A story where the small things are the big things

The novel opens with a beautifully crafted mini-epic: a man, a rowboat named Molly, and a hole punched by a cinder-block anchor—an accident both slapstick and elegiac. This establishes the book’s essential rhythm: comedy braided tightly with mortality. Throughout, Gast returns to this theme of beginnings, middles, and ends—an almost novelistic thesis on life’s strange arcs.

But the novel’s engine is the relationship between Simon and Ray, two aging, wryly self-aware men who meet at a dive bar in Portland and then reunite on Florida’s Emerald Coast. Their banter is as good as any contemporary fiction offers—sharp but never cruel, weary but unbroken, deeply humane. They are men with old losses, old music still playing in their heads, and just enough fight left to do something ridiculous in the name of hope.