It all begins with a mysterious envelope handed to Ricky Rice, bus station janitor. There’s a note inside: “You made a promise in Cedar Rapids in 2002. Time to honor it.” There’s also a bus ticket to Vermont.

Ricky, the protagonist of Victor LaValle’s Big Machine, has little to lose. And you know he can get to a bus without any trouble at all. So he leaves his upstate New York job for the whitest state in the union. (Ricky’s black.)

His mission takes him to the Washburn Library, out in the Vermont woods. He is provided with a comfortable cabin, meals, new clothes, new friends, and an office. All his new friends are also black, drawn from the seedier side of life, but liking their new Washburn digs just fine.

After a few days settling in to the warm fire and comfy bed of his cabin, Ricky is a little disappointed that the dinners don’t include anything harder to drink than water. Then again, “It was easy to see why. I felt like I might’ve shot dope with any of these people at one time or another, . . . There’s a look to people like us, no matter where you go. Like we’ve been pulled out of a fire, but not quick enough. No wonder we weren’t being served the hard stuff.”

They are told they are now The Unlikely Scholars. Each morning, they go to their new offices and pore through a stack of vintage newspapers. Then they dig deeper into any story that catches their interest.

Nothing about all this Unlikely Scholarship makes any sense, but Ricky is one of the most likable protagonists I’ve met in a good while. So I stuck with him as the library sent him on a mission to California.

My trouble with Big Machine was the competition. I’m a news junkie, and there’s an awful lot to keep up with just now. I took a day or two off from Ricky and, by the time I rejoined him in California, I had lost my grip on what was going on in Washburn-Library-land.

It was fun while it lasted.

A cow pattie or two.

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