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The Slide
At once an offbeat love story, a moving portrait of a family in crisis, and a darkly funny American comedy, Kyle Beachy’s arresting debut novel—written in prose that is swift, stunning, and sweet—heralds the arrival of a remarkable new voice in fiction.
Potter Mays retreats immediately after college graduation to the safe house of his childhood home. Like clockwork each morning, his mother makes him eggs, lovingly fried into hollowed-out pieces of toast. His father, in the midst of a campaign to revitalize downtown St. Louis, promises to “poke around” for gainful employment for his son. Potter’s best friend, Stuart—an “Independent Thought Contractor” working out of his parents’ lavish pool house—is willing to serve as a kind of life coach, provided, of course, that Potter pays for his services all summer.
However...
Altogether elsewhere, Potter’s (former? future?) girlfriend, Audrey, is backpacking around Europe with her beautiful bisexual traveling companion, Carmel. Potter was not invited, and getting a good night’s sleep has recently become an issue for him.
As enigmatic packages arrive from Audrey, the refuge of life at home soon proves illusory. Potter’s parents are oddly never in the same room together, the neighbor girl is looking quite adult, and Stuart’s much-needed counseling service is subcontracted to a third-party denizen of the pool house with an agenda all his own. And just what are those noises coming from the attic?
Kyle Beachy has woven a uniquely affecting story of the long and hard, then quick and hard, struggle to grow up.
Potter Mays retreats immediately after college graduation to the safe house of his childhood home. Like clockwork each morning, his mother makes him eggs, lovingly fried into hollowed-out pieces of toast. His father, in the midst of a campaign to revitalize downtown St. Louis, promises to “poke around” for gainful employment for his son. Potter’s best friend, Stuart—an “Independent Thought Contractor” working out of his parents’ lavish pool house—is willing to serve as a kind of life coach, provided, of course, that Potter pays for his services all summer.
However...
Altogether elsewhere, Potter’s (former? future?) girlfriend, Audrey, is backpacking around Europe with her beautiful bisexual traveling companion, Carmel. Potter was not invited, and getting a good night’s sleep has recently become an issue for him.
As enigmatic packages arrive from Audrey, the refuge of life at home soon proves illusory. Potter’s parents are oddly never in the same room together, the neighbor girl is looking quite adult, and Stuart’s much-needed counseling service is subcontracted to a third-party denizen of the pool house with an agenda all his own. And just what are those noises coming from the attic?
Kyle Beachy has woven a uniquely affecting story of the long and hard, then quick and hard, struggle to grow up.
287 pages
First published January 27, 2009
About the author
Kyle Beachy
4 books113 followersKyle Beachy‘s first novel, The Slide (Dial Press, 2009), won The Chicago Reader’s Best Book by a Chicago Author reader’s choice award for the year. His short fiction has appeared in journals including Fanzine, Pank, Hobart, Juked, The Collagist, 5 Chapters, and others.His writing on skateboarding has appeared in The Point, The American Reader, The Chicagoan, Free Skateboard Magazine (UK & Europe), The Skateboard Mag (US), Jenkem, Deadspin, and The Classical. He teaches at Roosevelt University in Chicago and is a co-host on the skateboarding podcast Vent City with pro skater Ryan Lay and others.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 67 reviews
June 5, 2009
Twenty-two year-old Potter Mays, the hapless anti-hero of this coming-home-but-not-really debut novel, has a three-month time-out from life to get it together. Three months – originally supposed to be three weeks – till his girlfriend Audrey returns from her own find-herself excursion to Europe. He couldn’t ask for a softer landing. Mom and Dad would like him to stay for a while, and Dad’s Name is enough in this small Midwest town to get him a job.
Squirrels in the attic turn out to share the space with the ghost of Potter’s older brother who drowned in the family pool at age five while Mom was spooning formula into the infant Potter’s mouth. Plenty of guilt to go around: seconds, anyone? Conversations with the ghostly brother in the attic yield the only resolution this novel has to offer.
But it’s 2009, and it’s not unrealistic that our happy ending consists of every one of our characters, with no hard feelings, splitting apart, and heading off in all directions, each one alone.
Squirrels in the attic turn out to share the space with the ghost of Potter’s older brother who drowned in the family pool at age five while Mom was spooning formula into the infant Potter’s mouth. Plenty of guilt to go around: seconds, anyone? Conversations with the ghostly brother in the attic yield the only resolution this novel has to offer.
But it’s 2009, and it’s not unrealistic that our happy ending consists of every one of our characters, with no hard feelings, splitting apart, and heading off in all directions, each one alone.
April 8, 2009
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)
So before anything else, please understand that I was rooting from page one for Chicagoan Kyle Beachy's debut novel The Slide to be great; after all, the way I received a copy in the first place was by the author literally bicycling over to my freaking neighborhood a couple of weeks ago and hand-delivering it, after first confessing that he's already a daily reader of the CCLaP website. But this isn't the typical college-grad basement-press situation we're talking about, which is usually the case when an author in town will hand-deliver a book for possible review (which happens more often than you'd think, actually); Beachy is in fact the literary world's Next Big Hot New Thing™ , with this novel infamously turned down by 117 different literary agencies before finally finding a home at Random House (or technically one of their corporate subsidiaries, Dial Press), where it has gone on to become a surprise national hit and to inspire standing-room-only crowds at recent readings. But you know what that usually means -- dumbed-down unreadable crap, not to put too fine a point on it -- which of course is why I was rooting for it in the first place, not only because I like to think of CCLaP's readers as unusually smart and hate being proven wrong, but also because it's high time that Chicago had another bestselling author who isn't some cheapie-crime-novel genre hack.
And indeed, from an initial surface-level scan of the book, the news doesn't look good at first; The Slide has in fact been described by many as a coming-of-age novel featuring twee hipsters in their early twenties, and regular readers know that I have a real love/hate relationship with such stories that sometimes borders on hate/hate. Ultimately it's the tale of one Potter Mays, a typical slacker schlub from St. Louis (where I happen to have been born and raised too), back at his parents' place the summer after graduating from a small private liberal-arts college on the west coast. It seems that Potter's girlfriend Audrey has decided to tour Europe that summer with her bisexual, radical-feminist best friend; and as is typical with 22-year-old slacker schlubs in shaky relationships, this impending Continental trip has Potter freaked out pretty badly, and wondering whether their relationship is even going to survive such a head-shaving possibly lesbian holiday. And thus does he turn for advice to an old high-school friend named Stuart, a smartass overeducated trust-fund kid who has decided recently to start professionally offering his services as an "independent thought contractor;" and thus do the two talk out the details of the relationship throughout the summer by way of a series of impossibly witty hipster conversations, even while Potter goes through the ho-hum motions of finding a minimum-wage summer job, hanging out with his upper-middle-class politically-connected parents, and of course finding all kinds of new girl troubles despite his angst over the vacationing Audrey.
