A Man Keeps His Late Wife's Literary Legacy Alive in Moving Documentary 'The Book Keepers'

Dick Wall goes on the book tour his late wife never had in their son’s moving documentary. Credit: Courtesy of Phil Wall

Last month, a Montpelier woman catapulted her dad’s backlist novel to the top of the Amazon bestseller lists with a viral video in which she told his story. A similar act of love is the subject of The Book Keepers, Phil Wall’s documentary about his dad’s tireless efforts to bring his late mother’s book to more readers.

The 2020 film, which features a scene in the Bennington Bookshop, screens as part of the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival Vermont Tour on Saturday, April 1, 6 p.m., at Woodstock Town Hall Theatre, presented by Pentangle Arts. A reception and book signing will precede the screening at 5 p.m., and the director will do a Q&A.

The deal

Carol Wall’s debut memoir was primed for success. Before its 2014 publication, Mister Owita’s Guide to Gardening: How I Learned the Unexpected Joy of a Green Thumb and an Open Heart earned rave reviews from People, Good Housekeeping, oprah.com and more. Readers spoke of being moved by Wall’s narrative of her friendship with a Kenyan-born gardener who helped her to weather the trials in her life as he coaxed beauty from her garden.

But Wall couldn’t fully enjoy her book’s reception, because she was gravely ill with a recurrence of the cancer that she’d written about in the memoir. Her husband of 42 years, Dick Wall, had helped her through the grueling stages of editing and copyediting. “Take care of our book,” she told him. Carol died nine months after the publication date, at age 63.

Under these sad circumstances, a book tour was out of the question — or was it? Determined to draw more attention to Carol’s book, Dick crisscrossed the nation in 2015, traveling thousands of miles to speak at bookstores and other venues about his wife, her book and her legacy.

Will you like it?

Promoting a book is tough. With no author available to do interviews or sign books, it can only be exponentially tougher. Carol’s publisher clearly made a significant commitment to Mister Owita’s Guide; books don’t get reviewed in People by accident. But every book has a publicity cycle that tapers off after publication. That’s when the author — or, in this case, the author’s loved ones — starts shouldering most of the burden.

The Book Keepers shows that for Dick, the tour wasn’t so much a burden as it was a mode of grieving and a form of tribute. The filmmaker accompanied his dad on cross-country trips from the latter’s Virginia home to bookstores as far away as Florida, Wyoming, Montana and Vermont.

There’s nothing glamorous about this sort of book tour. On some stops, we see Dick draw an enthusiastic audience for his multimedia presentation, which covers his life with Carol as well as the book itself. On other stops, he suffers through the time-honored author ordeal of sitting at a table with stacks of books and trying in vain to pitch them to passersby.

Dick tells the story of the couple’s high school romance to group after group. He uses metaphors and literary allusions to frame his grief: Emily’s wrenching final monologue in Our Town, a story about Wynton Marsalis improvising his way out of a disruption. Dick, too, is improvising, trying to figure out how to start his life over.

Endowed with the stoicism of an older generation, Dick is clearly more comfortable intellectualizing his pain than expressing it directly. But there’s a compelling rugged bluntness to him; never for a second does he seem like a salesman. When he obsessively checks the book’s Amazon rankings, we know it’s only because he desperately needs to see numerical evidence that his efforts matter.

Some of the doc’s most interesting scenes happen on the road, where father and son compare their experiences of loss. For the most part, though, Phil stays in the background and cedes the stage to his dad. If his filmmaking approach occasionally verges on the sentimental — understandably, given the material — Dick’s no-nonsense attitude always pulls it back to earth.

We also see footage that brings Carol achingly alive, both as a high school cheerleader and as an author coming to the realization that the days of her creative endeavors are numbered. Though she wrote all her life, penning novels and publishing columns in Southern Living magazine, Mister Owita’s Guide was the first book of hers that reached publication.

All older artists live in the shadow of two specters: failure and mortality. While Carol succumbed to the second, the dogged efforts of her husband and son have given her book a longer afterlife — a legacy of love.

If you like this, try…

Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020; Netflix): Everyone has their own way of grieving — and pre-grieving. In this documentary, filmmaker Kirsten Johnson prepares herself for her father’s death by staging it for the camera, a process that he gamely if bemusedly goes along with.

Bad Axe (2022; rentable): Filmmakers’ documentaries about their own families are a fraught, fascinating subgenre, as they strive to balance objectivity with tenderness (or sometimes less tender feelings). In this festival fave, David Siev shows how his midwestern Asian American family weathered the pandemic and kept their restaurant alive.

The Booksellers (2019; Amazon Prime Video, Kanopy, Pluto TV, the Roku Channel, Vudu, rentable): We meet some booksellers in The Book Keepers, but they aren’t the film’s focus. D.W. Young’s documentary offers viewers a peek into the world of New York’s rare book dealers.