NEXT BEST THING

A young man goes from one sexual relationship to another in an effort to mend his broken heart.

After coming of age in a life fraught with emotional turmoil, Miller Hoffman, the teenage protagonist of the author’s debut novel, In the Middle (2013), is back in a sequel spanning his college years in the early to mid-1990s, from his freshman year at the University of Arkansas through his graduation from Birmingham City College in Alabama. Still troubled, unable to get over his breakup with his girlfriend, Bobbie Lamont, a few years before, Miller tries to forget her by engaging in sexual relationships with women his age, younger women, and older women (his stepmother, his college professor, Bobbie’s best friend). Each woman falls hard for sad-eyed, “acne-scarred,” self-absorbed, morose Miller, including Michelle, whom the author identifies as a lesbian who only “dates” women but has sex with men. During these mostly short-lived encounters, Miller is too “honest” not to hide his love for Bobbie. This, and the tattoo on his chest paying tribute to her, eventually spurs the heartbroken departures of several women. In the end, Miller’s sudden decision to change his life appears less convincing than convenient. Virtually everything else that occurs and most of the novel’s other characters are either peripheral to or actively concerned with Miller’s sexual relationships, many of which follow an oddly jejune pattern: Women gear themselves up to tell Miller they want to be his girlfriend; he thinks he’d like to be their boyfriend. They are nervous, and/or he is nervous. They then have (tame) sex and have difficulty expressing their true feelings. They smoke many cigarettes. (The number of cigarettes smoked throughout the novel is wildly distracting.) The author depicts the characters as “chuckling,” “sighing,” and/or “frowning” on nearly every page, sometimes within the same paragraph. The author’s attempt to give his narrative substance—Miller’s estrangement from his father, his loss of close friends to violence, his social anxiety, his feeling of being unloved; female characters’ uncertainties and loneliness—is intermittently touching but falls far short of its potential in a novel that reads like a rough first draft.

An exploration of a troubled young man’s sexual odyssey in need of extensive editing.