Zoology, Ben Dolnick

A post chronicling yet another impulse-buy curtailing my progress on The List:

I picked up an advanced readers' edition of Zoology at Unique Thrift Store based entirely upon two facts: 1) It would cost me $0.33, on sale, and 2) The cover featured an endorsement by Jonathan Safran Foer, who I named as one of my favorite writers in my last post. It was a very quick coming-of-age read that allowed me to deviate from The List for just a day, and was ultimately a fine debut for the young Dolnick. It seemed the teensiest bit predictable to me; but then again, I'd imagine it to be a difficult feat indeed for a writer as young as Dolnick to produce a debut as widely-heralded as Adam Langer's Crossing California--which is what I expected Zoology to mimic. I appreciated certain turns of phrase, but Dolnick's style was a bit too sparse for me. Unique, certainly, but underdeveloped as well. The novel's protagonist, Henry Elinsky (a character who seemed a bit too autobiographical for my pure-fiction-loving comfort), describes his first love with amazing accuracy; perhaps it was this theme that justified Foer's analysis: "Ben Dolnick is a writer of incredible sensitivity. Zoology exploes the tricky journey to adulthood with honesty, humor, and generosity." My favorite sections were two, again near the close, in which Dolnick described Henry as he searched for Newman, the lost Nubian goat, or Henry on another similarly farfetched young-adult-novel adventure, and would chronicle his interesting, often irrelevant, thoughts in italicized parentheses. It was here that Dolnick best captured a nascent adult's perceptions of the world--a task that I felt was attempted throughout the entire novel. At one point near the book's end, Henry realizes, "My problems were as ancient and as beautiful as icebergs" (228), perhaps summarizing the book's essential subject: the passage from the prematurely world-weary realm of the teenager into adulthood. Zoology was a bit disappointing, but because of its brevity, I don't regret taking the time to read it.

I've been deviating markedly from my original summer reading list, but have been getting to a lot of good books via the Oak Park Public Library. I just picked up Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson and The Lazarus Project by Aleksander Hemon, two books I'd had on hold at the library and in my mental reading list for quite some time. I've also just begun The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, the book that launched The List in November when Diaz came to speak at Skidmore College. Away for a weekend at the farm in Wisconsin, I hope to get through a couple of these books before beginning a classic. I'm feeling Dubliners coming on...