Yeah, I know, not exactly the most rousingly original idea for a debut novel by a recently graduated college student, and one can certainly be forgiven for blowing off The Slide based on these initial impressions. But despite the reliance at first on so many hackneyed first-novel tropes, the first thing one notices when actually reading it is how well-done it is anyway, and how almost from the first page Beachy starts cleverly playing with these conventions in subtle but ingenious ways. Because the fact is that this isn't really a coming-of-age novel, not in the way we typically define it, and has only picked up that reputation because of a series of lazy untalented critics arbitrarily assigning it that label, after quickly looking at the book and seeing that it's about a 22-year-old who thinks about his childhood a lot. But this book isn't about Potter coming to grips with his childhood, and it's not about him getting past his childhood so he can become an adult, the two most common themes of coming-of-age stories; it's mere coincidence that these characters happen to reside within the milieu that they do, with it possible to still get across most of the book's main points even if these people were all middle-aged and with kids.
And what are those main points? Well, it's complicated, a big part of why I ended up liking this book so much more than I was expecting. Because partly it's about personal responsibility, about the ability to look honestly at one's behavior and understand the ways one is being both a good and bad human being to the people around them; because the farther this book progresses, the more we start to realize that nearly every character on display has a hidden agenda, one that's fairly despicable precisely because they're not owning up to their own secret behavior. And then partly as well it's about the lies we all tell ourselves while pursuing these hidden agendas, the pretty little sagas we make up in our heads about our endlessly noble endeavors, and how these endeavors to an outsider rarely seem as noble as they seem in our own inner brains. And yes, I know, this is all coming out rather abstractly today, and a few specific examples from the book would help illustrate what I'm talking about; but part of what makes this book such a charmer is that it's chock-full of unexpected little surprises, ones that need to remain surprises in order to enjoy them to their full extent, and so I'm hesitant about mentioning any of them at all. There's a whole series of little things constantly happening to these characters that back up and solidify more and more all the things I'm talking about today; and I guess today's one of those days when you'll simply have to take my word for it.
And then there's this, which I haven't seen a single other book reviewer yet mention, an oversight so basic that it shocks me: that one of the biggest points of all with The Slide is simply to serve as a requiem for a dying American Midwest, and that the whole reason Beachy makes so many specific references to St. Louis landmarks is not to be a cutesy local hero but rather to show the rest of the planet exactly what's being lost out here these days, as more and more of these once-grand Industrial-Age meccas of the midwest (the St. Louises, the Detroits, the Kansas Citys) continue their downward spiral into abandoned ghost-town status (one of the many "slides" throughout the manuscript that this book's title metaphorically refers to). It's no coincidence at all that Potter's dad works for one of those ineffectual do-gooder "urban renaissance" organizations so popular these days among such dying midwestern cities; and it's no coincidence that he holds this job while actually living in a McMansion in the wealthy suburbs; and it's no coincidence that the organization is a pathetic joke, and that they can't seem to come up with any other ideas than to turn an endless series of abandoned warehouses into an endless series of pricey suburban-style "C&C" (condo and coffeehouse) developments. Beachy has something very specific to say about St. Louis by making all this such a heavy part of the storyline, something very specific to say when he references the great landmarks of St. Louis in such hyper-realistic detail; and as a fellow St. Louisan, I have to admit that this aspect of the novel really broke my heart, and I'm appalled that not a single other book critic in the entire United States has picked up on this, instead mistaking the entire thing for some kind of cheesy hometown shout-out.
But still, even with all this, even at the two-thirds mark of The Slide I had been prepared to give it an only slightly high score, because of there being just too many typical undergrad-English-major contemporary-postmodern-human-interest-novel stereotypes on display. "Oh, great," I found myself saying a lot throughout the first half of this book, "yet another college-educated white male pontificating in pretentiously mythic terms about baseball. Oh, and of course there's a whole magic-realism subplot about the ghost of his dead brother appearing in the attic at night to give him advice. Of course there is, of course of course there is." And this is always the biggest problem I have with literature by young people, and what always ends up sinking otherwise great first novels -- that the story just ends up being way too obvious, too easy to guess at when you're not even meaning to, even when the young author in question thinks that they're avoiding the typical cliches, serving up instead a whole series of secondary cliches because they're 22 and they don't know any better. And this isn't necessarily that bad -- a well-done obvious book is still a well-done book -- but it's also why debut novels by authors in their twenties rarely get great scores from me, and why they're rarely considered truly great novels by the public at large.
But then starting around page 200 of the 287-page American paperback version (and yes, those who have already read this, I'm referring exactly to the thing you think I'm referring to), something legitimately remarkable happens in The Slide -- Beachy veers off in a direction I truly and utterly wasn't expecting, but in a way that makes perfect sense with the 200 pages that came before, not a jarring transition done simply to shock but rather a logical turn of events that profoundly ties together all the themes Beachy has been working with. And that's what finally did it for me, what finally made me realize what a genuinely special piece of work this is; because without giving anything away, let's just say that the last hundred pages of this book is an unending exercise in unexpected revelation, combined with a kind of world-weary gravitas that even most veteran authors fail to achieve in their projects. And this is the entire point of storytelling, or at least it should be, to present us with tales that make perfect sense afterwards but that we would've never thought of ourselves, to present us with tales that make us understand ourselves better without realizing that we were going to have anything in common with the main characters to begin with.
