Salvage King, Ya!: A Herky-Jerky Picaresque

One small pleasure of bookselling is discovering that an old favorite of yours, which you had for some reason assumed was unavailable, is in fact still in print. That was the case recently with this 1997 novel, which I was delighted to see is still available from its small Canadian press, so I rashly ordered a handful. Jarman's better known as a short story writer, but this novel, his only one, about a journeyman hockey pro who inherits his family's junkyard and balances (or, rather, careens between) three women, is a wonder. I'm quoted (anonymously) on the back cover as saying it's "funny, cluttered, driven, as if Denis Johnson had written a hockey novel," and I stand by that very high praise. It's so full of everything: love, chaos, hockey, ambition, inertia. Open any page and a sentence will floor you.