Coming-of-age tales generally center on the teenage years, but Bryan Gruley’s first novel charts the sudden awakening of 34-year-old Gus Carpenter to the world around him. Once an investigative reporter for the Detroit Times and vying for a Pulitzer Prize, Carpenter is now associate editor for his hometown’s Pine County Pilot, “Michigan’s Finest Bluegill Wrapper.”
If that’s not humbling enough, his return to “Starvation Lake” brings reminders of an earlier disgrace: As goalie for the town’s youth hockey team, Carpenter let through the goal that lost the state championship (for many, worse than losing a Pulitzer).
Unfortunately, “Starvation Lake’s” collective history is also poised to nosedive. Ten years earlier, Carpenter’s old hockey coach had been involved in a snowmobile accident: Vehicle and driver broke through a frozen lake and disappeared into icy depths. But the snowmobile has now been recovered — from a different lake and sporting a bullet hole. Soon Carpenter dons his investigative cap once more.
Gruley, the Wall Street Journal’s Chicago bureau chief, depicts small-town life and its newspaper persuasively, and he knows hockey, too: Play by play, he captures the passion for the game and the drive to win, both in the flashback scenes and among the 30-year-olds still clinging to the rink.
Carpenter himself lives by his coach’s lessons — “You can’t control what’s going on in front of you, but you can control what happens in your little corner of the world” — and the book’s strongest drama comes from watching him lose even that control.
As Carpenter examines old articles and photos, interviews friends and family and plumbs his own memories, dark revelations about “Starvation Lake” unfold with near-tragic inevitability.
Some of the suspense seems artificial — information cumbersomely delayed — but Gruley more than earns the Young Goodman Brown moment that Carpenter experiences near the novel’s end: “In a matter of a few days, all these people I’d thought I’d known … had been transformed. Now I saw strangers walking around in my memory.”
Fiction
Starvation Lake
by Bryan Gruley
$14; paperback
“There is a general consensus,” writes Malina Saval, “that American culture has failed our boys, and they have failed us.” In her first book, Saval seeks to refute this misconception by allowing her subjects — 10 teenage boys from various socioeconomic backgrounds — to speak for themselves. They even choose their own labels — “The Teenage Dad,” “The Sheltered One,” “The Gay, Vegan, Hearing-Impaired Republican.”
Provocative, but there’s a problem: The boys exaggerate, downplay and sometimes flat-out lie.
A Connecticut teen pegged as “The Troublemaker,” for example, turns out to be a particularly unreliable narrator. He boasts of a scar he got from a bullet wound; his mother says it’s actually from a dog bite he got as a child. He claims he does cocaine as often as he can, that nine of his friends have died and that he once suffered a three-day hangover.
Though Saval doubts what he says, she doesn’t fact-check much beyond asking his mom. Instead, she offers such trite observations as “most of the boys I met experienced moments of self-doubt but found the courage to overcome them.”
The book ends up feeling more like a sociology lecture than the inside look at a “raw, emotional world” that it promises to be.
Nonfiction
The Secret Lives of Boys: Inside the Raw Emotional World of Male Teens
by Malina Saval
$25.95