And how even more remarkable that Beachy pulls this off using one of my favorite literary devices of all, making Potter by the end what I like to call an "anti-villain" (and by this I of course mean someone who seems pretty decent at first, but becomes kind of a douchebag by the end, even while we remain sympathetic to what turned them into a douchebag in the first place, pretty much the opposite of the more well-known term "anti-hero"). This is one of the greatest feats in modern literature in my opinion, and it's no coincidence that the books I've found truly amazing since opening CCLaP all tend to share this aspect; because this is an ingrained part of the modern storytelling process for most of us, to assume that our story's narrator is a decent person and that we should be rooting for them throughout. Without getting into specifics (and yes, the fuzzy nature of today's write-up is driving me a little crazy too), this traditional narrator/hero paradigm is completely subverted by Beachy by the end of The Slide, with it being really tempting to hate our old friend Potter by the time this story is over, and to see all the bad things that happen to him as a sort of divine retribution for his manytimes clueless dicklike behavior.
This is the mark of a sincerely spectacular book, when we can both love and loathe a character at the same time, precisely by being offered extremely well-done and unexpected scenes concerning them over and over and over, building by the end a total which is so much more than a mere sum of its parts. And that's why today The Slide becomes only the fourth book in CCLaP's history (and the first this year) to earn a perfect score of 10, and why in my opinion it wouldn't surprise me at all to see this get a dark-horse Pulitzer nomination come next year. It's one of those books that makes you feel all funny and sad and strange afterwards, one of those books that inspires cults among 23-year-olds (much like Douglas Coupland's Generation X did among me and my friends when we were all 23), and in fact I could write an entire second thousand-word essay just about all the fantastic elements I didn't get to talk about in this thousand-word essay (starting for example with what has to be one of the greatest minor characters in the entire contemporary literary canon, the hulking bearded emo-misogynist hipster monster Edsel). What a treat this book was, a truly unexpected treat, and what an astounding future Beachy has in store for himself as an artist. I recommend jumping on the bandwagon yourself as soon as possible.
Out of 10: 10
So before anything else, please understand that I was rooting from page one for Chicagoan Kyle Beachy's debut novel The Slide to be great; after all, the way I received a copy in the first place was by the author literally bicycling over to my freaking neighborhood a couple of weeks ago and hand-delivering it, after first confessing that he's already a daily reader of the CCLaP website. But this isn't the typical college-grad basement-press situation we're talking about, which is usually the case when an author in town will hand-deliver a book for possible review (which happens more often than you'd think, actually); Beachy is in fact the literary world's Next Big Hot New Thing™ , with this novel infamously turned down by 117 different literary agencies before finally finding a home at Random House (or technically one of their corporate subsidiaries, Dial Press), where it has gone on to become a surprise national hit and to inspire standing-room-only crowds at recent readings. But you know what that usually means -- dumbed-down unreadable crap, not to put too fine a point on it -- which of course is why I was rooting for it in the first place, not only because I like to think of CCLaP's readers as unusually smart and hate being proven wrong, but also because it's high time that Chicago had another bestselling author who isn't some cheapie-crime-novel genre hack.
And indeed, from an initial surface-level scan of the book, the news doesn't look good at first; The Slide has in fact been described by many as a coming-of-age novel featuring twee hipsters in their early twenties, and regular readers know that I have a real love/hate relationship with such stories that sometimes borders on hate/hate. Ultimately it's the tale of one Potter Mays, a typical slacker schlub from St. Louis (where I happen to have been born and raised too), back at his parents' place the summer after graduating from a small private liberal-arts college on the west coast. It seems that Potter's girlfriend Audrey has decided to tour Europe that summer with her bisexual, radical-feminist best friend; and as is typical with 22-year-old slacker schlubs in shaky relationships, this impending Continental trip has Potter freaked out pretty badly, and wondering whether their relationship is even going to survive such a head-shaving possibly lesbian holiday. And thus does he turn for advice to an old high-school friend named Stuart, a smartass overeducated trust-fund kid who has decided recently to start professionally offering his services as an "independent thought contractor;" and thus do the two talk out the details of the relationship throughout the summer by way of a series of impossibly witty hipster conversations, even while Potter goes through the ho-hum motions of finding a minimum-wage summer job, hanging out with his upper-middle-class politically-connected parents, and of course finding all kinds of new girl troubles despite his angst over the vacationing Audrey.
Yeah, I know, not exactly the most rousingly original idea for a debut novel by a recently graduated college student, and one can certainly be forgiven for blowing off The Slide based on these initial impressions. But despite the reliance at first on so many hackneyed first-novel tropes, the first thing one notices when actually reading it is how well-done it is anyway, and how almost from the first page Beachy starts cleverly playing with these conventions in subtle but ingenious ways. Because the fact is that this isn't really a coming-of-age novel, not in the way we typically define it, and has only picked up that reputation because of a series of lazy untalented critics arbitrarily assigning it that label, after quickly looking at the book and seeing that it's about a 22-year-old who thinks about his childhood a lot. But this book isn't about Potter coming to grips with his childhood, and it's not about him getting past his childhood so he can become an adult, the two most common themes of coming-of-age stories; it's mere coincidence that these characters happen to reside within the milieu that they do, with it possible to still get across most of the book's main points even if these people were all middle-aged and with kids.
And what are those main points? Well, it's complicated, a big part of why I ended up liking this book so much more than I was expecting. Because partly it's about personal responsibility, about the ability to look honestly at one's behavior and understand the ways one is being both a good and bad human being to the people around them; because the farther this book progresses, the more we start to realize that nearly every character on display has a hidden agenda, one that's fairly despicable precisely because they're not owning up to their own secret behavior. And then partly as well it's about the lies we all tell ourselves while pursuing these hidden agendas, the pretty little sagas we make up in our heads about our endlessly noble endeavors, and how these endeavors to an outsider rarely seem as noble as they seem in our own inner brains. And yes, I know, this is all coming out rather abstractly today, and a few specific examples from the book would help illustrate what I'm talking about; but part of what makes this book such a charmer is that it's chock-full of unexpected little surprises, ones that need to remain surprises in order to enjoy them to their full extent, and so I'm hesitant about mentioning any of them at all. There's a whole series of little things constantly happening to these characters that back up and solidify more and more all the things I'm talking about today; and I guess today's one of those days when you'll simply have to take my word for it.
