Rating: 
Summary: A startlingly gritty and compelling novel
Review: An engrossing tale that tangles the reader right into its non-linear perspective, Troublemaker is a great first novel. Earl's story is alternately sad and funny--but always touching--and his voice rings true from start to finish. The book's dark humor will appeal to those readers who appreciate literature's more subversive side. One of the most enjoyable pieces of contemporary fiction--gay or otherwise--that I've read in a long time...
Rating:
Summary: A Fascinating Narrative of Lonely Youth
Review: As a fairly young boy, Earl is thrown out of his mother's house and shuffles between his grandmother's, an aunt's and life on the street. Troublemaker is a rich narrative of Earl's young life and his horrible sense of himself as a result of his mother's rejection. The things he has to do to just survive makes him value himself even less. We follow Earl from town to town and from one unhealthy situation to another. There is a desperateness to this story, yet just about when it seems too depressing, Earl pulls us out. His story is one of simple observation and rich self reflection. While at times there doesn't seem to much hope for Earl, the story ends on a pretty positive notes that led me to some renewed faith in the strength of human resolve even in the face of pretty bad odds.Brian Pera has written an authentic feeling story with an unfamiliar yet true sound to it. This book reminded me of the classic, 'Down These Mean Streets' by Piri Thomas. Pera is a young writer with a clear talent. I expect that this won¹t be his last book.
Rating: 
Summary: Pera's Troublemaker Is No Trouble At All!
Review: Being a Memphian myself, I was anxious to read the latest work of our newest local author, Brian Pera. Pera gives a new look to both Memphis fiction and the gay genre of literature. Earl, the narrator and main character, is one who the reader will quickly become absorbed in. His constant conflicts in life and his facination with a boy named Red drive this novel all the way. It was a quick read that I could not put down. Finding a part of me within the pages, I could quickly relate to Earl and his inner struggles. His search for affection gives the novel its depth and foundation. Pera is a true artist with dialogue, and a master at creating an interesting character that gay fiction fans will not soon forget!
Rating:
Summary: laugh out loud funny
Review: Bought this book after a review in Time Out which praised it without mentioning how funny it is. Yet I was laughing out loud. It's sad and everything and grim but hilarious too. The lead character has some of the funniest lines I've read. Very twisted. The way he talks gets inside your head. I thought it was a refreshing take on class, sex, and rootlessness. And anybody who's read above a grade school level should be able to keep track of things. It's set up like a mystery in a way. You keep reading wondering how it's going to pull together. I look forward to Pera's next one.
Rating:
Summary: A terrific story in a challenging writing style
Review: Brian Pera bears watching. Not many "first novelists" will tackle a writing style that asks alot of his readers; usually first books aim at telling a good story and rely on proven techiques to coddle the unwary reader. Not Pera. "Troublemaker" is a true grit tale about a tough subject told by a less than educated backwoods mentally challenged boy. It is told in the first person and getting used to Earl's language takes practice. Accepting his nonlinear process also requires much from the reader, but it is precisely the way this main character would talk and think and to write it otherwise would not be as engrossingly effective. I praise authors who make us work...stretching our brains opens new synapses....and Pera goes at it with a vengeance. The story is well described by the editorial above. Suffice it to say that meticulously exploring how disadvantaged youths are subject to abuse and deeply needy for meaningful relationships (and love) is a subject few mature writers have approached. Pera has given us a unique journey into hell and makes us care and want to cause a sea change. I eagerly await the next challenge from Brian Pera. Good stuff, this!
