Hub – Robert Herring, 1981 ★½

Reflections on a Childhood Deferred

Sometimes childhood feels like a present that never quite got unwrapped. I had that feeling twice over with Hub.

Our title character is a pre-teen boy who lives in a river town in Arkansas. He seems the product of a loving, relatively successful family, but his life is centered around two other people.

One is Uncle Ethel, a wise old man who lives on an isolated island, alone but for his aged dog and his shotgun. The other is a trouble-making pal named Hitesy, who badgers Hub to do things he knows he shouldn’t, goading him with the magic word “chicken” whenever Hub hesitates. Hitesy brags his father doesn’t care what he does, and dares Hub to follow his example.

One night Hitesy leads Hub into a seedy part of their town, a neighborhood called Mink Slide where a local prostitute conducts business without drawing her curtains. Hitesy and Hub see more than they bargained on, as the prostitute is visited by a town lowlife named Lute Freeman. Lute is a hulking brute who just walked out on the only job he is capable of doing, and when he can’t get satisfaction in the form of a freebie, he kills the prostitute with an angry swipe of his great hand. Then he spots the two boys watching through the window, and gives chase. Eventually, the three find their ways to the old man's island, where a long standoff ensues.

Did you ever have a book as a child or a teenager that you wanted to read, but never quite got around to? I guess there were a few of those for me; one of them was Hub. I was a freshman in high school when my father poked his head through my bedroom door and said he had this book he wanted me to read. It wasn’t even out in stores yet; what he had for me was a red-jacketed paperback known in the business as an “uncorrected proof.”

I didn’t recognize the name on the jacket, one Robert Herring. For years, I conflated the title with that of a Paul Newman movie, Hud, which I later saw and can report now Hub is nothing like. As to what Hub was about, I could not say at the time, as I never read it. I don’t think I so much as glanced at a page. But I often thought to myself, in quieter, deader moments, that I should at least pick up the thing and give it a try. After all, what would Dad say?

All through the rest of my high-school years, as best I can remember, the book sat on my bedroom desk, studiously ignored. Then came college, and my relocation. Hub seemed to vacate the premises by that time, as if by its own sullen volition.

After handing me the book, Dad never mentioned it to me again. Sometimes I thought there was disappointment in his silence, at my blowing off something else in life he wanted me to do. Maybe the book had some special meaning to him. Maybe “Robert Herring,” since he was someone I never heard of, was someone Dad knew, writing under a pseudonym. Maybe, it was even Dad himself, a writer who never made the hard transition to fiction-writing though he loved novels and passed that love on to me.

Of course, it also occurred to me that the book was something he hadn’t thought about himself much since handing it off to me.

Many years later, long after Dad had passed on, I found the book in Mom’s attic, distinctive in its plain red paperback jacket. It grabbed my attention like a hand at my throat. Hub! The book Dad asked me to read which I never did! How often had I wished I had done something to please the old man but waved it off, thinking I’d always have the time… Well, you know how that song goes.

I apologize for the excess backstory, but it seems to have a bearing on my takeaway from reading Hub. See, I really wanted to like Hub, for the fact it was a kind of final gift from Dad, a gift deferred, but one he still left for me, with a 35-year-old unanswered charge to read it. With that kind of build-up, you want the result to be good, even at the cost of breaking your heart.

So it’s almost with a kind of nihilistic relief I can report that Hub was a book that didn’t grab me at all. Not that it hasn’t got some fine ingredients. It’s a coming-of-age adventure story with a pungent Southern feeling about it and a storyline with echoes of the Jackson's Island idyll in The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer, a book Dad knew I loved. If Dad ever did read it, he might have seen a bit of me in the title character, a young boy with a sheepish fear of life he needs to conquer.

But the book doesn’t resonate with any kind of passion. It’s not especially evocative regarding the experience of seeing the world through a boy’s eyes. As an adventure story, it’s strangely static, mostly taking place on this island where Hub and Hitesy decide to lay low after observing the murder, not realizing Lute has somehow decided to hide out there, too.

Robert Herring did actually exist. He taught English and poetry at Middle Tennessee State University, living in Murfreesboro. The son of a preacher, Herring derived much inspiration from the outdoors as Hub, his debut novel, well attests. Herring published another novel, McCandless’s War, a few years later, and passed away, either in 2004 or in 2011, Google searches being what they are. If it was the earlier date, which I suspect, he outlived Dad by seven years.

Herring in the pages of Hub comes across as a bit of a misplaced poet, focusing most of his attention on describing the everyday wonders of the natural world at no small cost to character and plot.

“The sun was higher, probing down through the island’s willow crowns until the wood’s floor with its hennaed coverlet of bramble, burdock, Queen Anne’s lace, and bullbriers was pegged and tined with little chaplets of light,” Herring writes. That is a beautiful sentence, the kind I wish I had the vocabulary and sensitivity to write. Alas, he keeps writing like this during what is supposed to be a tense standoff near the novel’s end.

