured his carbide prose into such contemporary classics as “Paris Trout” and “Train,” he worked as a newspaper columnist.
And while he later wrote for The Sacramento Bee and penned stories for magazines such as Esquire and Sports Illustrated, the heart of his journalism career came at The Philadelphia Daily News in the 1970s and 1980s. Working under Gil Spencer, an editor who would put in time at The Denver Post, Dexter became one of the great city columnists of our time – perhaps one of the last.
Writing a newspaper column is hard work. It’s not hard in the manner of soldiering or logging or mining, though one of Dexter’s Philly columns led to a beating that nearly killed him. But putting your words out there three days a week courts public failure as surely as a high-wire act. There is no net, only the next day.
Yet Dexter kept climbing the ladder, and he dazzled. Some of his best work is caught in “Paper Trails: True Stories of Confusion, Mindless Violence, and Forbidden Desires, a Surprising Number of Which Are Not About Marriage.”
Despite the unwieldy title, this 82-column collection is a jewel box of muscular writing, recalling the short stories of Flannery O’Connor and Annie Proulx. These columns walk a path between tomfoolery and toughness. Sometimes they visit both on the same trip.
Dexter is a master of the lead, the hook that dares readers to take a pass on the second paragraph.
On a column about a hooker: “The rent is $95 a week, and Joline still owes the manager fifty. None of the regulars have called, so it’s time to go to work.”
On an odd-duck stunt man: “The last time I saw Jack Walsh his head was level on the table with half a dozen empty beer mugs in a bar in Trenton, N.J., and he said he was going to do something special for me.”
And: “This is a story about a man named Dally Aubin who got pushed too far by a pig, and I might as well break this to you now: Its name was Dolly.”
What sets Dexter apart from most of his peers is an uncommon ability to capture wild comedy and stark seriousness. It’s a neat trick, akin to a guitar player – Neil Young and Richard Thompson come to mind – who can stun you in both acoustic and electric formats.
The death of Zerna Sharp, who authored the “Dick and Jane” readers, spurs two pages of deadpan hilarity while limning one man’s entry into the writing life.
But Dexter is perhaps at his finest writing about race and class. He has an ear for the telling quote, the anecdote that says everything about how a brickmason awakes one day to find his future is all used up.
While Dexter is a man of compassion and sentiment, his mercy does not extend to all. Take the ending to a column about teenage thugs who nearly kicked to death a young husband and father:
“And maybe something will happen to a couple of these kids along the way, bad enough to scare the others. I hope so, because there is another side to all the mellowing I was talking about before.
“You come to understand that you are half of your baby’s life.
“And no 18- or 20-year-old kid is going to take that away because he’s drunk or dumb or mean.
“Once you know the stakes, you will kill him first.”
Dexter’s collection is a reminder of what the best city columnists do: Hit the pavement with sharp eyes, keen ears and a razor wit, then come back and reshape that world on the page. From craft, art. And something resembling truth, or what we can know of it.
Staff writer William Porter can be reached at 303-954-1877 or wporter@denverpost.com.
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Paper Trails
True Stories of Confusion, Mindless Violence, and Forbidden Desires, a Surprising Number of Which Are Not About Marriage
By Pete Dexter
Ecco, 290 pages, $25.95
