Next

If ever a book was "A Day in the Life," this is it. At first I only wanted to read James Hynes' NEXT because he grew up about 15 miles from where I grew up, although he's about a dozen years younger. But his day-in-the-life of fifty-ish, commitment-phobic Kevin Quinn, the dissatisfied editor of a university publication in Ann Arbor, quickly sucked me in. Yeah, just one day, but we pretty much get Kevin's whole libidinous, screwed-up life by way of his inner monologue, stream-of-consciousness patter. The events of his day in Austin - where he has flown to interview for a job - is sort of summed up by Kevin in a single sentence: "... his seminostalgic, semihorndog stalking of Joy Luck; his fateful fall on the bridge; his emotionally show more tumultuous lunch with Dr. Barrientos; his epiphanic sponge bath in the men's room in Wohl's; his erotic reverie in the cab; his apocalyptic aural fantasy in the elevator just now …" Yes, this is a story rich in detail and 'location.' Ann Arbor and Austin are almost characters in the novel. I already knew something of the former city, and came away knowing plenty about the latter [where the author has resided for many years]. The story builds slowly - patience is required - but inexorably to a shattering conclusion that will leave you breathless and, well, shattered. (And you'll also suddenly 'get' the significance of the cover photo.) This is fiction of the first order. Bravo, Mr Hynes. My highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less

http://damnarbor.blogspot.com/2011/01/next-novel-of-ann-arbor-boomer.html

Hynes' writing engages and entertains, and, as an Ann Arborite, 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 show more 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. show less

The first three-quarters of Jim Hynes’s marvelous Next move at a leisurely pace. Kevin is a middle-aged editor from Ann Arbor. He’s disaffected and utterly self-obsessed, so consumed by his own thoughts that he barely notices the world in front of him. Except for the women; he most definitely notices the women. On the heels of a major multi-city terrorist attack that has the nation in a panic, Kevin flies from Ann Arbor to Austin, where he has a job interview. He has several hours to kill after arriving, so like any desperate, pathetic man, he spends the afternoon chasing after women he doesn’t know while reminiscing about the women he has known before.

We know this character. He’s appeared in countless novels, and I’ve often show more made the comment that the world really doesn’t need any more books about him. But Next is different, and if you can manage to live for a short while inside the head of yet another aging man trying to find his youth between the legs of yet another younger woman, you really should. Hynes has a sharp wit that skewers his targets (and they are abundant), and a rare gift for describing the minutia that give depth to everyday experience. Neither of those admirable traits would be enough to make me recommend this book, however, if it were not for its breathtaking finale.

I won’t go into any detail here – it would spoil the thrill of discovery. Suffice it to say that once you reach the book’s final 50 pages, you will be utterly unable to put it down. Plan accordingly. show less

It's hard to breathe new life into the well-worn ground of the middle-aged life crisis of the typical white American male, but James Hynes succeeds wonderfully in this amazing, hard to stop reading tale.

Kevin Quinn is our narrator and we are living almost entirely inside his head for the majority of this book, privy to a stream-of-consciousness inner dialogue of lust, guilt, action, inaction, sexual memory, and a kind of ultimate epiphany that will leave you breathless.

This is one of those stories where not much happens by way of plot (until the final third of the book, in which everything explodes at once), but in between we get a sense of Quinn as a character so fully developed, it's hard not to feel for him, even if you aren't show more entirely enamored of him or his motivations.

Heading from Ann Arbor Michigan, where he lives, to a job interview in Austin, Texas, Quinn tells no one--not even his live-in girlfriend, where he is going or why. He is seeking not so much a new life as a new and unexpected possibility to break him from the rut of his existence. (He finds the unexpected, but really, it finds him, an outcome he is totally unprepared to deal with.) Even within this literal flight of fancy, Quinn deviates from his expected routine, impulsively following a beautiful young woman from his plane when it lands in Austin, knowing he is risking missing his job interview but unable to stop himself from doing something he knows is self-destructive.

That's a motif that continues throughout the rest of Quinn's fateful day, and in between the reader encounters meditations on modern confrontations with terrorism since 9/11, and a stark view of how Americans view these events compared with those who are connected in even deeper ways.

There's also one of the greatest, truly erotic sex scenes ever depicted in modern fiction, so even though there's not as much driving plot as some may like, there's never a dull moment.

The ending may be one of the best I've read in recent memory, but not for the faint of pulse. This book will stick with you long after the final page. show less

Holy shit... this was the book I'd been avoiding for 9 years. But I'm glad I read it, and I think it was so well done. Very well-controlled plotting, and the end just knocked me sideways -- I don't really want to say more because it would be a big old spoiler. Definitely unsettling, but in the best way, and very worth reading.

I don't even know how to star this. It's kind of like a mash-up of Mrs Dalloway from the point of view of a straight white guy and some crazy apocalyptic movie. The writing is strong throughout and then when the plot makes that turn, it bumps up a notch so I spent the last third of the book holding my breath and fighting back the tears. I need to think about this for a while.

What an amazing read. As a woman I'm not sure that James Hynes gets it right for all men, but I think and fear that he has.

Kevin's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day has the randomness of a tornado and I was completely sucked up into it and propelled forcefully forward.

Hooray for CPCL reader, who shared my immersion. Boo to the rest of you.

Now please excuse me while I go and read the rest of James Hyne's novels.

DO NOT MISS THIS ONE!