The Dove in the Belly

This is a book for people that like slow, quiet “day in the life of” stories with ambiguous endings. We follow Ronny through a year of college in 1970s South Carolina as he tries to figure things out. There is plenty of drama and life changing events but they're all presented here on a low simmer. As a result, while the story itself was easy to follow and kept me mostly engaged, I never really connected with any of the characters and none of these huge events really hit me very hard. Unexpectedly, it has a HFN “ending” but left me feeling like the story still had a long way to go.

The book opens with Ronny starting a new year in a dorm that houses a lot of the football team - who use him as their resident paper writer. He helps them study and pass their classes and they don't give him too much shit. One of the team, Ben, is someone Ronny has always been a bit obsessed with and they end up having a secretive affair throughout the year. Ben is still dating girls during and it's a little convoluted whether he's doing this because he wants to, to keep up appearances, or it's just something that's just expected but meanwhile he's very possessive of Ronny even while he perpetually cheats on him. There are a lot of moments that are major red flags against Ben but there are also a lot of sweet private moments that make you think maybe it's worth it for Ronny, especially when he doesn't have much else in his life.
Besides the relationship drama, we also see two deaths of old women, daily school and local newspaper business, and a vague picture of what college life was like in this time and area. Interestingly, there aren't a lot of mentions of racism or even homophobia (besides blatant use of the word fa**ot) despite the time and location of the story which I thought was strange. There's even a campus-supported LGBT meetup group. Unless this was a particularly liberal city in the middle of the South, it felt a little duplicitous. The author mentions that his own life inspired a lot of the story so who am I to call it fake but it also makes me think he must have been incredibly lucky and/or naive.

Overall, I'd recommend it if the above is your thing. It was well written and the characters felt like real people with realistic dialogue. It just left me feeling a little bereft and wasn't a page-turner for me, taking me 3 weeks to complete.

5.0

“[...] he liked the feeling he had already claimed.”

The book started in a really weird media res but it didn't give me any good reason to justify why we started there; then it used “capsule chapters” to quickly explain the months prior these first few pages of the book. Only after that is that I got interested on what was happening, but the book's lack of interest on building up a decent start had already killed the vibe hard for me. Things after that went fine, though... until the final chapters. The closer the book got to the end, the less it became about Ben and Ronny, and the more it became about (what I can only call) the author's fear of death - I mean, seriously, what's up with all that? It just didn't make any sense at all. The last few pages felt like the author was borrowing the character's voices to express his own thoughts on mortality. I could see that he wanted the final message to be “enjoy good things while they last” but all the final pages' moping on loss and mortality didn't justify themselves as the conclusion to the couple's main arc at all. Loss and mortality should've drawn them INTO a conclusion, it shouldn't have been THE conclusion. Specially when it's clear as day that the main force behind the book is trust or the lack thereof. And to top it off, the author didn't finish some character's arcs, nor recognised their disappearances. If even Otis got a closing arc, why Hoagie didn't?

Talking now about the good aspects, Jim is a damn good writer when it comes to transform abstract feelings into text. I also have got to give it to him in the matter of characters, all of them have a very strong voice. They feel real even with the briefest exchanges of dialogue. Ben and Ronny are as real as a book character can be and they're the ones who holds this book together for me. They're the reason why I rated this a 5.0, and not a 2.0.