Residents of D’Hanis might find Billington, the small town featured in Bobby Finger’s debut novel The Old Place, eerily familiar.
The single stoplight, train crossing, church, grocery store and school district buildings made of the town’s signature red brick all derive from the D’Hanis of Finger’s childhood, memories of which helped him render his fictional version of the town, located about 50 miles west of San Antonio, in fine-grained detail.
“The memory of the place is so strong that I think about it all the time. I know that it’s a huge part of who I am,” said Finger, a journalist, pop culture critic and co-host of the podcast Who? Weekly.
The Old Place will be released by Putnam on Sept. 20.
Finger’s family moved to the North Side of San Antonio when he was 13. After attending Clark High School, he went to the University of Texas at Austin to study filmmaking, with a double major in the more practical field of advertising at his parent’s request.
That advice helped Finger land a job unexpectedly in New York, where he said he never imagined living, though now he says he can’t imagine leaving.
Writing The Old Place was a way of looking back on his 36 years and working through all the possibilities of how his life might have played out had the family never left D’Hanis, or had he later stayed in San Antonio or Austin.
Mary Alice Roth, the first character we meet in the novel, tried to leave D’Hanis once but returned after a year. The reason behind her decision to leave is a major subtext of the storyline, which weaves through family secrets that play out over generations.
Thinking back on his preteen life in D’Hanis, Finger said, he recalled sharing a chain link fence with neighbors whom he saw almost daily. He could easily picture their walls and carpet and furniture; he watched movies with them in their living room.
As an adult, however, he realized that “I talked to them all the time, [but] I kind of knew nothing about these people.”
The chapters of The Old Place explore such paradoxes of small town life, that while everyone knows everyone, “they don’t really know each other as well as they think.”
When Mary Alice’s sister Katherine visits for the first time in years, buried truths emerge over the course of a week about Mary Alice’s deceased husband and the son she lost soon after. Though some events in the book are tragic, including infidelity, accidental death and suicide, it resolves in the end as a heartwarming story, characters making peace with the choices and mistakes they and their loved ones have made over their lifetimes.
In terms of novelistic influences, Finger said he loves the family dramas of Anne Tyler and the close attention to historical detail in novels by Paulette Jiles, whose Castroville-based tale News of the World is well-loved for its happy ending.
“I love family dramas that end happily,” Finger said. “Maybe things aren’t perfect, but they end nicely and you feel like someone learned something from whatever they went through.”
Finger’s parents worried at first that their son’s novel might be about them — a little too close to home — but were relieved to read an early draft and discover that like the fictional name of their hometown, their son had invented the personalities populating the tale, and had treated them and their milieu with respect.
San Antonio plays a role in the story, from a pivotal scene at Sea World to Mary Alice’s visit to the River Walk and famed 1970s-era gay bar San Antonio Country.
“I love San Antonio, and I wanted to showcase it in a special way,” Finger said, particularly because fellow New Yorkers tend not to know much about San Antonio, “and I think that’s kind of a shame.”
The Old Place has garnered enthusiastic reviews, including as one of “10 noteworthy books for September” in the Washington Post, but Finger said he’s trying not to pay too close attention until the book comes out.
The author’s equal love of his former and adopted hometowns is evident in his choices for book release appearances: one in Brooklyn on Sept. 20 and one in San Antonio on Sept. 22 at 6 p.m. at Nowhere Bookshop. The Old Place is available for pre-order as a hardcover or audiobook.
