"Trouble
is, Kevin’s seen his fair share of movie air disasters."
And
not much else; but that's about to change. Kevin is Kevin Quinn, the
protagonist of James Hynes's
new novel Next. Kevin's nothing special. He's not a bad fellow, but not
particularly good, either. He's bored with his life in Ann Arbor, Michigan, so
he's flown down to Austin for a one-day job interview, but arrives hours early.
Meanwhile we wander with him around Texas's capital which, in its semitropical
midsummer torpor, has an unsettling effect on Kevin's Midwestern soul, like
someplace more legitimately exotic. (But Hynes, himself an ex-Michigander
resident in Austin, is great at teasing out what is genuinely exotic about the
place, in the eyes of an outsider.) Killing time, wondering as he wanders,
Kevin worries, too; and his worrying is standard Boomer guilt, about his life,
about the recent terrorist attacks in Europe, about not having told his
girlfriend he was leaving, about whether he really wants a change. He ogles
women and thinks about those he's known, those he's bedded, those he's wanted
to bed, the one crossing the street, the one behind the counter. A bit creepy, you
might think, until you walk along the street and ambush your own thoughts: Wow,
look at that one, doesn't she look like...? It's a portrait so unerring in
its smallest details (his hesitancy, his worrying, the diffuseness of his
personality) that all men of that generation will recognize great chunks of
themselves in it. Kevin's Everyman, 2010 version, is nibbled at by the
Boomer conceit that, all evidence to the contrary, he's the center of the
universe. And for once in his life he's right.
Jim Hynes is a friend
of mine, so I'm doubly happy to give this gem of his a resounding three cheers.
And in a planetary alignment seldom seen in literary criticism, the major
critics seem to agree. So off you go and
plunk down your twenty bucks. It's an investment in modern literature.
