North Carolina Literature in a Global Context
PITFALLS OF PARENTING a review by Annie Frazier Drew Perry. Kids These Days: A Novel. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 2014.
ANNIE FRAZIER grew up in Raleigh, NC, on her family’s small horse farm and now lives in Florida where she attended New College of Florida in Sarasota to study ancient Greek language and literature. Her first published story, “Sakura” (in NCLR 2014), was a finalist in the 2013 Doris Betts Fiction prize competition. NCLR editors included it among six Pushcart Prize nominations submitted in 2014. Listen to the author read from and talk about this story at the 2014 North Carolina Writers Conference. DREW PERRY lives with his small family in Greensboro, NC, and teaches at Elon University. His debut novel, This Is Just Exactly Like You (Viking, 2010) was selected as a finalist for the FlahertyDunnan prize from the Center for Fiction and listed by Atlanta Journal-Constitution as a “Best of the Year” pick. Kids These Days has already received praise as an Amazon “Best of the Month” pick as well as being placed on Kirkus Reviews’ “Winter’s Best Bets” and “Books So Funny You’re Guaranteed to Laugh” lists. Perry has also been published in Black Warrior Review, Atlanta, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Huffington Post.
Kids These Days is Drew Perry’s hilarious and poignant second novel. The story is told from the point of view of Walter, an intensely obsessive, pitiably naive, and very much adrift man whose dryly comic and idiosyncratic view of the world makes him a surprisingly charming narrator. We meet Walter as the recession is in full swing, his wife Alice is pregnant, and he has just lost his job selling loans at a bank in Charlotte. Apprehension about becoming a parent paralyzes him, much to Alice’s understandable chagrin. In the face of such calamity, the couple moves down to Alice’s deceased great-aunt’s beachfront condo in Florida. Alice’s sister Carolyn and her family live nearby, and Carolyn’s husband Mid offers Walter a job. Things have the potential to fall nicely into place, until Walter realizes Mid is at least a hint shady in his many business undertakings. Mid owns a locksmith business, a sunglass shop, two parking lot ice machines, several questionable and risky real estate ventures, and a pizza joint with a less-than-legal secret menu. He’s shifty about bookkeeping and shiftier about what exactly Walter’s job entails. As the novel unfolds, the depth of Mid’s fraudulence reveals itself to Walter and begins to catch up with Mid, often in amusing ways. A wise man would avoid Mid’s
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business. Yet Walter stays on, partly because Mid is family and partly because the job promises an immediate paycheck in a stagnant economy, but mostly because Walter tends to do the opposite of what he probably should. Walter’s passivity is apparent in the very first lines of the book: “I’d agreed to it – the baby – because I’d decided that was what was owed. That if your wife, who you loved beyond measure, wanted a child, you were supposed to think it was a fine and perfect plan” (1). Walter has agreed to something he finds terrifying. Problematically, the more Walter’s fear consumes him, the more unwilling he seems to find a way past it. Walter tells Alice he’s trying to change, then admits to himself, “I wasn’t sure if I actually was” (135). He spends a good deal of time wondering how he ought to feel, based on how he sees most people react to impending parenthood, and concludes that “all those people knew exactly how to do this, did not flinch in the onrushing face of certain peril. They’d simply come wired with something I hadn’t” (39). Walter’s fears of fatherhood are compounded watching his four nieces (a toddler, twelveyear-old twins, and a harmlessly rebellious fifteen-year-old) spin out of control each in her own way – most notably, “the traveling circus of Delton being fifteen” (147). Walter’s dangerous position