Jim the Boy
A Novelby Tony Earley
Little, Brown, and Co., 230 pp., $23.95
Tony Earley (Here We Are in Paradise: Stories) has bypassed postmodernism, irony — in short, any literary technique that is even vaguely contemporary — in favor of greener pastures. Literally. Jim turns 10 years old as the novel opens in the tiny town of Aliceville, North Carolina, during the Depression. The next year of his life offers up typical dilemmas for 10-year-old boys: the inevitable but redeeming humiliation of learning how to let down your guard, the struggle to understand why parents act the way they do. Jim’s father died one week before he was born; he lives with his mother and three bachelor uncles. His father’s father is a cantakerous, ornery bootlegger who tussled with “the Revenue” and lives up in the hills. He haunts Jim’s life as a looming, unsophisticated specter, but it’s a testament to the resonant simplicity of Earley’s style that you’d never imagine laughing at any of these country folk for their simple ways. They’re tinged with the kind of lyricism that almost accidentally bubbles forth from people who always attempt honesty. As we follow Jim in his engaging but relatively ordinary year, it becomes apparent how the landscape molds character: “The ground smelled old, forgotten, and made Jim think of crickets singing late in the evening before the first frost.” Earley’s pastoral nostalgia isn’t ingratiating or reactionary; it’s elementary in all the right ways. The plot, though, suffers from the pastoral touch — it’s a loosely connected string of occurences that provides a series of glimpses, instead of an indelible impression, of Jim and make his final epiphany less arresting than it could be.
This article appears in June 2 • 2000.