And then there's this, which I haven't seen a single other book reviewer yet mention, an oversight so basic that it shocks me: that one of the biggest points of all with The Slide is simply to serve as a requiem for a dying American Midwest, and that the whole reason Beachy makes so many specific references to St. Louis landmarks is not to be a cutesy local hero but rather to show the rest of the planet exactly what's being lost out here these days, as more and more of these once-grand Industrial-Age meccas of the midwest (the St. Louises, the Detroits, the Kansas Citys) continue their downward spiral into abandoned ghost-town status (one of the many "slides" throughout the manuscript that this book's title metaphorically refers to). It's no coincidence at all that Potter's dad works for one of those ineffectual do-gooder "urban renaissance" organizations so popular these days among such dying midwestern cities; and it's no coincidence that he holds this job while actually living in a McMansion in the wealthy suburbs; and it's no coincidence that the organization is a pathetic joke, and that they can't seem to come up with any other ideas than to turn an endless series of abandoned warehouses into an endless series of pricey suburban-style "C&C" (condo and coffeehouse) developments. Beachy has something very specific to say about St. Louis by making all this such a heavy part of the storyline, something very specific to say when he references the great landmarks of St. Louis in such hyper-realistic detail; and as a fellow St. Louisan, I have to admit that this aspect of the novel really broke my heart, and I'm appalled that not a single other book critic in the entire United States has picked up on this, instead mistaking the entire thing for some kind of cheesy hometown shout-out.
But still, even with all this, even at the two-thirds mark of The Slide I had been prepared to give it an only slightly high score, because of there being just too many typical undergrad-English-major contemporary-postmodern-human-interest-novel stereotypes on display. "Oh, great," I found myself saying a lot throughout the first half of this book, "yet another college-educated white male pontificating in pretentiously mythic terms about baseball. Oh, and of course there's a whole magic-realism subplot about the ghost of his dead brother appearing in the attic at night to give him advice. Of course there is, of course of course there is." And this is always the biggest problem I have with literature by young people, and what always ends up sinking otherwise great first novels -- that the story just ends up being way too obvious, too easy to guess at when you're not even meaning to, even when the young author in question thinks that they're avoiding the typical cliches, serving up instead a whole series of secondary cliches because they're 22 and they don't know any better. And this isn't necessarily that bad -- a well-done obvious book is still a well-done book -- but it's also why debut novels by authors in their twenties rarely get great scores from me, and why they're rarely considered truly great novels by the public at large.
But then starting around page 200 of the 287-page American paperback version (and yes, those who have already read this, I'm referring exactly to the thing you think I'm referring to), something legitimately remarkable happens in The Slide -- Beachy veers off in a direction I truly and utterly wasn't expecting, but in a way that makes perfect sense with the 200 pages that came before, not a jarring transition done simply to shock but rather a logical turn of events that profoundly ties together all the themes Beachy has been working with. And that's what finally did it for me, what finally made me realize what a genuinely special piece of work this is; because without giving anything away, let's just say that the last hundred pages of this book is an unending exercise in unexpected revelation, combined with a kind of world-weary gravitas that even most veteran authors fail to achieve in their projects. And this is the entire point of storytelling, or at least it should be, to present us with tales that make perfect sense afterwards but that we would've never thought of ourselves, to present us with tales that make us understand ourselves better without realizing that we were going to have anything in common with the main characters to begin with.
And how even more remarkable that Beachy pulls this off using one of my favorite literary devices of all, making Potter by the end what I like to call an "anti-villain" (and by this I of course mean someone who seems pretty decent at first, but becomes kind of a douchebag by the end, even while we remain sympathetic to what turned them into a douchebag in the first place, pretty much the opposite of the more well-known term "anti-hero"). This is one of the greatest feats in modern literature in my opinion, and it's no coincidence that the books I've found truly amazing since opening CCLaP all tend to share this aspect; because this is an ingrained part of the modern storytelling process for most of us, to assume that our story's narrator is a decent person and that we should be rooting for them throughout. Without getting into specifics (and yes, the fuzzy nature of today's write-up is driving me a little crazy too), this traditional narrator/hero paradigm is completely subverted by Beachy by the end of The Slide, with it being really tempting to hate our old friend Potter by the time this story is over, and to see all the bad things that happen to him as a sort of divine retribution for his manytimes clueless dicklike behavior.
This is the mark of a sincerely spectacular book, when we can both love and loathe a character at the same time, precisely by being offered extremely well-done and unexpected scenes concerning them over and over and over, building by the end a total which is so much more than a mere sum of its parts. And that's why today The Slide becomes only the fourth book in CCLaP's history (and the first this year) to earn a perfect score of 10, and why in my opinion it wouldn't surprise me at all to see this get a dark-horse Pulitzer nomination come next year. It's one of those books that makes you feel all funny and sad and strange afterwards, one of those books that inspires cults among 23-year-olds (much like Douglas Coupland's Generation X did among me and my friends when we were all 23), and in fact I could write an entire second thousand-word essay just about all the fantastic elements I didn't get to talk about in this thousand-word essay (starting for example with what has to be one of the greatest minor characters in the entire contemporary literary canon, the hulking bearded emo-misogynist hipster monster Edsel). What a treat this book was, a truly unexpected treat, and what an astounding future Beachy has in store for himself as an artist. I recommend jumping on the bandwagon yourself as soon as possible.
Out of 10: 10
September 12, 2008
In The Slide, Kyle Beachy composes a narrative that produces the reading experience I search for in a novel. By the end of the first chapter, one feels a sense of longing. Unlike the motivated reading inspired by mystery or suspense, The Slide encourages the longing one feels upon meeting someone special for the first time, a desire to chase intimacy. Potter Mays is a character familiar enough to believe in, yet distant enough to inspire curiosity. This delicate balance does more than merely sustain a reader's attention. It keeps us connected to the authenticity in Potter's most peculiar choices. However muddled Potter’s summer adventure may seem, Beachy’s protagonist never follows his doubt farther than his readers should. Insightful characterization, raw emotion, and a sharp wit enable Kyle Beachy to write a story that invites his readers to learn, alongside Potter, the extent to which we are all haunted by our past.
February 10, 2010
The Slide is undoubtedly a great book. It hovers somewhat close to a magnificent book, and lots of people obviously think it gets there. But for me it was only almost.
It's a bit hard to explain why I think this is so. I mean, this is a book written to appeal almost directly to me, for one thing. It's practically about me, or at least plenty of people I know. The hero is Potter Mays, upper-middle class disaffected overly smart kid who just graduated college and has (somewhat) sheepishly moved back in with his parents -- just for the moment, of course, while he figures out what he's doing next. He's constantly thrust into the midst of everyone he went to high school with, many of whom are on the cusp of being successful, either financially or familially. It's summer, and he spends most of his time having semi-awkward exchanges with his parents or retreating to his best friend's poolhouse to get stoned.
