Anderson Native’s Novel One of Family Emotions, Familiar Places
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
There is a certain longing that attaches itself to the towns of our youth—at times, sprawling and sunlit; at others, shrunk down to a single tennis match, a parent’s gaze, a can of salmon in the pantry.
Michael Spake, Anderson native now transplanted to Florida by way of Hammond Acres and Huntington Hills, gives this yearning a shape and a name in “Life Close to the Bone,” a novel that shuttles between fiction and memory with an easy intimacy.
Though Spake’s day-to-day life unfolds elsewhere, Anderson remains ever-present in his work—the Cardinal Racket, the Belton Palmetto Championships, streets lined with recollections as familiar as old shoes.
When another Anderson literary scion, Bren McClain, author of “One Good Mama Bone,” encouraged Spake to “put yourself in the story,” he found the path he needed in her advice. Tennis, the sport that molded him at T.L. Hanna and later at The Citadel, becomes both a compass and a crucible. Spake’s hero is haunted by the game, its rituals, and by a mother whose approval proves elusive, doling out darkness alongside rides to distant courts.
The narrative unfolds in and around Anderson landmarks: the Cardinal Racket Club, Skin’s Hotdogs, the mill villages where family lore knits together the past—echoed in small Southern customs, like the genesis of the ritual serving of canned salmon patties. The book’s emotional center is familial, though Spake insists this is not autobiography. Instead, it is an amalgam: his tension with tennis parents, amplified for narrative effect, a composite of the stories and secrets exchanged courtside.
More than 30 years on, Spake’s circle marvels at the clarity of his recall—the remembered pain of a lost match, the unspoken bonds between mother and son. Now a regulatory attorney, Spake’s present involves the ordinary rituals of contemporary life: a butterfly garden, a pair of dogs, and family meals. Yet he still returns to Anderson regularly, a place preserved in the amber of his fiction.
There is more to come. Spake’s next novel will reach further back, into the first half of the last century, exploring the mills, the coming of electricity, and the shadows at Portman Shoals. He describes it as a prequel, darker in its historical sweep, tentatively titled “Lent and Destitution.”
“Life Close to the Bone” is available online and in print. For Spake, and for Anderson, the story continues—much as a match does, threads of anxiety, triumph, and love braided tight.
