Did I get a good review, or what?

Steven J. Svoboda, a book reviewer in California, recently wrote the following review of Three Flies Up, my most recent book, published last spring:


Three Flies Up: My Father, Baseball, and Me. By Kelley Dupuis. Denver: Outskirts Press, 2008. 382 pp. www.outskirtspress.com. $15.95.

Kelley Dupuis has hit a grand slam home run with Three Flies Up: My Father, Baseball, and Me. It just goes to show that if you are a good enough writer, you can get away with virtually anything. In this case, Dupuis has given us a nearly 400-page autobiography about his life and his relationship with his father that is pretty near impossible to put down once you start reading it. The fact that the author is not a famous athlete, musician, or scientist does not impede one’s appreciation of his story.

Dupuis proves himself a superlative writer, effortlessly turning the seemingly less than extraordinary events in his own life into a magical adventure filled with piquant moments. His father clearly loves him and just as clearly has some man-sized dysfunction that throws up a huge wall to the deeper father-son connection that would have benefitted both of them. No doubt the great majority of us guys (including myself) who hail from the author’s generation share this with him. So it is an easy book to relate to, made even easier by Dupuis' absolutely captivating combination of perceptiveness, honesty, and lack of pretension.

As a lifelong baseball fan, I greatly enjoyed the writer’s detailed relation of events on the diamond and how they informed his connection with his father. At times father and son do manage to connect and express the love they have for each other, sometimes directly, and other times through their shared love of the game.

Along the way, we learn about the author’s jobs in radio, old-time newspaper journalism, and for many years, with the State Department. I would never have imagined that the ins and outs of this work could be so interesting, but in Dupuis’ hands, it is little short of enthralling.

His marriage falls apart, though for decades he remains technically married to his ex. A long affair with a Russian woman he meets while working in Moscow for the State Department is described in lyrical detail. Only a few years before the present day, he tracks down and quickly marries the ex-wife of an old friend.

As Dupuis portrays him, his father was a deeply flawed man, hurling prejudice at many groups in a futile attempt to conceal his own inadequacies and gather attention for himself. Even at Dupuis’ mother’s funeral, his father feels the need to try to be the center of attention. One sobering moment comes when Dad shatters twelve-year-old Kelley’s Christmas bliss by snarling about how he hates the holiday. And yet, in the end, one has compassion for his father and compassion for the author himself. Truth presented this clearly and with this much heart cannot help but speak to all of us.

Death comes to all of us eventually, of course, and in Dupuis’ story, in the last pages of his book, three departures come in quick succession: the demise of the author’s mother, his alcoholic sister (and closest friend) Lynn, and finally, his father.

If you want to read an unusual, fascinating book, possibly learn more about your own relationships, and enter into the world of a man who couldn’t write a bad sentence if he tried, then be sure to pick up Three Flies Up: My Father, Baseball, and Me.

NOTE BY KELLEY: I swear to God, I did not write this review myself.