Personal Reasons: a Novel

Matt Conner is sixty-two. He caught the tail end of Vietnam and came home in ?72 full of anger and guilt. Whiskey was Matt?s anodyne, and barroom brawls were his way of dealing with the America he felt had betrayed him. When he wasn?t drinking and fighting, he worked on a bridge-building crew in Tacoma. He became tough and mean and filled with anguish.

And then he met Pam, a hippy from Shreveport who worked in a coffee shop he used to sober up in. An angry vet and a hippy chick?it shouldn?t have worked, but it did. They were married for forty years before she died of a liver disease. Pam had given Matt his life back. She?d become his anodyne, and she?d helped to calm the angry spirit inside him. But she was gone now, and Matt, still mourning for her a year later, has a brief affair with Becky, a battered young woman with no one to turn to for help. Their relationship deepens after Matt rescues her from her boyfriend, Eric.

Matt still holds old fashioned beliefs. Becky is thirty-six?young enough to be his daughter. He is embarrassed of their relationship and tries to distance himself from it by dating his neighbor who is a three-time widow and closer to his own age. She?s had a crush on Matt for several years and used to hit on him even when Pam was still alive. Her name is Faye, and she shares many of the same old-fashioned values that Matt does.

Becky?s problems, however, are not going away that easy. Her boyfriend, Eric, wants revenge. He recruits help from his connections in the drug world, and Matt Conner finds himself pulled deeper and deeper into a situation he wants no part of, and to make matters worse, his outlet, Faye, seems to have an ulterior motive for her attraction to him.

Matt does not want to lose the normal life that Pam had worked so hard to give him, but when Eric and his drug pals make it personal, he resorts to the violence, and the angry spirit of his past to solve the problems of his present.