So this is a nice, easy plot, right? A calm slacker bildungsroman, sort of, where the too-smart hero watches all the douchebags he used to know flitter around getting douchier, while he tries to figure out why he's not yet living the rarefied life he was destined for.
Not quite. There are a few kinks in the predictable plot arc which occur early and are carried through. Without being too spoiler-y, two of them are that Potter's girlfriend is on a European backpacking trip without him -- with their bisexual friend, actually -- doing who knows what with who knows whom, and sending Potter sporadic pictures and packages that don't ever reveal their meaning. So much of the book is filtered through Potter's questions about how much -- and if -- he really loves / loved Audrey, and what he will do when she comes back.
Another hitch is that Potter had an older brother who died as a young child. I don't want to discuss this much more, because there is a lot of the plot that hinges on this, and Freddy's effects on the characters are startling, chilling, and often beautifully sad. I leave the readers to discover these for themselves.
There's more, of course. One unexpected thing that Potter chooses to do is to get a manual-labor job, driving and lugging huge jugs of water all around the city. There is a nice dichotomy, therefore, between the relative wealth and easy life he has always known vs. that of his coworkers, who are all older, coarser, no-nonsense-er, and who all despise him to varying degrees. And there is further contrast with the lives of the people to whom Potter delivers the water, many of whom are actually really poor, living brittle lives in rundown shacks.
In one of these shacks lives a tween boy, Ian, whom Potter -- in another unexpected twist -- comes to befriend. Again, I don't want to give a lot away, but the relationship between Ian and Potter is both consistently surprising and sometimes desperately sad.
The last thing, plotwise, that I will mention is Potter's hot younger next-door neighbor Zoe. Their relationship is also surprising (though maybe less so than Potter and Ian), and their interactions are not only clearly the most achingly beautiful in the whole book, they're some of the flat-out most terrific budding-romance-type scenes I can remember reading ever. Stunning, wonderful, magical. Brilliant. I would gladly read a whole book of Potter and Zoe.
So. There's all of these strands, all of these elements -- and more, but come on, this is getting long enough. And it's great, the pacing is great, the dialogue is great, the characters are believable and unique and interesting. But here's where we get to the part where I fell away from loving this book. Because about two thirds of the way through, the whole thing spins and there is a twist which I found totally un-believable, and everything thereafter seemed much more forced to me, much less natural and believable and real. And worse than that, I can't help feeling that Beachy consciously decided that he had to do this to... I don't know, elevate his work, to make it move away from simple realism and normalcy and into something else, something higher, I guess. It all felt way too intentional, I guess, and instead of following an easy trajectory, he shot way away. And he lost me. I mean, I still really loved the book, but I just lost the sense of trust I had in the author, I guess.
(Note: for pretty much the exact opposite reaction to the above, please see this review by the always amazing Jason Pettus.)
It's a bit hard to explain why I think this is so. I mean, this is a book written to appeal almost directly to me, for one thing. It's practically about me, or at least plenty of people I know. The hero is Potter Mays, upper-middle class disaffected overly smart kid who just graduated college and has (somewhat) sheepishly moved back in with his parents -- just for the moment, of course, while he figures out what he's doing next. He's constantly thrust into the midst of everyone he went to high school with, many of whom are on the cusp of being successful, either financially or familially. It's summer, and he spends most of his time having semi-awkward exchanges with his parents or retreating to his best friend's poolhouse to get stoned.
So this is a nice, easy plot, right? A calm slacker bildungsroman, sort of, where the too-smart hero watches all the douchebags he used to know flitter around getting douchier, while he tries to figure out why he's not yet living the rarefied life he was destined for.
Not quite. There are a few kinks in the predictable plot arc which occur early and are carried through. Without being too spoiler-y, two of them are that Potter's girlfriend is on a European backpacking trip without him -- with their bisexual friend, actually -- doing who knows what with who knows whom, and sending Potter sporadic pictures and packages that don't ever reveal their meaning. So much of the book is filtered through Potter's questions about how much -- and if -- he really loves / loved Audrey, and what he will do when she comes back.
Another hitch is that Potter had an older brother who died as a young child. I don't want to discuss this much more, because there is a lot of the plot that hinges on this, and Freddy's effects on the characters are startling, chilling, and often beautifully sad. I leave the readers to discover these for themselves.
There's more, of course. One unexpected thing that Potter chooses to do is to get a manual-labor job, driving and lugging huge jugs of water all around the city. There is a nice dichotomy, therefore, between the relative wealth and easy life he has always known vs. that of his coworkers, who are all older, coarser, no-nonsense-er, and who all despise him to varying degrees. And there is further contrast with the lives of the people to whom Potter delivers the water, many of whom are actually really poor, living brittle lives in rundown shacks.
In one of these shacks lives a tween boy, Ian, whom Potter -- in another unexpected twist -- comes to befriend. Again, I don't want to give a lot away, but the relationship between Ian and Potter is both consistently surprising and sometimes desperately sad.
The last thing, plotwise, that I will mention is Potter's hot younger next-door neighbor Zoe. Their relationship is also surprising (though maybe less so than Potter and Ian), and their interactions are not only clearly the most achingly beautiful in the whole book, they're some of the flat-out most terrific budding-romance-type scenes I can remember reading ever. Stunning, wonderful, magical. Brilliant. I would gladly read a whole book of Potter and Zoe.
So. There's all of these strands, all of these elements -- and more, but come on, this is getting long enough. And it's great, the pacing is great, the dialogue is great, the characters are believable and unique and interesting. But here's where we get to the part where I fell away from loving this book. Because about two thirds of the way through, the whole thing spins and there is a twist which I found totally un-believable, and everything thereafter seemed much more forced to me, much less natural and believable and real. And worse than that, I can't help feeling that Beachy consciously decided that he had to do this to... I don't know, elevate his work, to make it move away from simple realism and normalcy and into something else, something higher, I guess. It all felt way too intentional, I guess, and instead of following an easy trajectory, he shot way away. And he lost me. I mean, I still really loved the book, but I just lost the sense of trust I had in the author, I guess.
(Note: for pretty much the exact opposite reaction to the above, please see this review by the always amazing Jason Pettus.)
