Sheer Joy in Detroit

By Van Ledyard

Shawn Dygert’s carefully calibrated life is going exactly nowhere, and he knows it. The family machine shop he inherited is circling the drain as his only customers, the Big Three car companies, bottom out in yet another late 1980s downturn. He can’t get his old flame Irene, the only woman he has ever really been interested in, to give him the time of day – no matter how much he apologizes. Shawn’s near term coping strategy is to carefully wind down the business while spending every spare hour playing beer league hockey in drafty rinks with ex-college players, former minor leaguers and assorted has-beens. Beyond that, well, he’ll worry about it when he gets there.

Then he learns that Dygert Mold Inc., a drifting plankton in a sea filled with automotive whales, is inexplicably coveted by Dick Rabideaux, a Big Three executive who will stop at nothing to get it. Why Rabideaux would want Dygert Mold, with a life expectancy measured in weeks, is beyond Shawn’s comprehension. All he knows is that even though his family business may be worthless, he won’t be forced into giving it up. No, not that.

Shawn’s careful calibrations are further upset when he learns that Joey Durkovich, a beer league rival and minor real estate wannabe, is in hot pursuit of Irene. Not that there’s anything he can do about it at the moment. Then more complications: His old high school baseball and hockey coach, Father Don, pulls him into a hare-brained fundraising scheme, a charity hockey game, to benefit Gordie, a very sick kid and the son of Shawn’s old friend Lumpy. Doctors say Gordie has "Detroit-itis" which seems to be contagious.

Shawn has invited none of this. But he’s determined to do right by his family’s legacy, by Irene, and by the kid. If he won’t prevail, at least he’ll go down swinging. When Dick Rabideaux makes his final, violent play for Dygert Mold, the messy, disconnected threads of Shawn's life pull together. And out of the failure, the ugliness, and the broken relationships, he finds his way to a new understanding about life that until so recently seemed without hope or promise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Van Ledyard
• Release date: Mar 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9780985544003

Van Ledyard

A Note from VL: For a long time now, friends have asked me to tell them what it was like growing up in Detroit. They’ve seen the stories in the newspapers, read about the bankrupt car companies and corrupt city officials, the horrific crime news, and spent time with the picture books and videos of The Ruins. A few have even tramped around the old Packard plant where they bump into other tourists with cameras. I tell them, it’s hard to say. You want to explain. But when you begin to isolate this thing or that, it falls apart. Because this Detroit, as sick and troubled and worn out as it is, is a living thing populated by real people. So to explain this place, to dissect it, is the surest way to miss what’s alive in it. Or most amazing of all, what's beautiful in it. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote that, “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” I believe that to be true. That line runs through the heart of each and every Detroiter, north and south of 8 Mile Road. If you accept that, then you see there’s really no solution for Detroit, at least not in the way most people think. More traveling experts with their political prescriptions, more futile “task forces” and “public-private coalitions” won’t fix what’s been broken for so long in this city. Healing can however begin with the realization that Solzhenitsyn’s line does run through the heart of all those who own a little piece of the big and wounded soul of this city. I wrote this book to explain all this to my friends, especially those perplexed by what they come eventually to label “the Detroit mentality.” I wrote the book in a way that might explain all this to them better than the usual brain-spun analysis. It’s a made up story about Shawn and Irene and all of the others. Whether I succeeded or not is up to them to decide, and you the reader. Sheer Joy in Detroit is one man’s understanding of the place, fixed in one particular point of time. There are others. February 2012

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