LUMMOX

Proletarian novelist Magnuson (The Fire Gospels, 1998, etc.) provides a memoir of his younger days around Menomonee Falls and Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

A child of the ’60s, Magnuson (Creative Writing/Southern Illinois Univ.) writes his autobiographical sketches in the third person and in the vernacular with scant attention to grammatical niceties. The result is graphic, edgy, and (to use a favored locution) pretty much kickass. In his musically precocious youth, the author for a while pursued a grungy life in the music room of an abandoned elementary school. There, he kept a set of drums, drank copious amounts of beer, and contemplated the allure of nubile high-school cheerleaders. Occasionally, although he ran to pudge, young Mike even hooked up with a lubricious teenager. The next section shows our near-troglodyte tubby hero as a counselor in a juvenile group home, working with seriously troubled boys. Thence to life with some fierce feminists, lewd women, and several seriously troubled grownups. Clearly, this is not your TV-sitcom, family-style lummox. Yeah, he’s still big (“about 250 in the winter and 230 in the summer”), but within this boorish, bearish, boozing lout, this sweaty, tavern-haunting factory hand, is a perceptive, serious, and intelligent lummox caught in the guise of an oaf. Deep down, Magnuson admits, he's a pussycat. He has a true appreciation of Bach, Wagner, and Coltrane, Proust, Faulkner, and Dostoyevsky. As one of his juvenile charges told him, “you know all kinda shit you never get to tell anybody about.” Now the big guy gets to tell a bit of it, and it makes for kick-back, totally cool reading.

A wild, unseemly, entertaining elegy that will appeal not just to lummox readers, related in street language that doesn't hide the talent.