THE BICYCLE MAN

In 1988, 34-year-old Sanford “Sandy” Jackson Rivers, who’s white, has worked for the Richmond Times-Daily for nearly a decade, becoming one of the most influential journalists in the state. One day, an obituary-desk photo of an African American man on a battered bicycle sends him rushing off to attend the funeral; then, the story looks back to April 4, 1968, when paperboy Sandy has his first early morning encounter with Henry Clayton Woods, the man in the photo. That same day, the Rev. Martin Luther King is assassinated, and over the next 16 tumultuous months, Sandy tries to make sense of how the headlines in the papers that he delivers affect real lives. Deans, the author of Reckless: The Political Assault on the American Environment (2012), spent 25 years as a journalist, and his novel is a meditation on the “audacious proposition” that the world can be condensed into “eight straight columns of black and white,” delivered before breakfast. He also effectively shows how Sandy has the makings of a journalist early on, as he observes the “roaring din” of the presses, a service in a black church for a soldier killed in Vietnam, and his friend Winston’s determination to serve in the military. The glimpses of Sandy as an adult that bookend the story are tantalizingly brief, but the story of his younger, searching self is even more engaging. Deans’ prose elegantly portrays the natural world that serves as a backdrop for Sandy’s nuanced interactions—“Dawn wander[s] in as though it might not stay”—and marks each of Sandy’s daily journeys as he awakens to the concepts of love, loss, and forgiveness.

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