February 12, 2009
Note: I wrote this review for publication, but it got killed (editor had double-booked reviews of the same title by accident). That's why it sounds a little more formal than the GR standard. But enjoy!
Bestselling self-help books call it the quarter-life crisis; psychologists call it the post-college transition. To first-time novelist Kyle Beachy, it's the slide: the disorienting time when college has ended and adulthood hovers in the wings, both too close and too far away.
Beachy's main character, Potter Mays, is spending the first summer after graduation at his parents' cushy home in suburban Saint Louis. He has a lot on his mind: the fate of his relationship with his college girlfriend, Audrey, pocked by mutual infidelity and probably on its last legs. His deteriorating best-friendship with Stuart, a young eccentric of untold wealth who has taken up residence in his family's pool house. The first intimation of fault lines in his even-keeled parents' marriage. The troubles of a sagacious young boy he's met while doing the rounds of his summer job, delivering bottled water to the city's thirsty. The girl next door, a Saint Louis Lolita in need of an SAT tutor. And last but not least, the appearance of a real live family ghost in his attic.
Beachy, who grew up in Saint Louis, writes about place very well, describing the city with a winning combination of real affection and critical detachment. Potter enters "the kitchen nooks of houses bigger and colder than museums of modern art," where he "switched out bottles while housewives looked through Lands' End catalogs." There's a gem like that on almost every page. There's also a winsome sweetness to the writing. Potter's love for his parents, the estranged Audrey, his city, his dead brother Freddy, the game of baseball—they all come through loud, clear, and refreshing as a slug of cool, purified H20. Well-paced, often funny dialogue keeps things moving along.
The plot isn't always as successful as the prose style. A certain amount of zaniness is introduced, perhaps to make up for the things that aren't inherently dramatic about Potter's situation; some of the sub-plots complement Potter's inner movement, while others contribute mainly color and noise. Even so, The Slide brims with charms, and occasional moments of profundity as it shines a light on a young man's experience of one of the strangest life changes that our society knows.
Bestselling self-help books call it the quarter-life crisis; psychologists call it the post-college transition. To first-time novelist Kyle Beachy, it's the slide: the disorienting time when college has ended and adulthood hovers in the wings, both too close and too far away.
Beachy's main character, Potter Mays, is spending the first summer after graduation at his parents' cushy home in suburban Saint Louis. He has a lot on his mind: the fate of his relationship with his college girlfriend, Audrey, pocked by mutual infidelity and probably on its last legs. His deteriorating best-friendship with Stuart, a young eccentric of untold wealth who has taken up residence in his family's pool house. The first intimation of fault lines in his even-keeled parents' marriage. The troubles of a sagacious young boy he's met while doing the rounds of his summer job, delivering bottled water to the city's thirsty. The girl next door, a Saint Louis Lolita in need of an SAT tutor. And last but not least, the appearance of a real live family ghost in his attic.
Beachy, who grew up in Saint Louis, writes about place very well, describing the city with a winning combination of real affection and critical detachment. Potter enters "the kitchen nooks of houses bigger and colder than museums of modern art," where he "switched out bottles while housewives looked through Lands' End catalogs." There's a gem like that on almost every page. There's also a winsome sweetness to the writing. Potter's love for his parents, the estranged Audrey, his city, his dead brother Freddy, the game of baseball—they all come through loud, clear, and refreshing as a slug of cool, purified H20. Well-paced, often funny dialogue keeps things moving along.
The plot isn't always as successful as the prose style. A certain amount of zaniness is introduced, perhaps to make up for the things that aren't inherently dramatic about Potter's situation; some of the sub-plots complement Potter's inner movement, while others contribute mainly color and noise. Even so, The Slide brims with charms, and occasional moments of profundity as it shines a light on a young man's experience of one of the strangest life changes that our society knows.
July 24, 2008
the book is good, and it is funny, and it is sad, and it is (oh god dare I say it ) heartwarming and if you don't know kyle already it is probably going to make you fall in love with him, which was probably the (not so secret) reason he wrote the book in the first place - so watch out, young and open hearts of the world - watch out for 2009
Read
February 9, 2021Okay, so at first I'm thinking coming-of-age tale, and typical in some ways, drugs, loss, sex, fractured families, and on and on, but good, the Kyle Beachy can definitely write, and then we're thinking, nice, it's also a celebration of St. Louis and the mid-west, and I like that, its different, and again, the Beachy can you know, write, but then like 200 pages in, its something all together different, a story suddenly filled with twists and turns, chaos, violence, and goodness; a story I couldn't put down because I had to know what came next. And that's good stuff. And that's why I read. Nice work dude.
September 10, 2014
(disclaimer i know the author from telepresence and have had the pleasure of sharing a non-telepresence beverage with him, so salt my stars to your taste)
I was either never young enough or old enough, even when I was young enough, to appreciate coming-of-age stories. I always resented the genre because i cynically suspected its implementations to be either wisdom from someone unfairly young to have it or just unripened bile. and by "I was" i mean mostly I am. So I was a little uncertain, even with the data of knowing the author to be a talented and savvy assembler of words, about reading what is putatively a coming-of-age novel about being 22 and home from college back at the home of your soon-to-divorced parents.
So I was delighted and professionally entertained by this book that is actually a gnomic sweltering revision of Hamlet, the story of a mad prince who cannot manage the responsibilities of being attached to a full-sized penis, in the words of page 270 something. A few of the elements of the book trail off into something like incompletion but such reflections of life as The Slide captures are an incomplete thing. The best you can hope for is to change in parallel, the author tells us. Anyway I am officially reading into the device that I read this book, and that I endorse it for the use of anyone with a gimlet eye or ear for the contradictions and collisions of post-childhod human life circa 2000 AD USA suburbia. unquestionably the best novel written in part about the 2001 st. louis cardinals.
I was either never young enough or old enough, even when I was young enough, to appreciate coming-of-age stories. I always resented the genre because i cynically suspected its implementations to be either wisdom from someone unfairly young to have it or just unripened bile. and by "I was" i mean mostly I am. So I was a little uncertain, even with the data of knowing the author to be a talented and savvy assembler of words, about reading what is putatively a coming-of-age novel about being 22 and home from college back at the home of your soon-to-divorced parents.