Rating:
Summary: A compelling and thought provoking debut novel
Review: Buying first novels is a practice which carries a high degree of risk. However, the payback on investment in this case is spectacular and Pera's publishers are to be congratulated for bringing us Troublemaker. A compelling and thought provoking read, this tale moves round in ever tighter circles, drawing us deeper and deeper into the mind and world of Earl, a dysfunctional youngster tipped into drugs and prostitution as inevitably as Chelsea Clinton got to Oxford. The action cuts backwards and forwards in time and place. This, in combination with the idiomatic speech of the first person narrative, enables us to feel what it is like to wear Earl's skin and see the world through his eyes. I was drawn on to turn the page to find out what the next twist would be as Earl lurches forward through life, compelled by the twin forces of romantic love and the uncaring coercion of those circumstances have placed around him. The structure and style used in Troublemaker could have made this a difficult and heavy read. However, Pera proves to be an intuitive communicator, turning Earl's inarticulateness and hazy understanding of the world into coherent insightfullness. He is to be congratulated on accomplishing this with barely a false note (just twice in 214 pages did I find a particular phrase just too insightful and knowing for it to be Earl's own voice). Pera has achieved an authentic ring with the character of Earl and through him gives us pause to consider our own condition and how we relate to those sucked in to homelessness, drug addiction and prostitution. Maybe not quite a Dickens yet, but with this much promise on offer I hope Pera proves to be as productive as that great social commentator of the Victorian era, as I look forward to reading much more from him. Bob O'Dwyer, London, UK
Rating:
Summary: A compelling and thought provoking debut novel
Review: Buying first novels is a practice which carries a high degree of risk. However, the payback on investment in this case is spectacular and Pera's publishers are to be congratulated for bringing us Troublemaker. A compelling and thought provoking read, this tale moves round in ever tighter circles, drawing us deeper and deeper into the mind and world of Earl, a dysfunctional youngster tipped into drugs and prostitution as inevitably as Chelsea Clinton got to Oxford. The action cuts backwards and forwards in time and place. This, in combination with the idiomatic speech of the first person narrative, enables us to feel what it is like to wear Earl's skin and see the world through his eyes. I was drawn on to turn the page to find out what the next twist would be as Earl lurches forward through life, compelled by the twin forces of romantic love and the uncaring coercion of those circumstances have placed around him. The structure and style used in Troublemaker could have made this a difficult and heavy read. However, Pera proves to be an intuitive communicator, turning Earl's inarticulateness and hazy understanding of the world into coherent insightfullness. He is to be congratulated on accomplishing this with barely a false note (just twice in 214 pages did I find a particular phrase just too insightful and knowing for it to be Earl's own voice). Pera has achieved an authentic ring with the character of Earl and through him gives us pause to consider our own condition and how we relate to those sucked in to homelessness, drug addiction and prostitution. Maybe not quite a Dickens yet, but with this much promise on offer I hope Pera proves to be as productive as that great social commentator of the Victorian era, as I look forward to reading much more from him. Bob O'Dwyer, London, UK
Rating:
Summary: A startlingly gritty and compelling novel
Review: Calling this gay fiction kind of misses the boat. A really good psychological read with an intense protagonist who doesn't fit in anywhere, and sees things in his own screwed-up way. His voice and the structure are the strongest points, the way he keeps falling back and standing up again, and can't figure out what's happening to him. A "stranger" not quite savvy enough not to care. The author says it's Huck-finnish. Which is true: But it's more like Huck Finn sinking as he's trying to swim. My only complaint was it's short.
