The Ordinary White Boy

Rating:
Summary: Judging a Book by its Cover
Review: Bonnie puts all the Advance Reader Copies out on a table in her independent bookstore. They're there for us to take if we want; she could never read them all. I browsed these books recently, reading titles, author's names, and wondering about the artwork. This one has the guy snoozing on the red couch. The Ordinary White Boy? Sounded interesting, looked interesting. So, I took it.

Turns out it was interesting. I love Lamar, the self proclaimed ordinary white boy. What's great about him is that he is coming to terms with who he is and the choices he's made in his life. I felt like I should read with a highlighter pen and mark up the passages of self discovery so I could pass it on to friends and say, check out this passage. But I might as well photocopy the book to yellow paper. It's full of discovery and I want my friends to read every page.

It occurs to me that "discovery" is a heavy word. This novel is everything but heavy. Short chapters, snappy dialogue, and insightful monologue made this book fun to read. The fact that I walked away, much as Lamar does, with a little more clarity about ordinary white boys is just bonus.

Rating:
Summary: In the Tradition of Percy and Ford
Review: Clarke has written a fine first novel. If you enjoy Walker Percy's The Moviegoer or Richard Ford's The Sportswriter, check out Ordinary White Boy.

Rating:
Summary: Ho-hum.
Review: Get ready for a dull read, folks. This book has no guts or poetry to it, not even great writing. It's just a simple little tale about a "charming" loser named Lamar stuck in an upstate-NY town and who wanders around working as a reporter for his dad's shoddy newspaper, not sure if he's really in love with his girl. (Why his girl sticks with him in the first place, we never know, because we only have access into Lamar's insipid brain). Lamar then stumbles -- like the author, apparently, once he discovered the hook his agent probably gave him -- onto a contrived plot. Get ready: somebody's missing! A guy named Mark Ramirez. And this Ramirez is the only Latino guy, it seems, in the whole damn state. And guess what else: Ramirez may not just be missing, but he may be murdered, simply because he's you know, a Latino, and Lamar doesn't know how to deal with this heavy stuff, especially as some of his relatives, including his father and his uncle, are like, racist guys. Intense, isn't it? The problem is, it's an utterly useless and ineffective device, as Mr. Clarke lacks the guts to do anything with his plot. Don't worry, the world isn't nearly as ugly as Lamar fears. In the end, he'll keep his girl, the "mystery" is solved, and you close the book wishing you spent your money on a movie and Twizzlers at Blockbuster.