So I was delighted and professionally entertained by this book that is actually a gnomic sweltering revision of Hamlet, the story of a mad prince who cannot manage the responsibilities of being attached to a full-sized penis, in the words of page 270 something. A few of the elements of the book trail off into something like incompletion but such reflections of life as The Slide captures are an incomplete thing. The best you can hope for is to change in parallel, the author tells us. Anyway I am officially reading into the device that I read this book, and that I endorse it for the use of anyone with a gimlet eye or ear for the contradictions and collisions of post-childhod human life circa 2000 AD USA suburbia. unquestionably the best novel written in part about the 2001 st. louis cardinals.
March 17, 2009
This is, in many ways, a very standard, traditional coming of age novel about a kid who moves back home the summer after he graduates college. Nothing special there.
But it's set in St. Louis, and that REALLY affects things. Like.. it's one thing to read a novel about a guy in his 20s who's lost and directionless and searching for meaning and significance in his life. But it's another thing entirely when the guy you're reading about is doing all those things RIGHT DOWN THE STREET from you. It becomes especially.. I dunno. Powerful.
Add to that the fact that the book focuses a great deal on (for lack of a better term) "St. Louis High Society," and you get a whole other dimension at work here. It's like.. I can read it and say to myself, "YES. THESE are the people who make St Louis so... St. Louisy. These are the ones who are obsessed with what high school you went to, and they'll never-ever-ever leave, and they just ... GAH." I don't know. The book's really good. I loved it.
But it's set in St. Louis, and that REALLY affects things. Like.. it's one thing to read a novel about a guy in his 20s who's lost and directionless and searching for meaning and significance in his life. But it's another thing entirely when the guy you're reading about is doing all those things RIGHT DOWN THE STREET from you. It becomes especially.. I dunno. Powerful.
Add to that the fact that the book focuses a great deal on (for lack of a better term) "St. Louis High Society," and you get a whole other dimension at work here. It's like.. I can read it and say to myself, "YES. THESE are the people who make St Louis so... St. Louisy. These are the ones who are obsessed with what high school you went to, and they'll never-ever-ever leave, and they just ... GAH." I don't know. The book's really good. I loved it.
May 31, 2009
Good, fun, and quick read. Loved reading as a person who is the age of the narrator and as a person who has briefly met the author and would be proud of a Chicago writing wunderkind. Beachy is not a wunderkind, but competent, perhaps a little too influenced by his MFA. His first "story of a post-grad" novel does not shape up to be nearly as good as This Side of Paradise, or The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (and I'm only in the middle of the second). Maybe it's not fair to compare Beachy to Fitzgerald or even Chabon, but if you want to be a great writer, aren't those your competitors or peers? It just doesn't quite live up-- moments are contrived, metaphor is heavy, and it just seems like this book is primed to be adapted into a movie directed by and starring Zach Braff with an indie rock soundtrack that college kids will love.
May 12, 2009
There are some nice little bits of linguistic innovation going on from this book, however aside from that I felt there was a lot of missed opportunity and characters that had no currency: they weren't likable, let alone interesting. I kept because I always felt the book was on the precipice of delving into something really significant and because I love the St. Louis Cardinals, but in the end I felt disappointed on a number of levels. It seems the overarching message I was left with was that everybody is pretty terrible, but we'll all be okay--maybe that's significant/correct but I feel like I've read that in better crafted books. It was like the Moviegoer without a lot of what made the Moviegoer great.
Good first effort though, and I still root for this author, but not blindly.
Good first effort though, and I still root for this author, but not blindly.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 17, 2010
I was in St. Louis this week. I visited the Arch and knocked on it as if to determine its quality. I made up a game wherein I have the means to travel to a new city for the sole occasion of reading a novel based in that city. (This game has one round.) For this round I picked The Slide by Kyle Beachy and read the whole thing over the course of two days. It’s an exciting book, full of imaginative bounds and small experiments and other freshness. I had an incredible feeling reading about downtown as I experienced downtown. The book was in my bag when I knocked on the Arch. Recommended.
July 4, 2008
Incredible book. Beachy put it on. Funny, enthralling, dark (yes) and hotly well wrote- in the way that makes you want to reread it, quote it, steal lines and pass em off as your own at a party.
You all better pre order right now.
You all better pre order right now.
June 15, 2009
I can't recommend this book enough -- it was a fast, fun read with many poignant passages. I am shocked that this is a debut novel -- the story is well-crafted and well-told and very original. Easily the best thing I've read in a while...
December 17, 2012
Pedestrian all around. Portrait of neglected kid in Oakville (my hometown) is one-dimensional, obviously written from vantage point of a Claytonian who's never been south of 44. Disappointing - somebody's going to write a great novel about St. Louis, but this ain't it.
July 1, 2009
Loved it! Took a weird turn at the end and I didn't appreciate all the Cubs bashing, but hey.... it is set in St. Louis.
April 6, 2024
Really gorgeously written book, and there are such baseball gems hidden here and there.
June 10, 2017
Long harsh boring
A long jaunt into the ennui of a pretentious liberal arts post grad. Very long winded, very painful to read.
A long jaunt into the ennui of a pretentious liberal arts post grad. Very long winded, very painful to read.
July 30, 2017
A well-written debut, but The Slide just didn't work for me. I found myself wanting to punch the narrator/Potter Mays in the face for all his whining, obscene privilege and stupid decisions, not the least of which was (SPOILER ALERT) committing statutory rape on his 16-year-old neighbor. Not only does Potter get away with it, the incident is treated as his burden, rather than giving us any indication of how the girl really felt about it. We're told -- via Potter the narrator -- that she seems fine with their brief sexual encounter and that everything is great because she wasn't a virgin and soon after starts dating a boy from her class. Swell! There are some other equally aggravating events that occur, but I'm not going to spoil everything.
Despite all that, I still stuck with the book until the end because Beachy did create a very interesting study of an upper middle class family in crisis. And whether or not he intended this, he also slips in scenes that illustrate the growing divide between the upper crust and "working class." I found it very satisfying (SPOILER ALERT) when Ian's father beats the shit out of Potter at the batting cages. The father says he's doing it to teach Potter a lesson, but I'm left wondering if Potter really learned anything at all or if it was just a wasted summer for a spoiled, directionless millennial.
