AMERICAN GYRO

In Zervanos’ novel, a young man dreams of being an actor but finds disappointment on the road to success.

Johnny Demos, a bartender at his grandfather’s restaurant who’s nearing the end of high school, dreads the prospect of spending his life shucking oysters and waiting tables. Seeking escape, he embarks on a potentially ill-advised career in acting, spurred on by a brief relationship with the “painfully lovely” Sierra McCloud. Shortly after the death of his grandfather, Johnny learns that a cousin, Mitch Mitchell—a self-described “producer of independent films”—has written the script for a movie that will feature an appearance by screen legend Dante Saludo, a John Goodman–like figure whose career has seen better days. Johnny eagerly follows Mitch to New York under the illusion that he’s headed for a career in film. Naïvely, he misses all the signs that Mitch is a disreputable character, and the resulting collapse of his dreams is—like Pip’s disillusionment in Great Expectations—both devastating and darkly funny. Also like Pip, he ultimately learns the folly of rejecting family in pursuit of grandiose pursuits, and his desperation to succeed makes him instantly endearing. Zervanos is an excellent prose stylist with a keen eye for the subtleties that inform human interaction—small moments like an uncle repeating the only word he knows from Shakespeare, or an elderly woman dabbing a loved one’s face with a washcloth. He excels at mining poetry from the mundane: “His forehead looked like clay that hadn’t made it to the kiln and was beginning to crack.” The author evokes youthful solipsism with poignancy: “The only thing I knew for certain was that I was completely and utterly alone in the universe.” The oddball characters who orbit Johnny are rendered with a humorous yet sympathetic eye, and, like the best bildungsromans, the book leaves readers with a warm sense of hope.

A luminously written coming-of-age story abounding in compassion and wisdom.