Van Boyle by Nathan Leslie
Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp

Van Boyle by Nathan Leslie
Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp

“Van Boyle”
Novel
Texture Press, 2025
$19.95, 168 pages
ISBN: 978-1945784248

“I’m not homeless. I have a home. It might not look like your home, but I have one,” Van Boyle, the curiously passive but sympathetic title character of Nathan Leslie’s innovative new novel insists. “My home is where I make it.” Van is 66 or 67 when he makes this assertion.  And yet, the story of Van Boyle may very well be the story of a man who is desperately in search of “home.” Indeed, at the age of fifty-five, his wife having left him eight years earlier, on his way to Arizona to try to patch things up with his daughter, Ashley (she slams the door in his face), Van reflects that he never liked traveling, even as a major league ballplayer. It was “always a hassle and it took him away from home, where he wanted to be. That’s all he ever wanted—a home and to be in it.” 

Beginning with Boyle’s death at the age of sixty-nine, his sad, sparsely attended funeral in Cumberland, MD, at the edge of the Allegheny Mountains (only his ex-wife, a former teammate and a cousin there besides the pastor). Leslie unspools Van Boyle’s life, gradually taking us back to his origin. We see his life falling apart in reverse, back through the years, with succeeding chapters numbered from 69, his age at death, back to zero. These chapters are related in the third person, but titled chapters in Van’s own voice, which usually begin “The Time Van…” (such as “The Time Van Sabotaged his Chances to Make a Bunch of Money” and “The Time Van Broke Bread with the Pitcher Who Struck Him Out Four Times that Afternoon”) are interspersed throughout, highlighting Van’s own confused reflections. You can almost hear him asking himself, How did I get here? Why am I here?

At first, when we read sentences like, “If Van could find worms or centipedes or salamanders under rocks and logs, he’d take all he could. A Ziploc bag could prove useful. Free protein, and with a little table salt, not unappetizing, fried,” we wonder if Van Boyle is some sort of survivalist, living off the grid. Only when we read his history in reverse do we understand how things gradually fell apart, after one or two stellar seasons playing baseball for the Baltimore Orioles. At one time, indeed, he had a family, a home, a vacation condo, drove a Mercedes.

Yet at 65, we read how a random partner, Jenna, a woman with three teeth in her mouth, leaves him in Martinsburg, West Virginia. They are sleeping in his buddy Carl’s 1974 Dodge Caravan. Two chapters later, at age 63, Van meets Jenna outside a warehouse in an industrial park. They share body warmth and forage for food, like two wild animals. Leslie shows us the understated sadness of Van’s life in casual prose. “I’m not a vegetarian,” Van tells us in “I’ve Eaten,” a reflection at the age of 65, shortly after Jenna leaves him – that is, shortly before we read about Jenna leaving him – ‘but I’ve mostly eaten plants, easier to catch. Don’t have to even try. Spring and summer are easy. Dandelions and goosefoot and garlic mustard, chickweed, and broad leaf dock. Wild onion. Beech leaves, young green pine shoots,” and the list goes on. Amaranth, arrowroot, berries, squirrels, grubs, groundhogs and possums. June bugs, worms and termites. How did this happen?

A character Van calls the Handler is partly to blame. It’s the all-too-familiar story of the manager of the sports star’s finances, who skims and cheats and self-deals. Apart from playing baseball, Van knows how to do very little, and after his career ends – at twenty-seven he runs headlong into the centerfield wall chasing a flyball and wrecks his knee, resulting in four surgeries and arthritic pain for the rest of his life – he tries selling real estate, and then the Handler, who “manages his investments” (wink-wink) steers him into owning a restaurant called Bistro Bistro (reminiscent of Johnny Unitas’ Chinese restaurant The Golden Arm),  which likewise fails. Indeed, Timothy, the man whom Van’s wife Cheryl leaves him for when he’s forty-seven, is a “project manager” with the outfit that sets the place up.

But mostly it’s Van’s own fecklessness that trips him up. All he’s ever known is playing ball – he once won a golden glove award and was a part of an Orioles World Series winning team. “He was a ballplayer—that’s what and who he was. When that ended, his work life also ended, as far as he was concerned. He ended.”

At the age of fifty-one, Van imagines his own funeral. It’s nothing like what eventually transpires eighteen years later in Cumberland. “It would be well-attended—all my ex-teammates and friends and family members,” and mourners would “chant poems by Auden and Yeats.” The music would be Bach.

Leslie takes us back to Van at the age of twenty-nine meeting his future wife Cheryl while he is signing autographs at a mall. We’ve already read about their break-up, of course. He’s already washed up as a player when they meet, but she idolizes him at first, smitten by the star. Gradually over the years she finds him pathetic, frustrating. “There’s just not enough fight in you,” she tells him when they break up. “It’s like you’re treading water. You’re going against yourself all the time.” He’s a disengaged parent, for one thing, and it’s no wonder his son and daughter eventually want nothing to do with him.

As the years roll back and we see Van’s brief successful career, his drudgery in the minor leagues, groomed by scouts at the age of eighteen, we understand how he has been trapped. Leslie takes us all the way back to his uncle Al asking him at the age of ten, “You want to be a ballplayer, is that right?” The die is cast. It’s all he’s ever prepared himself for.

And yet, nothing is truly fated, is it? In bringing us back to Van’s infancy, Leslie notes, “It all awaits us.”

Van Boyle is both an intriguing character study and a novel with an imaginatively constructed plot. The reader isn’t so much concerned with “what happens next” as s/he is with “what happened before.” The novel makes you consider your own life, how you’ve gotten to where you are, going back and back and back…