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Summary
Summary
The New York Times Book Review praised the characters in Jon Hassler's last novel, Dear James, as"so exquisitely rendered that even a first-time visitor to Staggerford will come to love them as old friends." Now, in Rookery Blues, Hassler once again brings to life an oddball group of Midwesterners, as they brace themselves and each other for the turmoil of the late 1960s on a small college campus. Rookery, Minnesota, is about as far north as you can go and still be in the United States, and Rookery State College is an academic backwater if ever there was one. The campus is populated by students seeking draft deferments during the height of the Vietnam War and misfit teachers who can't get a job anywhere else. Even so, some of the faculty at Rookery State long for a meeting of the minds, the companionship of soulmates. And then, one frigid afternoon, the Icejam Quintet is born in the improbable basement apartment of Neil Novotny, an unkempt English instructor and obsessed novelist. With Leland Edwards on piano, Neil on clarinet, Victor Dash on drums, and Connor on bass, the group comes together with the help of its muse, the lovely Peggy Benoit, who plays saxophone and sings. The most gifted and spirited of the bunch, Peggy instills the harmony that allows the Icejammers to produce the kind of jazz they've all dreamed of playing, bringing them satisfaction they never thought they'd experience. But even isolated Rookery State will be touched by the great discontent sweeping the country. News of a salary freeze electrifies the rabble-rousing Victor, and the first labor union in history comes noisily to campus. As a teachers' strike takes shape, threatening both the draft-dodging students and the complacent administration, the five musicians must struggle with their loyalties--to the school, the town, their families, and each other.... As he does in all his novels, Jon Hassler infuses the story of this unlikely collection of eccentrics with wry wit, deep feeling, and ultimately, his faith in human beings to endure despite their own sadly comic foibles. Like his beloved Staggerford novels, Rookery Blues is about the sheer need for community that everyone harbors--even in the unlikeliest places.
Author Notes
Author Jon Hassler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on March 30, 1933. He received his bachelor's degree from St. John's University in 1955 before going on to the University of North Dakota for his master's degree. After graduating from college, he taught high school English for the next 10 years. In 1970, while teaching at Brainerd Community College, he became interested in writing fictional stories.
Hassler's first novel, Staggerford, a story of a small-town school teacher, was chosen Novel of the Year in 1978 by the Friends of American Writers. In 1987, Hassler's fifth novel, Grand Opening, a tale told from the point of view of a twelve-year-old boy living in the corrupt town of Plainview, Minnesota, won the Best Fiction Award, given by the Society of Midland Authors.
Granted honorary Doctor of Letters degrees by Assumption College, the University of North Dakota, and the University of Notre Dame, he has also received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Minnesota State Arts Board. He died, after years of suffering from progressive supranuclear palsy, on March 20, 2008.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In his eighth novel, Hassler (Dear James) takes leave of the denizens of Staggerford and visits the fascinating magic of his wryly observed insights upon a motley collection of junior professors at Rookery State College, a sort of purgatory for academic misfits in the remote northwoods of Minnesota. The year is 1969, and the Icejam Quintet at first seems the answer to faculty disaffection. The jazz group includes the campus's star musicologist, Dr. Peggy Benoit, a sexy, divorced sax-player and vocalist, and three English professors: pianist Leland Edwards, clarinetist Neil Novotny and drummer Victor Dash. The bassist, Connor, a somewhat celebrated painter from a larger college, is struggling with alcoholism and a bad marriage. A near-death experience sobers Connor, and he falls into bed with Dr. Peggy, which stirs the rebellion of his unhappy teenage daughter. When the high-handed Minnesota State College Board unlawfully diverts money earmarked for faculty raises into a building fund, combative Victor, an ex-union man, leads a movement to bring in a strike-minded union. After the faculty strikes, the administration orders a lockout, forcing a major crisis that puts the members of the Quintet at odds with their community, themselves and each other. Skillfully skewering academic intrigue, basic human foibles and the upheavals of the 1960s, Hassler has produced an uproariously funny, wonderfully satisfying sendup of academic tomfoolery. 40,000 first printing; author tour. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
The eighth novel from the author of the endearing Staggerford series (Dear James, 1993, etc.): a delight about five faculty members who in 1969 start a jazz group at their small Minnesota state college. Tongue firmly in cheek, Hassler cheerfully sends up student unrest, inane college bureaucrats, and other academic idiosyncracies both universal and peculiar to the '60s. Remote Rookery State College is the unlikely place where Neil Novotny, lousy English teacher and mediocre unpublished novelist, comes up with the idea of starting a jazz quintet. With the help of Peggy Benoit, Neil's muse and out-of-reach love, he recruits a cast of eccentrics from a town and state full of same: Leland Edwards, slavishly devoted to his mother (with whom he still lives), will play the piano--and a mean piano it is; Connor, a painter lured away from a Minneapolis private college, plucks the bass; Peggy plays the clarinet; and Victor Dash the drums. The five make music against a backdrop of '60s shenanigans, as when Victor becomes campus leader of the Faculty Alliance of America, a neophyte union urging the faculty to strike (salaries have been frozen for two years). The novel goes on in this vein: bright, antic, and vivid, with lots of deadpan humor, romantic and political intrigue, affectionate reversals of fortune. Just when it seems that Neil will be fired because students arrange their schedules to avoid his class and because he isn't published, Connor arranges for Emerson Tate, a Minneapolis critic connected with a small press, to rewrite Neil's novel into a historical romance. With a supporting cast of characters who almost always amuse and entertain, Hassler's comic formula remains fresh, even as the strike fails and the caravan moves on. Hassler displays once again why he's the novel's answer to Garrison Keillor. This may not be Lucky Jim, but it's worthy to be mentioned in the same breath. (First printing of 40,000)
