THE LIBRARY LIZARD
A HIT AND A MISS

First, the miss. The best thing about Nick Flynn's memoir is its title: "Another Bullshit Night in Suck City" (W. W. Norton, 2004). Basically, it's a good idea that runs off the rails about halfway through. Nick grew up in Scituate, Massachusetts, with a struggling, erratic single mother and his brother, and only a vague notion of who his absentee father was--an alcoholic criminal, a street bum, and a charming world-class moocher, with pretensions of being a novelist. Nick goes away to college after his mother's suicide, but flounders around and drifts though life without much purpose. A classic slacker.

The most interesting part of the book is the first third, which brilliantly describes his part-time job dealing with the derelicts in a Boston homeless shelter. It is there, incidentally, that he finally meets his father. Unfortunately, the book begins to sag after this point (or maybe I did), and it becomes a narration of "I did this, and then I did that, and then I did the other, and it all sucked." It's probably a generational thing, but I found myself becoming increasingly bored and impatient with Nick and bailed out two-thirds of the way through. Another reader might really enjoy it, so don't let me put you off. If you like NPR, you'll probably like this narrator.

The hit is a first novel by Jason Headley, "Small Town Odds" (Chronicle Books, 2004). Somehow this one struck a chord with me. It tells the story of Eric Mercer, a highschool star (football and academics both) in a declining West Virginia small town called Pinely. He and his girlfriend Jill (another high school standout) both have scholarships to college. It will be their ticket out of Pinely, and the future is full of promise. Then he, quite literally, screws up. He gets drunk at a beer bust and has sex with a girl named Gina, hardly even knowing that he is doing so. Three months later she shows up at his door and tells him she is pregnant and won't even consider an abortion.

At first he thinks he can still go away to college with Jill and nothing will change, but he soon realizes how unrealistic that is. Jill is devastated by what he has done, and their relationship is over. She goes away to college without him, and he stays in Pinely to shoulder his responsibilities as a father. The book is primarily about what his life is like five years later, working two dead-end jobs (handyman at the local funeral home and part-time bartender at the VFW) and having his daughter Tess on weekends. He loves Tess and can't imagine a life without her, but at times he wishes she had never been born. He is bitter about his wasted life and takes it out by drinking too much, fighting, and getting into trouble with the police. It is obvious that Gina would like for them to get together, but he wants to have as little as possible to do with her.

The writer brings all the secondary characters to life--Eric's employers, his long-suffering parents, the sympathetic town cop, Jill's parents (who still like him), Eric's friends. He avoids making Gina a slut who tried to entrap Eric; she is as much as a sympathetic character as he is. Much of the book concerns the crisis that arises in his life when Jill returns to town for a funeral and, after years of avoiding contact, he has to confront her. It is then that it really sinks in to him what his life is and what it will be, and he makes a shaky peace with himself and his choice.