Recent reads

Please don't come back from the moon, by Dean Bakopoulos. A coming-of-age tale with a difference. In the middle-class Detroit suburb of Maple Rock, the responsible adult men, the fathers and husbands, have disappeared without a trace. Some of them suddenly vanished in the middle of the day; others walked away in the night, or simply drove away with no explanation other than rueful and vague apologies. The author never quite explains these disappearances, although he hints that they're connected in some way to the disappearance of the stable, good-paying manufacturing jobs that used to be the economic foundation of the community. But this is not the author's purpose here. Instead of theorizing about the disappearance of the responsible adult men, he writes about the difficulties that their sons, in particular one Michael Smolij and his small circle of freinds, encounter while growing up in their absence.

It's impossible not to think of this as a fictional, magical-realist analogue to the real life difficulties of young men growing up in communities where responsible adult men, and the economic factors which allow men to honestly support their families and be respected by those around them, are absent. But the tone of the story isn't preachy or political or prescriptive. The story told by Michael is one of boys learning, earlier than they should, about freedom, beer, cars, violence, and women, and then, belatedly, about their need for education, financial skills, and the ability to be good and responsible men. I found it easy to sympathize with the difficulties that Mike encounters in trying to sustain a relationship with his high school girlfriend once she goes to the University of Michigan and has the opportunity to make alliances with more successful men; dealing with older women whose husbands are absent; and with the comically pathetic experience that he and his more assertive friend Nick have in trying to organize the harried retail staff of the shopping mall where they both work to seek better pay and working conditions.