Flatscreen

November 21, 2011
Well past high school and still living off the “Daddy Guilt Fund,” Eli Schwartz, the narrator of this rollicking debut novel, is the classic couch-bound failure-to-launch whiling away his 20s “denying real time, like an anthropologist attempting to study a distant, extinct species, wondering what went wrong.” Eli’s simple passions—pop culture, cooking, and watching the Food Network—render his life a pleasant stupor suddenly interrupted when his mother sells the house to one “Seymour J. Kahn: actor, cripple.” The once accomplished and beloved but now elderly and wheelchair-bound Seymour acts as a time-lapsed version of Eli (“I recognize my own kind,” he says upon meeting him). And under the old man’s terrible tutelage, Eli awakens to a wholly incongruous lifestyle of hillbilly heroin and gunplay. Comedy and pathos abound in Seymour’s absurdist world, and in Eli’s fantasies of a better life that come in the form of hilariously familiar cinematic scenarios in which, for instance, the screwup becomes the star chef. Fans of Jack Pendarvis and Sam Lipsyte will enjoy Wilson’s fresh, fantastical perspective and the ways in which his vessel, Eli, proves too wry to allow the clichés to play out. Agent: Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency.

January 1, 2012
A frequently funny subversion of the coming-of-age story, though there's a pervasive sadness underlying the comic. This promising debut novel sustains itself through the strength of its voice--the first-person narration of Eli Schwartz and the distinctive voice of author Wilson. A pudgy, jobless, stay-at-home 20-year-old with a passion for cooking and an ambivalence toward sex, Eli describes himself as "a glorified townie without the glory. No rugged good looks or blue-collar gas-station-employee pride. No fading memory of a football career. No greaser girlfriend, legs thick and strong like the twin pistons on my (nonexistent) restored Camaro." Eli might easily be described as a loser and a stoner, but the novel seduces the reader into identifying with him, caring about him, rather than treating him (as some others do) as an object of ridicule. "I'm a good soul who's gone a bit off the deep end," he explains. His well-to-do father left his mother for a second marriage and family and took his standard of living with him. His older brother left for college, keeping Eli in a claustrophobic relationship with the mother who encourages it (at least until she also discovers life beyond Eli and threatens to leave as well). The plot's pivotal encounter involves Seymour Kahn, a veteran actor whose roles have diminished because he's in a wheelchair but whose sexual appetite remains omnivorous. Kahn enters Eli's life as a surrogate father, potential lover, sexual procurer and/or drug buddy, after he becomes interested in buying the family home that Eli's mother needs to sell. The repressed, apathetic Eli and the profane, uninhibited Kahn make for an odd couple, though Eli acknowledges, "I'm afraid of becoming Kahn, but part of me knows I'm already Kahn, that he's the part of me I want to keep away from the world. I think Kahn might be in love with me." Though the voice is strong and the characters indelible, the author rejects the resolution of a typical rite of passage. Instead, it doesn't offer much resolution at all (except for Kahn), as Eli conjures 20 possible endings, committing to none. A book with lots of laughs that's also very bleak.

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Starred review from January 1, 2012
Eli Schwartz at 20: jobless, pudgy, leading an aimless, often drug-addled existence. Into his life comes the larger-than-life Seymour Kahn, an Orson Wellslike, wheelchair-bound former actor. A raconteur and raunchmeister who shares Eli's fondness for drugs, Kahn becomes a kind of reverse role model and failed father figure for Eli, who, in the meantime, is struggling to find, well . . . what? A job? A girlfriend? Love? Longing? Meaning or purpose in his feckless life? Actually he'd settle for some sex, but that's seldom forthcoming, despite his fevered fantasies. In his first novel, Wilson, editor of The Faster Times, has written an antic, amusing, ribald coming-of-age novel. Though secondary characters seem interchangeable and, frankly, forgettable, Eli himself is a well-rounded (!), endearing though sometimes exasperating protagonist. The author's use of sentence fragments and Eli's occasional stream-of-consciousness ruminations that flicker like images on a flatscreen TV bring a briskness and energy to a novel that otherwise might be mired in Eli's inanition. Despite a veneer of the ironic and snarky, the novel offers a foundation of genuine caring, affection, andyeslove. An auspicious debut that promises, in Wilson, a standout addition to a new generation of writers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)