I need to point out here that the copy of Hub I am working from puts both me and Mr. Herring at a disadvantage. It’s that uncorrected-proof thing. People are asked not to base their reviews off of them, for good reason. What is on the pages of an uncorrected proof doesn’t always make it to what finally emerges in print.

It’s possible that some editor, or Herring himself, might have reworked the text somewhat, perhaps in the very direction I would have found worthwhile. I can see in this book the seeds of some greatness, of exploring the darker corners of one’s own under-regarded world and finding in oneself, with the help of a wizened helper like Uncle Ethel, the strength to deal with those dark things in a bold and meaningful way. The elements are here in the version of Hub in front of me; but they never come together.

Instead, the book kind of veers off into a lot of solitary rumination about the nature of fear, and some plumbing of Uncle Ethel’s backstory that makes him out as a kind of superhero, a strangely inert one yet self-reliant to a preternatural degree. He’s very good at laying traps for the dangerous, persistent Lute, though his major quality as Herring describes him is an unbecoming stillness that grows more bothersome as the pages move toward a bloody climax.

The characters are mono-dimensional to a fault. For all his awkward youth, that sense I might suspect if he indeed ever read Hub that Dad saw in me, Hub’s principal characteristic is his affection for Uncle Ethel. We see Uncle Ethel and Hub at the beginning of the book talking about a “witchin’ pool” that draws those that look upon it to lose their soul. Later, we learn how Uncle Ethel helped Hub rescue a crow he accidently injured; as the bird took wing the boy seemed to think the bird thanked him, an impression Uncle Ethel quietly encourages.

Mostly, Uncle Ethel sets an example for Hub, one he doesn’t find anywhere else, certainly not in Hitesy, who fast loses his authority over Hub as the danger of Lute presses upon them, rendered by the novel’s second half to sniveling supercargo unable to appreciate the true bond of humanity that binds Hub to Uncle Ethel.

“Soon or late a man’s got to do the closest he can to right,” Uncle Ethel explains.

But this feels like a bit of strange advice, coming from where it does. Why Uncle Ethel thinks it right to let Hub and his pal camp out on his yard without telling them there’s a killer in the neighborhood until the loon practically jumps in their bonfire doesn’t seem right to me. Uncle Ethel doesn’t even tell a deputy about Lute’s lurking about the island even after Lute begins to demonstrate his willingness to do harm. Maybe I just don’t have Uncle Ethel’s aptitude for fixing traps.

For all his hulking menace, the villain, Lute Freeman, is the novel’s biggest misfire. A contemporary Kirkus Review of Hub calls him a “pea-brained lug,” which pretty much covers it. The fact Hub and Hitesy do nothing with their discovery of Lute’s murderous villainy frustrates this reader’s sympathies, but any moral complexity regarding this sin of omission is effectively squandered as Lute goes on to kill another person, this time making his complicity clear enough that he becomes a wanted man. After that, Lute doesn’t do much of anything interesting except lie in wait for an opening while Herring describes the world of nature around him, or else yell threats to show how evil he is.

There’s a put-upon quality to the character, a sense Lute is acting so brutish, and keeping after Uncle Ethel and the kids when he could be making tracks for safer havens, simply because it fills a hole in the story for dramatic tension that would otherwise be left gaping. I wasn’t sold on him at all. Again, there’s more than an echo here of Tom Sawyer, with Lute filling the Injun Joe role, but while Injun Joe makes for a memorable villain, Lute never seems to have a thought in his head beyond murdering the old man who keeps after him while he lurks.

The book offers a lived-in perspective about the natural world in particular, and Herring’s familiarity with Southern folkways and its various quirks is used to amiably amusing advantage. We get a couple of dry chuckles with a gas man who tolerates the ramblings of an old woman he hates because it’s his unhappy lot to do so.

“Ain’t it wonderful to have a right-thinkin’, Christian president,” she muses, setting the time of the novel to about the time of Jimmy Carter’s 1976 election. “I jest feel our country is truly bein’ borned agin.”

But we lose these characters fairly quickly in the narrative, not to mention everyone else not named Hub, Hitesy, Lute, or Uncle Ethel. There’s some business regarding the police investigation of Lute’s crimes, but to risk a bit of a spoiler, they serve no useful purpose in the resolution of the plot. They are just there to take up space, and allow Herring to make some comments about backwards Southern folkways meaning little when faced up against the power of true evil in the form of its stupider-than-dirt vessel, Lute Freeman.

There is a fair bit of tension near the end of the book, as Lute becomes more violent and desperate and the island becomes completely cut off from the mainland by a rising river. It doesn’t pay off very well, but at least it moves some.

A reader with more of an interest in nature than me might find this a worthy adventure story for what it presents, but I was too often bored and frustrated by its failure to move more efficiently. I kept wondering how the 14-year-old version of me would have taken to Hub, or more likely, not taken to it, wishing all the time it would reach me in some way that hearkened back to those old days with Dad. Perhaps there was some solace in that disappointment. I wish it had been otherwise, though.