Mickey seems to see and hear everything, revealing as he does, Michael Rumaker’s amazing abilities as a novelist. Rumaker has a wonderful eye for realistic detail and an exceptional ear for dialogue. His ability to create realistic American characters living in 20th century America rivals any American novelist I have ever read. Pagan Days is one of the best novels I’ve read in a lifetime of reading. Michael Rumaker is a working-class Marcel Proust, a great novelist, inspired by memory to write this truly memorable novel. Anne Geismar Mickey’s days as a pagan open his eyes to an almost mystical, but certainly aesthetic, view of the world where each experience, no matter how difficult or painful, offers him a vision that will carry him through life. Pagan Days enriches our literature, and reinforces that the avant-garde need not be unintelligible to communicate the complexity of being human. Rumaker’s characters breathe like Rodin’s figures-they are alive, real, sinewy, torn, ecstatic, and transformative. Jeffery Beam