Photo credit: Lucas Flores Piran
Describe your latest book.
One of the Boys is an urgently written coming-of-age story that follows a 12-year-old as he watches his father descend into an all-consuming crack and cocaine addiction. The novel begins in the basement bathroom of a suburban home in Kansas, where, through the coercion of the father, the narrator and his older brother drum up damning evidence against their mother to win the war — the father’s term for divorce.
Restless and questing, the three then move westward in hope of a better life. The story unfolds in Albuquerque’s sublime, ugly Western landscape, just off the interstate: apartment complexes, biker bars, grocery stores, balloon fiestas, bus stations. The Sandias loom in the near distance. Biblical weather sometimes arrives, full of portent.
One of the Boys is a chronicle of the vagaries and excesses of American men; it is a cautionary tale of a contemporary Gatsby trying to carve out a new life via relocation; but most importantly, it is the story of two foxhole-weary brothers banding together to protect each other from the father they once trusted, but no longer recognize...