Ronald Truluck’s Counterpart
It turns out I’m not the only guy to write a coming-of-age novel about a young reporter trying to make it at a Southern newspaper.
Back in 1992, Sam Hodges wrote “B-Four,” starring Beauregard Forrest, cub reporter for The Standard-Dispatch in Birmingham, Alabama. Beauregard only got the job because his father is a big-shot banker, so his resentful editors relegated him to writing obits and pet-of-the-week stories. Those stories usually run on page 4 of the B section, hence his nickname: B-Four.
In some ways, Beauregard is a lot like Ronald Truluck, my protagonist in “The Accident Report.” Both are bundles of insecurity. Both make dumb mistakes that end up in print. Each of them has an older newsroom colleague who coaches them through rough patches. They’re both newbies in the dating game and their romantic and work lives intertwine when The Big Story comes along.
Ronald Truluck didn’t have any family members in my novel, but Beauregard has family complications galore, mainly with his father. Beauregard thinks reporting is his calling, but Dad wants his son to quit the paper as soon as he has the SAT scores to get into Washington and Lee College.
The novel takes an affectionate look at Confederate re-enactors, a theme that might be a hard sell with a major publisher in 2025. (St. Martin’s Press originally published “B-Four” and it was republished by the University of Alabama Press.) Dad has a Robert E. Lee complex, in that he re-enacts as a general and rides a horse he calls Traveler, though the animal’s real name is Snuffy. Beauregard also enjoys re-enacting and takes pride in his ability to “die” realistically on the battlefield. Sometimes, when he’s facing a crisis, he wonders what Robert E. Lee would do in such a situation.
Hodges gets the details right about what it was like to work in a newsroom: the co-workers you can’t stand, the logic in deciding whose name goes first in a double byline, drinking massive amounts of coffee from white styrofoam cups, and digging through yellowing clippings in the morgue. Almost every page had a detail or sensory image I wish I’d put into my book.
“B-Four” is a very funny book about a bygone period of newspapering, when computers were commonplace in the newsroom but cell phones and the internet hadn’t taken over our lives. It’s also about the universal struggles of young people trying to figure out who they are. You don’t have to be a newsie to appreciate “B-Four,” but it helps.
