Please Don't Come Back from the Moon [Paperback]

As the economy worsens in Michigan, sixteen year-old Michael Smolij watches as father after father leaves town, the men unable to face their families with no jobs, dignity evaporating with every passing day. One by one, fathers spend directionless days in the local tavern before quietly disappearing forever. So many men leave the blue-collar neighborhood outside Detroit that everyone points to the disappeared as having "gone to the moon", wives left to carry the burdens of children and part time jobs, exhausted physically and emotionally by the dual role of mother and father.

Ultimately the loss of their fathers breeds a twisted violence in the hearts of the sons left behind. With the abdication of the men, the boys are forced to become men prematurely and put away their childhoods; thus is born a smothering anger and an incalculable sadness that resides deep in their hearts.

As Michael gets older, he tries to look out for his younger brother, Kolya, but acting tough has set Michael and his cousin Nick apart from kids with fathers, incipient "bad boys", distorting both Michael and Nick's views of the world and what it has to offer to fatherless sons. Drifting into a cursory education, Michael's curiosity is partially fueled by the young women in his life, who are attracted to the brooding sensitivity of the unhappy young man.

This novel lays bare the broken hearts of desolate young men. Bakopoulos is unstintingly honest, unabashedly free with the emotional territory of abandonment, allowing a poignant view of a loss that is permanent, a tattoo on the psyche. Always they think of their fathers, remembering, wondering how they might have changed, if they are happy on the moon, if they have forgotten their sons.

The prose is beautifully rendered, tender, innocent, bruised by reality, tinged occasionally with the angry bravado of something-to-prove. In the very city where their fathers worked on assembly lines for Ford and General Motors, the only employment for Michael, Nick and their contemporaries is found at the local shopping mall, as a failing economy grinds up any opportunity for a decent life of hard work like past generations.

Please Don't Come Back from the Moon portrays the gradual unfurling of hidden promise in a life once destined for failure, haunted by the losses of the past. Yet fate intervenes for Michael Smolij. In a world where fathers, in their own distress, leave and take up residence on the moon, the sons fend for themselves, many lost along the way, casualties of society's neglect and disinterest. But Michael finds his voice, buried beneath the rage that has simmered since childhood. In sensitive and lyrical prose, with a surfeit of desolate images of towns and people forgotten, Bakoploulos delivers a thought-provoking and soulful novel on the pains of growing up fatherless, where dreams may still surface.

Along with helpless anger lodges a seed of doubt, the potential of being like their fathers. And as adolescent boys become young men, marry and start families, they cannot bear to acknowledge their unspoken fears, the legacy of their fathers...a silent call to the moon: "Like an eye, the moon follows us wherever we go." Luan Gaines/2005.

This book grabs the reader's attention with a powerful first chapter and then slides into a captivating rhythm that carries you through to the end. The story reveals a working class life that unfolds into what we realize is *our* reality, no matter what our social class, where we live, or how solid our family structure. We follow the life of the main character, Michael, a boy whose life is displaced when his father (and in fact all the men in town) leaves.

We learn about the hardship of a post-industrial, service based economy, where passions and dreams disappear in the haze of obligation, bills, and the comfort of the social networks, spaces, and places we consider "home". Mr. Bakopoulos gently, and brilliantly, conveys his ideas through his characters while commenting on the plight of men and society in a post-industrial economy, without being overtly political.

This book is thoughtful, well written, funny in parts and sad - you know the sad where you get a choking pit in your throat when you read - in others. Wow. Buy this book.

The crumbling of America's manufacturing sector is more than just a segment on the nightly business report as Dean Bakopolus records in this beautifully written and moving first novel. Narrator Michael Smolij's family is part of a close-knit blue collar Detroit suburb, where nearly all the fathers work in local factories. As these jobs vanish through downsizing and outsourcing, so do the dads also begin to disappear. One leaves a note: "Gone to the moon." The parish priest joins the exodus. The local bar starts serving the fourteen-year-olds who've had to step into their fathers' shoes. Mothers start working two or three jobs. Instead of growing into the good-paying factory positions their fathers' held, the kids take the only jobs available; working at the mall for $6 an hour.

Michael's family is a little better educated than some of the neighbors and he aspires to college, taking community college classes while working in the mall bookstore. His cousin and best friend move into their twenties working at mall food court jobs meant for high school kids, trying their hands at any kind of entrepreneurial enterprise that will bring in a little money. They forge new families, but as they struggle to realize a slice of the American dream they always expected to be theirs, the sons of the vanished fathers are overcome by a strange restlessness, and Michael fears that they, too, will abandon their families, leaving their own children with even less to hope for than they had.

Bakopolus infuses a touch of magic into the grit of the story with excellent effect. Where did the fathers go? No amount of detective work turns up any of them. Realizing that there was no dignified place for them in the post-industrial economy, perhaps they really did go to the moon. This is an auspicious debut from a writer who has a great deal to say and the skill to tell it well. I look forward to his next novel.