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"If you read enough Keith Maillard novels,
you start to believe Raysburg, West Virginia really exists."
— Jeremy Twigg, BC Bookworld
"Difficulty at the Beginning uses
some of the same source material as his earlier works, and under
the steady hand of a master craftsman who has honed his skills through
many novels, Maillard reaches his apex."
—Wheeling Intelligencer
In this, the first volume of Difficulty at
the Beginning, John Dupre is a student at Raysburg Military
Academy, where his best friend Lyle Ledzinski is training him to
be a perfect Socratic athlete: “A sound mind in a sound body.”Together
they want to experience all of life — athletics, philosophy,
beer, the quest for Truth, and most of all, those mysterious creatures
that seem to come from another planet: girls.
By their junior year they’ve taken to hitch-hiking
around, fired up on Kerouac, James Dean and St. Augustine, and their
horizons begin to expand like an endless sunrise.They’re out
for experience and suffering, and that’s just what they’re
going to get.
Written as though on the back of the pages of
Gloria (shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award,
1999), Running depicts the lives of young men in late-1950s
America with humour, pathos, and muscle.Taken on its own or as the
prelude to Difficulty at the Beginning it’s a memorable and
invigorating piece of writing that shows how the smug, grey culture
of the 1950s was shattered forever with three little words.
"Running perfectly represents the
terrible, lonely beauty of young life, a literary equivalent of
the songs of Paul Westerberg. Keith Maillard's books changed my
life. They made me want to write, and to be a writer."
—Dave Bidini
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