Grab On to Me Tightly as if I Knew the Way: A Novel
Bryan Charles
Language: English
Pages: 213
ISBN: 0060882980
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A wise, bighearted, and hilarious look at one teenager's life by a remarkable new voice in contemporary fiction
It's 1992, and as Vim Sweeney deals with the recent end of his high school career and the uncertainty of his future, America shares his angst. In Seattle, Kurt Cobain reeks of teen spirit. In Washington, George Bush (the first one) has just finished rattling his saber at Saddam Hussein. And in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Vim is trying to put off adulthood and all that comes with it, whatever that is, for as long as he can. He's already juggling guitars, girls, and a long-absent biological father who's suddenly making noise about Wanting to Be Involved. And he still can't convince his friends why local schoolboy hero Derek Jeter is bound for obscurity.
Grab On to Me Tightly as if I Knew the Way traces Vim's stumble toward adulthood as he comes to terms with his parents, balances friendships and infatuation with varying levels of success, and accepts that the things he thought would last forever probably won't. Generous in spirit and laugh-out-loud funny, here is a novel that introduces a tremendous new talent and deftly captures the alternately amusing and harrowing process of holding on until you find your way.
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5. Nora Reperton sitting next to you wearing a pink sweater and spotless pink Converse All-Stars and her fingernails are painted light pink. Her cheeks and lips glitter and shine in the flashing light from the screen. The coming attractions. The following preview has been approved for all audiences. Her perfume smells like the vast rolling fields of heaven itself. It’s Giorgio, she tells you. She and her mother both wear Giorgio. You want her to take you there. Her hand is warm in yours, ten
our fingernails, Duke and I, waiting for the word. Finally it comes. We go upstairs and sit at the table and right in the middle’s the dish. The lid comes off. I wanna dive in the spaghetti and live in it the rest of my life. No. Joe Sweeney, being the guest, gets first crack. Someone slides it over and the motherfucker starts . . . piling it on, he heaps it on till there’s a little mountain almost spilling over the side of his plate. I’m watching this happen in utter horror. By the time it comes
was a little bit. I didn’t get out of the car right away. Instead I sat there a long time staring, hands at ten and two, looking out through the windshield back at Ed Hoekstra, my true father. Chapter 106 The moonlight spills through the trees. The starlight, the satellites, the blank heavens. The road. The peace way deep in the shadows and earth. The steel mist hovering over the water. The dark houses and dreams inside, in the rooms in sleeping minds. The left-on televisions and frantic blue
drone characters, the most famous of which is Revolutionary Road’s Frank Wheeler. This is only a temporary thing. It’s such good money and you can write on the weekends. You work for a big corporation but there’s a devilish irony at play here too because you used to be in punk bands and insert a caustic edge into even your most innocuous-seeming office banter and you’re really in the end only an imposter collecting a paycheck and not a real actual corporate dude so ha! This type of thinking can
(1990) It’s hard to believe that the man who recorded this went on to produce Nevermind and Siamese Dream, two slick-sounding albums that are now essential classic rock. This is dark Midwestern Stooges rock that even now couldn’t get played on modern rock radio. John Brannon’s vocals would scare too many people. Rollinghead, Daddyhorse (1992) This is a Kalamazoo band, and unless you were there or know someone who was you probably won’t find their CDs, which is a shame. Dave Grant, the
