No Big Thing

WHITE TRASH TO PICK UP TRASH, read the headline and so the story unfolds. Imagine a family living in rural Missouri, a family respected in their community, a family with typical problems in their workaday lives. What if the patriarch of this family had been involved in white supremacist activities in the distant past and was coasting on romantic notions of that time? What if he applied in the name of the Ku Klux Klan to join the State's Adopt-A-Highway program and had to fight an uphill battle to make it happen? What if the courts ruled in his favor and he enlisted his grandson, an army vet, to go on litter patrol? What if litter patrol on the outskirts of St. Louis was an even more dangerous mission than the ones the grandson had experienced in Iraq? What if that patriarch was gradually slipping into dementia and perhaps unmindful of the conniving forces-neighbors, reporters, state bureaucrats, even the hierarchy of the Klan itself-hoping to take advantage of the snowball he had set in motion. Imagine that and you would have the bones of NO BIG THING, a funny, thoughtful take on the obvious and not-so-obvious forms of discrimination. Throw in a colorful cast of supporting characters-a rough-and-tumble meth dealer, a fledgling social anthropologist, a Baptist minister, a Deadhead with wanderlust, an idealistic lawyer, a recreational thief with a unique specialty, and you have a novel that could take its place on a library shelf somewhere between Hiassen and Vonnegut.