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This eighties-centric, Ritalin-fueled, pitch-perfect comic novel by a writer to watch brings energy and originality to the classic Midwestern coming-of-age story.
Anchor
October 1999
Featuring: Justin Cobb
320 pages
ISBN: 0385497091
Trade Size (reprint)
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Contemporary
Meet Justin Cobb, "the King Kong of oral obsessives" (as
his dentist dubs him) and the most appealingly bright and
screwed-up fictional adolescent since Holden Caulfield
donned his hunter's cap. For years, no remedy--not
orthodontia, not the escalating threats of his father,
Mike, a washed-out linebacker turned sporting goods
entrepreneur, not the noxious cayenne pepper-based Suk-No-
Mor--can cure Justin's thumbsucking habit. Then a course of hypnosis seemingly does the trick, but
true to the conservation of neurotic energy, the problem
doesn't so much disappear as relocate. Sex, substance
abuse, speech team, fly-fishing, honest work, even
Mormonism--Justin throws himself into each pursuit with a
hyperactive energy that even his daily Ritalin dose does
little to blunt. Each time, however, he discovers that there is no escaping
the unruly imperatives of his self and the confines of his
deeply eccentric family. The only "cure" for the adolescent
condition is time and distance. Always funny, sometimes hilariously so, occasionally
poignant, and even disturbing, deeply wise on the vexed
subject of fathers and sons, Walter Kirn's Thumbsucker is
an utterly fresh and all-American take on the painful
process of growing up.
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