101. NEXT

James Hynes 2010

This noteworthy novel, the events of which happen all in eight hours, finds Kevin, a fifty year old, in mid-life crisis seeking a change. He flies to Austin, Texas from Ann Arbor, Michigan, in a job interview kept secret from his current younger live-in girlfriend Stella. He arrives early and is told to come back and kill time at a Starbucks. The next ensuing few hours shows him in minor nuances and, in a stream of consciousness format, we learn about his past life: his childhood, his family, past loves, entanglements, commitment issues and sexual exploits. At once sarcastic and sentimental, this novel and Kevin's character certainly is one that 'grows on you'. When he returns for his interview, when the next thing happens, and in a stunning ending, you can't help but feel for him.

'As the ground rushes up to meet him, Kevin thinks about missiles again.'(opening line)

'A Michigander can be every bit as prickly as a New Yorker, just not as loud. The midwesterner's credo: keep it to yourself.'(29)

'I can't believe,, he almost says aloud, I can't believe that I still let this get to me after twenty-five years. It's not like he still loves her-- he's seen her a couple, three times since then, he even went to her wedding with no ill effect-- but he still experiences that one moment, when she told him what she told him, as if it happened ten minutes ago. Love fades, but rage and humiliation endures forever.'(82)

'That's right, the sign's s telling Kevin, I'm talking to you, Mr. Royal Oak, Mr. Bachelor of General Studies, Mr. Non-Tenured Staffer, Mr. Maybe You'd Be Happier at Sam's Club. It's the same thing Kevin hears in his head every time he parks his five-year old Accord among the Volvos and Subarus at the Gaia in Ann Arbor out on Wastenaw, where there used to be cheap motels and discounts carpet emporia and the Ponderosa Steak House where his mother always took him to dinner when she came to visit him in college. It's the voice that's telling him that he's an underachiever in every way he can imagine, professionally, personally, financially.'(98)

'Of course, even if you were one of them, Ann Arbor's righteousness could be a pain in the ass.'(99)

'And because the brainy Chomsky readers who run the co-ops have a political analysis, they know exactly what's happening to them: it's the last reenactment of the Battle of Bertrand Russell-- first time as farce, second time as tragedy-- as the gentle vegans and pacifists who thought they could wear down corporate hegemony like water on a rock find instead that corporate hegemony has opened wide and is eating them alive, and they get to watch their own death, kicking and screaming like Robert Shaw in Jaws.'(101)

'He knew that look, and even now, when it shouldn't matter anymore what she thought of him, he hated it and feared it. It was the look she gave him when she was measuring him against some private standard in her head. It was a look that already held the expectation that he would disappoint her. The problem was that he never knew what the standard was, and she wouldn't tell him. It was a look that still made him angry-- not the implied judgment itself, but the fact that he still let it get to him.'(109)

'Now he knows why his father sang melancholy Sinatra in the shower, and the memory of his father's bass-baritone-- too low for Sinatra, he strained to the high notes-- unexpectedly tightens his throat. It kills Kevin to think he never put it together, the difference between what his father sang when he was alone and thought no once could hear, and what he sang when he was harmonizing with his SPEBSQA buddies two Saturdays a month, one hideous old chestnut after another:'(130)

'Kevin knows he's falling, but at the same time he knows there's nothing he can do about it. Events seem to slow and to become more inevitable all at once. It's a moment of a perfect, blissful contradiction: it feels like it could last forever, as if Kevin falling is something that has always happened and always will, but he also knows it's only an instant, and will be over almost before it started.'(137)

"Where I come from, or maybe I should say, where my father comes from, a man has to be, well tough is what people usually say, but a better word is, decisive... You have to judge how things really are, how people really are, take their measure very quickly, and then act accordingly. A man like that, once he decides what you are, and what you can and cannot do, he doesn't change his mind very easily."(185)

'What's going on with me today, he wonders-- is it the change of scene, or the slightly exotic, subtropical women he's met here, or is it just the heat? Or, now that he's fifty-two stories up, is it the altitude? Or is it because he's actually contemplating going back to Ann Arbor as if this whole episode in Austin never happened? Is it because he's thinking he might actually go back and be a father to Stella's child? Is this death of the old Kevin or the birth pangs of the new, and how can he tell the difference?'(250)

Reagan Arthur Books, First Edition: March 2010
308 pages
Book borrowed from the library