The Flamingo Rising
By Larry Baker
Knopf, 309 pages, $24
Not far into Larry Baker’s eccentric, cleverly conceived but oddly unsatisfying first novel about growing up in north Florida in the 1960s, we are introduced to a parlor game.
“The rules are simple,” narrator Abraham Isaac Lee tells us. “If you could travel back to the past and change only one small specific thing, what would it be? You are not allowed a major revision. You cannot erase wars or plagues. You cannot stop a bullet after it has left the barrel. In fact, you cannot reverse an action, only a decision. Then you must predict the future.”
For Abraham, who has reached early middle age steeped in faith, happiness, regret and the tragedies of the past, this is serious business. Change one thing, and life might be different. Change one thing, and life might have been saved.
When we meet Abraham, he is a picture of success, owner of three homes plus “(e)mpty lots, movie theatres, rental houses, twelve apartment buildings, convenience stores, one large office building in downtown Jacksonville, thousands of acres all over north Florida.”
Abraham has loved his wife, Grace, since he was 12 and is besotted with affection for his three sons. He is a responsible citizen, a devoted son to his own aging father and a photographer whose seascapes and train studies have earned him a few prizes.
At St. Agnes parochial school in St. Augustine back in the 1960s, he was the popular, brainy Korean kid who lived out on A1A on the way to Jacksonville. Abe’s father, Hubert Thomas Lee, had returned from Seoul at the end of the Korean War with the little boy and a racially mixed baby girl who had been born in the same orphanage on the same day. Hubert and his wife, Edna, in a bit of parental ad-libbing, decided to rear the children as twins.
But that, we soon learn, is hardly the strangest thing about the Lees. This is: Their home is the Flamingo, the largest drive-in theater in the world. The Lees live in rooms set into the 150-foot-high, 200-foot-wide screen tower that Hubert had built in the ’50s.
Life magazine calls the Flamingo “A Southern Wonder of the World.” When Hubert builds a playground for patrons’ children, it must be the biggest between Jacksonville and Miami. And when he draws the ire of his neighbor, atheist undertaker Turner West, their feud must achieve equally grand proportions.
Although ’60s north Florida simmered with racial, class and economic tensions, “The Flamingo Rising” does not. Moreover, although Abraham early on tells us, “My speech is usually dramatic,” his narration is exactly the opposite–repetitious, largely graceless, leaching away surprise and suspense, and annoyingly ungrammatical.
We never care much about Abraham. Nor, with the exception of Hubert and the wise, wanton Alice Kite, the Flamingo employee who teaches Abraham more than he first realizes, do any of Baker’s other characters captivate us much.
Still, “The Flamingo Rising” is sure to arouse a twinge of nostalgia within anyone who once squandered even a few hours of his youth at the drive-in.
