All Intensive Purposes

The blurbs on Robert Mailer Anderson's first novel, Boonville, are pretty hyperbolic, even by the standards of such blurbs. For example, Jonathan Yardley apparently said that Boonville is "the funniest first novel by an American writer to come my way since John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces." I wish I felt the same way.

At the center of the story is John Gibson, bred in south Florida and not too long ago graduated from the University of Miami. His grandmother, the black sheep of the family, passes away and Gibson chucks his life in Miami to move to her cabin in Boonville, California, a town of 715 oddballs and eccentrics north of San Francisco and south of Mendocino.

Anderson does a good job painting the town of Boonville and its assorted inhabitants, though one beef I have with the book is that several of the characters are drawn without sympathy. For example, John's girlfriend in Florida, Christina, seems like such an unpleasant sort that it's hard too see why he would date her, let alone as long as he did, and it seems unlikely when he pines for her. I found it too easy to see the gears of Anderson's plot moving too easily behind Christina and a few other characters. Had Boonville, like (say) A Confederacy of Dunces, gone over the top, maybe Anderson could have gotten away with this sort of thing, but I thought he got stuck somewhere between satire and realism.

More generally, Anderson uses the book, and John's internal life, as a platform to share a whole bunch of odd thoughts about pop culture and modern living. All too often, these asides did not seem to advance the plot or his characterizations. Maybe he's gotten all of this out of his system, and his second novel will be one to watch for. I don't regret reading Boonville, but -- sorry, Jonathan Lethem* -- if I were going to read a novel set in Northern California, I'd stick with Vineland.

What do I know? If you want buy it, click through the link above to send me a few pennies.

* Boonville's back cover: "A brilliant new voice--twitchy, corny, sly, cackling, and sad, but most of all, racing with vitality and goosing you to keep up. Boonville is the creepy and hilarious coming-of-age story the territory deserves--not your parents' Vineland, but your own." --Jonathan Lethem