Book Review: Wild Bill Rides Again

IndieBookView

Nov 1

Wild Bill Rides Again

by Jim Antonini

Genre: Literary Fiction

ISBN: 9798218240554

Print Length: 314 pages

Reviewed by Maxwell Gillmer

Bill Moreland is average. He lives an average life in an average suburb with an unremarkable job at the same average bank he's worked at since he graduated college. His children are spoiled screw-ups, and his relationship with his wife has tired over time, no thanks to their disagreements over lifestyle. Bill has spent 750 days just commuting to his job over the past twenty-eight years. And those days are weighing on him.

But after a tumultuous fiftieth birthday, replete with a botched business deal, bailing his son out of jail, and a fight with his drunken wife, Bill has had enough. The next day, he finds himself doing the unthinkable: he steals one million dollars from his bank and drives south.

For the next fourteen days, Bill flees the authorities on the wildest trip of his life, traversing the country from Florida to Louisiana to Texas to Colorado and all the way up to Washington State. In a mad dash with nowhere in particular in sight, he stops in towns across the country and picks up fellow travelers in need of a change. But this heavy bag of cash in Bill's trunk isn't a treasure to spend on himself. Bill finds himself dropping bags of ten-thousand-dollar donations to community centers and struggling schools everywhere in an impulse of charity.

Wild Bill Rides Again is more than an itinerant narrative of a man in the throes of a mid-life crisis. This is a story of American collectivism. Anchored in dive bars and restaurants, Bill comes in contact with people from all walks of life: groups of men, connected through the fragrant sizzle of a crawfish boil; a woman, alone, searching for home and a father figure; a man, hidden away in a garage in the woods, working on old cars as he spends his days in the solitude of the mountains.