Who Am I

A novel about a boy growing up in suburban America of the last century.

Who Am I, J.J. Zerr, Primix Publishing, 2021

Eddie Walsh, the main character and focal point of Zerr's novel, is five years old as the book opens, always into some mischief with the neighbors, always testing the patience of his parents and his extended family clan. His grade school antics and worries are described in elaborate, almost day-to-day detail, and the book's time frame only very slowly advances through later stages of Eddie's life. Time is spent on the kinds of childhood experiences that will be immediately familiar to readers of a certain age: little boys trying to behave themselves in church pews during Christmas Eve Mass, little boys playing games on the playground during school recess, and so on, always registered in particular detail (“From our place you had to pass the Hemsaths, the funeral parlor house, the drugstore, which looked like a house, the general store, and the volunteer fire building on our side of Main,” etc.) [7] Gradually the narrative moves on to Eddie's young adulthood, his love for a young woman named Teresa, and his signing up for the Navy. Zerr lavishes most of his writerly attention on building the two main pillars of his story, sentiment and nostalgia. The book is an extremely affectionate dramatic reconstruction of small-town mid-20th century American life, and Zerr sprinkles a good many period-signifiers like “Brylcreem” and “Clearasil” into the text. Readers who likewise want to indulge in sentiment and nostalgia will have plenty to enjoy in these pages. Unfortunately, there isn't much for anybody else. When lines like “Anyhow, that's how I decided to take Latin as my optional class” [249] or “Zeke wiped his plate shiny clean with bread and ate that, too” [10] occur so often in a story as they do here, readers can't expect much in the way of plot movement or character development, and they get precious little of either.

A syrupy but very stodgy fictional tour through the yellowed pages of a family album.