OGDEN'S PROVERB

A teenager struggles with an alcoholic father, a move to the East Coast, and first love in McCluskey’s novel.

In the 1970s, Ogden Skully’s family has humble roots—his parents were raised during the Depression—but his father has high hopes for him. As his dad climbs the corporate ladder, the family leaves behind the Chicago suburbs for Connecticut, where Ogden is enrolled, along with the Guggenheims and Astors of the world, at Hamden Academy. It’s a precursor to Harvard University, and everyone there seems nice, but Ogden, a former public school student, doesn’t feel like he fits in. He also confronts his troubled home life; his dad is a heavy drinker who’s prone to rages, and his mom is often silent and still carrying the trauma of childhood poverty. Still, Ogden finds some comfort with his first girlfriend, Chloe, who’s from a wealthy oil family and whom he can make laugh. Also at Hamden is Adam, a rebellious boy who thinks Ogden may be a kindred spirit. As the two become friends, a jarring tragedy hits the Hamden community, testing the last threads of Ogden’s innocence. McCluskey, the author of A Moment of Fireflies(2020), offers a bildungsroman that, despite its relatively short length of fewer than 200 pages, is full of long, winding sentences—and some great lines. For example, Ogden wins Chole over with an unspecified comment that is, according to Ogden, “pithy, yet decidedly harebrained and proudly empty-headed.” That said, some paragraphs span pages, which can cause the story to feel like it’s drifting at times. McCluskey peels back multiple layers of memory, revealing the not-so-privileged past that led to Ogden’s seemingly secure future. Over the course of the book, the author memorably lays bare how one can be haunted by moments years in the past even while one looks toward a bright future.

A rich, soulful coming-of-age tale full of the wonder of first love.