Thursday, January 13, 2011

Next: a novel of the Ann Arbor boomer

I just finished reading Next by James Hynes, a novel written in the tradition of Ulysses and the style of Mrs. Dalloway: a day in the life of Kevin Quinn, a middle-aged university employee in Ann Arbor, as he travels to Austin for a job interview that could be the beginning of a whole new life.

Hynes' writing engages and entertains, and I liked recognizing both physical and character traits of the city (i.e. Nichols Arcade and the self-righteousness with which some in the Ann Arbor population shop at Whole Foods).

By the same token, Kevin's angsty indecision rings gratingly familiar as well. His anxieties and preoccupations--the inadequacy of his mid-level job, memories of the sexual exploits of his twenties, his reluctance to have a child, the disintegration of his marriage as a result, his simultaneous pandering to and complaining about his current much-younger girlfriend and her desire to have a child, the threat of another terrorist attack (while the most understandable, also the issue over which Kevin has the least control)--read a little tired and ridiculous to this twenty-something's sensibilities. Is this the experience of an adult in the 21st century? I'm sorry you hate your secure employment and that you are unable to communicate your desire to remain childless to your romantic partners.

And then there were the classic delusions the baby boomers seem to roll over and over on their tongues, like a blotter paper of acid, back when it used to be good:
It's just that once upon a time, Ann Arbor was different, Ann Arbor was above all that suburban class-warfare bullshit. Okay, maybe it never was, not really, maybe it's the soft-focus blur of mid-life nostalgia, maybe he's been soaking for too long in Ann Arbor's marinade of pretension and infinite self-regard--but he remembers his college days and a few years after as a time of great leveling, when even the mouthy daughters of Southfield furriers and the guilty-rich daughters of GM executives found the lanky son of a middle manager from Royal Oak exotic; when everybody he knew voted for the Rainbow People's Party candidate for mayor, a sexy manager from Borders; when the owner of Big Star Records used to hold parties in the basement of his house in Burns Park and supply the weed himself; when the term "politically correct" was a joke that lefties told on themselves. Sure we were smug, thinks Kevin, sure we were superior, but I was part of something then, I belonged in Ann Arbor in a way that I never belonged at Somerset Mall or in Bloomfield Hills or even Royal Oak for that matter. I was one of them.
The whole thing made me wistful for another book of Mrs. Dalloway persuasion: Saturday, by Ian McEwan, about a surgeon on the day his adult children visit him and his wife. Of the same generation as Kevin, Saturday's protagonist Henry Perowne meditates on similar themes--growing older, terrorism in the West, war--but Henry does not feel like a 50-year-old adolescent prematurely thrust into adulthood. Was that Hynes' point? That the boomers are overgrown teenagers, interminably stuck in the 60s and 70s, completely ill-equipped to survive in our changing world?

In that case, mission accomplished.

5 comments:

  1. Ha! Thanks for warning. I've met plenty of Kevin's type in A2--the folks who talk about the good old days, which seems mainly to boil down to "back when I went to parties and knew how to make friends." Ann Arbor hasn't changed that much, Kevin/James. Maybe it's you.

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  2. "Was that Hynes' point? That the boomers are overgrown teenagers, interminably stuck in the 60s and 70s, completely ill-equipped to survive in our changing world?"

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86GA4JnW7x4

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  3. Adam,

    I think you need to take a look at this guide to making links in HTML.

    ReplyDelete
  4. "Was that Hynes' point? That the boomers are overgrown teenagers, interminably stuck in the 60s and 70s, completely ill-equipped to survive in our changing world?"

    ReplyDelete