Any Day Now - Terry Bisson

   2018; 344 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Alternate History; Coming of Age Fiction; The 1960s.  Overall Rating : 5½*/10.

 

    It’s the 1950s, and all over the USA, the times they are a-changin’.

 

    You can hear it on the radio.  The “big band” music of the two previous decades is being replaced by a new sound that makes you want to snap your fingers and move your feet.  They call it “jazz” for whatever reason.

 

    Clayton “Clay” Bewley Bauer’s was just in grade school back then, in a small town called Calhoun, Kentucky; just outside the much bigger city of Owensboro.  His future, like all those in the Bewley clan, is already set in place:

    Graduate from high school,

    Graduate from Vanderbilt,

    Get a job in upper management somewhere.

 

    That sounds good.  The trouble is, that’s the “old way”, and Clay yearns to be part of those times that are a-changin’.

 

What’s To Like...

    In Any Day Now we follow Clay through three phases of his life.  Let’s call the first one his “Jazz Phase”, in the late 50s, wherein high-schooler Clay is introduced to new music from his friends and new ideas in the science-fiction books he reads voraciously.

 

    The next one is his college years in the early 60s; and we’ll label this his “Beatnik Phase”.  Clay eschews his family's tradition of attending Vanderbilt and instead opts for a small college in Minnesota.  But he soon drops out of there and moves to New York to be part of the Beat Scene and fulfill his career dream of becoming a poet.  His third phase is his “Commune Phase”, set in the late 60s and early 70s, after he moves out west and embraces the hippie lifestyle, including partaking of lots of recreational substances.

 

    The storyline resonated with me in several ways.  Clay’s approximately the same age as I am; we both spent our childhoods in small towns; and both had our long-haired, “Peace-Love-Dove” counterculture days.  To be honest, though, I never was tempted to go live in a commune.

 

    The first half of the book is Clay's Coming-of-Age saga, and felt like Terry Bisson was incorporating parts of his youth into the story.  One example: both the author and the protagonist were born and raised in Owensboro, Kentucky.  At that point I was disappointed that there wasn’t a bit of the Alternative History that the Amazon blurb promised.  Then abruptly, around 50% Kindle, a timeline anomaly pops up, and leads to a very different world that's going to sorely test Clay’s ideals.

 

    The ending is so-so.  After some exciting events in the “commune community”, Clay gets a much-needed rest.  But nothing is resolved, which makes me wonder if Terry Bisson intended to one day write a sequel to this.  Alas, it won’t happen.  Terry passed away in January 2024, and Wikipedia lists Any Day Now as his final full-length novel.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.1/5 based on 24 ratings and 11 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.36/5 based on 189 ratings and 38 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    "It has to be real jazz,” said Clay.

    “So what’s real jazz?” Ruth Ann asked.  They were sitting on the hood of the Ford with the motor cooling underneath, still warm on their bottoms.

    “Felonious Monk, Charles Mingles, Billy Ladyday,” said Clay.  “Very experimental stuff.  But it has to swing.  White people don’t do it as well.  Coal Train is good.”  (loc. 447)

 

    They were calling themselves Redeemers.  They wore masks on TV and talked about freedom.

    “The freedom to burn things,” Rotella said.

    They burned bridges in Indiana, barns in Idaho, buses in Detroit, cars and crosses in Georgia, and two kidnapped King’s Men in a locked shed in Illinois.  MLK called them misguided pawns; the UN called them terrorists.

    “Terrorism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” said Haig.  “It’s time the silent majority spoke up for America.”

    “Got a light?” muttered Clay.  (loc. 3649)

 

Kindle Details…

    The Kindle version of Any Day Now is presently priced at $9.99 at Amazon, which is rather steep.  Other Terry Bisson e-books are in the $2.99-$9.99 range.  It appears that a number of the author’s best-known works, such as Bears Discover Fire, are not yet available in e-book format.

 

Ernest was a rich kid working at being poor.  (loc. 862)

    There’s a fair amount of profanity in Any Day Now.  I counted 22 instances in the first 20%, but to be fair, half of those were the n-word racial epithet, which was mostly used to show Clay didn’t like the word, even though it was used frequently in the 1950s.

 

    Recreational drug usage is one of Clay’s frequent habits, and is generally presented in a positive and/or humorous way here, such as learning how “hold in” a toke, and how to properly prepare peyote before partaking of it.  I thought Clay’s first acid trip was presented particularly well.  Gay people are a common occurrence in both the Beat Scene and the hippie communes.  So if you’re a homophobe, you probably should skip this book.

 

    My biggest issue with Any Day Now is the storytelling.  Terry Bisson’s writing style is good, but the plotline doesn’t go anywhere or reach any conclusion.  Plus the previously mentioned genre-switch at the halfway point didn’t work at all for me.  Moreover, judging from the extremely low Goodreads ratings and several reviews there, I’m not the only one that felt this way.

 

    Despite that, I enjoyed Any Day Now, presumably because I could relate to so many of Clay’s experiences and have enjoyed so many of his sci-fi novels.  So let’s just call this one an ambitious and noble literary experiment that didn’t work.  RIP, Terry Bisson.  Your devoted fans dearly miss you.

 

    5½ Stars.  One last thing.  At one point during his Beat Phase, Clay goes to hear a 1950s hipster speaker by the name of Lord Buckley.  If you’ve never heard of him, go to YouTube and listen to some of his routines.  You will be amazed.