Rating:
Summary: A Romantic Defiance
Review: Earl hustles, shoots up, and drinks. He lies, robs johns, and clobbers one bad daddy with a lamp. He looks 15, passes for 18, says he's 22. But for a troublemaker, he's not a bad kid. You won't exactly like him, but he's hard to dislike. Unlike the Dixie Chics' Earl, whose just desserts are poisoned peas, Pera's peripatetic anti-hero earns sympathy, if not affection, as his thoughts erratically span his pilgrimage from Omaha to Memphis, Buford, Ark., New York, and Colorado Springs. Earl is an innocent rogue, like all those Hucks and Holdens troubled by the way the world is and unable to figure out what's wrong with it. He's so beclouded that some reviewers have mis-read his drop-out grammar, street urchin idioms, and obsession with Red/Jared/Robert--another hustler and hub of all his non-sequential thoughts--as proof he's retarded. He's not. What he is, is an actor-victim in a picaresque role he'd rather not play but can't escape. Earl's world is absurd, mean. Marvel he's so forgiving. His drunk father dies, leaving him nothing but a flask. His mother dumps him on his demented Nana. Grandma beads him with a gun, then buys him a one-way ticket to New York. There he proves too up-front for tricks, and Madam (bless her golden heart) sends him back to Omaha. His mother peeks behind the curtains but won't open the door. He drifts to a carnival and meets Red, whose savvy takes him in--though Red won't. When Red vanishes, Earl becomes obsessed with finding this slightly more-adept mirror of himself. Troublemaker is a desperate seeking for self, combing the landscape of the heart--the real geography of the novel--for someone to belong to in spite of rejection. It's this hope that, after all, makes a disjointed narrative-Earl's, not the author's; Pera is deft with voice and viewpoint as well as cinematic time and locus shifts--a Romantic act of defiance instead of a meaningless soup of alienation to drown in. Earl can't see land, but he feels it's out there, and he keeps on swimming. Despite exploitation and snuff films, Earl clings sentimentally to beauty in bad art--a photo of Red, a picture postcard, a cheap figurine of a freckled boy and his dog gone fishin'. On its surface, Troublemaker shares the world of Dennis Cooper, who inspires Pera and earned Troublemaker's grateful dedication. But beyond the seedy underworld and stylistic iconoclasm these writers share, their ends lie worlds apart. Cooper draws the ire of straight and gay readers for choosing taboo subjects and refusing to take sides--even on the most disturbing issues of sexual behavior and politics. Pera transcends the sordid and frames it between his opening and final chapters in the Gateway to the Garden of the Gods, where American Indians once got wild, saw visions, and were One within the circle. Pera's novel reiterates the wonder Bruce Springsteen finds in post-modern times: "At the end of every hard-earned day, people find some reason to believe."
Rating: 
Summary: Gritty and sometimes darkly funny, but strangely unaffecting
Review: In a recent interview with the Memphis Commercial Appeal, Brian Pera stated that he would rather people read his book without the onus of critical or journalistic reviews. Of course I'm paraphrasing but must admit that there were many reviewer's remarks about Troublemaker that, for me, already sealed the book's "fate" (two things in particular: Kirkus's noting that Troublemaker reads like Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and the book's own cover, an obvious homage to Dennis Cooper, to whom Pera dedicates his book). My biases firmly in place, I set about to read Troublemaker in earnest. I am happy to report that the book is a very engrossing (and surprisingly quick) read. The novel's protagonist, Earl, is a gay hustler despite himself, and his life (such as it is) and concomitant obsessive search for his true-love-cum-lover-in-arms Red is effectively told through a series of constantly shifting vignettes. Even when Earl seemingly gives up and tacitly ends his search (by settling down with, variously, "Walrus" in New York and "Fletcher" in Arkansas), Pera always adds a small but important detail that reminds Earl of Red, and again launches him back on his way. Pera begins Troublemaker at breakneck speed, shifting psychic and physical locales at a dizzying pace, which becomes quite a hindrance to a reader trying to figure out where they (and Earl) are in the story. However, as the novel progresses, the narrative slows and Pera's loose ends begin to tie themselves together. I can see why many reviews have trouble (pardon the pun) with the dialect. To the untrained ear, the nuances of Earl's uneducated lower-class Southern speech (I don't want to call it "trailer trash" but there you are) take some getting used to. Pera's choppy, jumpy vignettes, quasi-"happy endings" aside, also work against the overarching story. But I suppose my biggest objection to the book (and its characters) is that I never really "cared" for them. Earl's naivete elicits no sympathy, and his obsession with Red is baseless (Pera gives no good reason why Red is, for Earl, so iconic). By the end of the novel (and even after a climactic reunion with Red), I nevertheless found myself asking (the novel and myself) "so what was the point of this?" Perhaps Pera will, in his subsequent works (and I do hope there will be more), delve deeper into human motivations and emotions, but in Troublemaker there is little of either.
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