Despite all that, I still stuck with the book until the end because Beachy did create a very interesting study of an upper middle class family in crisis. And whether or not he intended this, he also slips in scenes that illustrate the growing divide between the upper crust and "working class." I found it very satisfying (SPOILER ALERT) when Ian's father beats the shit out of Potter at the batting cages. The father says he's doing it to teach Potter a lesson, but I'm left wondering if Potter really learned anything at all or if it was just a wasted summer for a spoiled, directionless millennial.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 16, 2017
Potter Mays spends the summer after college back home in St. Louis wondering about the meaning of love and family, rooting for the Cardinals and feeling adrift. Often very funny, but also wise. Nice to see a novel set in St. Louis, and anyone familiar with the city will recognize various touchstones and attitudes.
July 6, 2023
If you were born in the 80's and grew up in St. Louis, you should read this, especially if you live baseball. The coming of age is set in all the places we're familiar with and teases out details we were too young to notice. The plot is based on the ennui of a college graduate who I thought was losing his mind, but maybe he wasn't. I'm still not sure.
January 2, 2019
Maybe I'm just getting older, but so many of these stories about millennials are not enjoyable, primarily because the characters are so annoying unlikable. This is the story of Potter Mays, a college graduate who moves home after graduation and spends his time obsessing over his girlfriend who is now in Europe with a bisexual female friend and may or may not have broken up with him before leaving. It seems like Potter is determined to screw up every relationship he has, and all you can do is shake your head in disgust while reading.
Perhaps part of the problem is that none of the characters really have any depth, including Potter, whose motives are unclear. He has a best friend that doesn't seem to like him much, parents that seem loving on the surface but also seem to ignore him, an underage neighbor who inexplicably strikes up a friendship, and the above-mentioned girlfriend. Other than that he has no friends (in a town he has lived in all his life), and doesn't seem at all interested in having any.
Perhaps part of the problem is that none of the characters really have any depth, including Potter, whose motives are unclear. He has a best friend that doesn't seem to like him much, parents that seem loving on the surface but also seem to ignore him, an underage neighbor who inexplicably strikes up a friendship, and the above-mentioned girlfriend. Other than that he has no friends (in a town he has lived in all his life), and doesn't seem at all interested in having any.
May 30, 2023
Interesting coming of age story. Potter moves back home after finishing college and how he deals with that. I actually thought the side characters were the most interesting.
May 3, 2009
After catching wind of the acclaim regarding Beachy's debut novel, I delved into The Slide with high expectations. And yes, I may have shot myself in the foot, but it's nearly impossible to read a book, see a movie, or play a video game without hearing other opinions about it beforehand. Then there's the notion of the "world view," and how it will affect one's reactions. But I digress prior to even getting started.
Luckily, this book's characters are all memorable, suggesting that characterization is one of Beachy's strengths as a writer. Still, I didn't warm up to the characters. Carla (Potter's mom) is static, I think, and I find it strange that Potter refers to his parents by their first names. I'm not fond of the narrator's diction, either, because I just don't buy that a twenty-two-year-old would talk like this--even an intelligent one with an English degree. If I'm not mistaken, the reader isn't aware of how much time has passed since the novel's events took place and the point in time at which Potter Mays is relaying them. Past tense allows for this, so my opinion about the narration's formality may be off base. Similarly, the dialogue was stilted in places. Again, I couldn't always believe it captured conversations as they'd actually play out. There's a fine line between dialogue that is too realistic and dialogue that isn't realistic enough.
Regarding positives, The Slide has several. For example, while the time frame concerns what will seemingly turn out to be a ho-hum summer for a recent college graduate, the plot is unpredictable. The book is heavily grounded in St. Louis, and the details therein not only cement this, but also enhance the reading experience. I enjoyed hearing about the Arch and the Cardinals. In fact, baseball is referenced a lot, and it all feels authentic, like genuine knowledge of the game, its rules, and its players. The cover art is gorgeous and relevant. And The Slide, as a title, functions on multiple levels, which is a huge plus. Thankfully, the book ends on a hopeful note, wrapping up loose ends to the extent that they won't raise any questions.
Beachy is a nice guy, so I hope I gave his novel a fair assessment.
Luckily, this book's characters are all memorable, suggesting that characterization is one of Beachy's strengths as a writer. Still, I didn't warm up to the characters. Carla (Potter's mom) is static, I think, and I find it strange that Potter refers to his parents by their first names. I'm not fond of the narrator's diction, either, because I just don't buy that a twenty-two-year-old would talk like this--even an intelligent one with an English degree. If I'm not mistaken, the reader isn't aware of how much time has passed since the novel's events took place and the point in time at which Potter Mays is relaying them. Past tense allows for this, so my opinion about the narration's formality may be off base. Similarly, the dialogue was stilted in places. Again, I couldn't always believe it captured conversations as they'd actually play out. There's a fine line between dialogue that is too realistic and dialogue that isn't realistic enough.
Regarding positives, The Slide has several. For example, while the time frame concerns what will seemingly turn out to be a ho-hum summer for a recent college graduate, the plot is unpredictable. The book is heavily grounded in St. Louis, and the details therein not only cement this, but also enhance the reading experience. I enjoyed hearing about the Arch and the Cardinals. In fact, baseball is referenced a lot, and it all feels authentic, like genuine knowledge of the game, its rules, and its players. The cover art is gorgeous and relevant. And The Slide, as a title, functions on multiple levels, which is a huge plus. Thankfully, the book ends on a hopeful note, wrapping up loose ends to the extent that they won't raise any questions.
Beachy is a nice guy, so I hope I gave his novel a fair assessment.
September 4, 2009
This book is very subtle. It seems like not much is going on with Potter, recent college grad back at home in Missouri, but a lot is going on. He has parents he doesn't feel entirely comfortable around; he has a rich pal; an ex-girlfriend; a temp job; a hot neighbor; a lonely kid whom he befriends; and a dead brother.
Yes, on some level he's trying to figure out himself, but it's not self-conscious. His reflections on what he sees and experiences—some of his descriptions are wittily good—don't come off as condescending because he's always one step behind everyone. Always scrambling.
It took me almost the entire book to figure out that the whole time he was suffering a broken heart. (He never cried. Guys hold a lot inside). But even though Potter is kind of sad and lonely, and he's in that time of life between leaving adolescence and defining one's adulthood, you know things are going to change for him. He even says that at one point, that things are always changing. And yet still there are those constants you can rely on—which is what I got from the end of this book: his dad, his mom, a friend, and baseball season.
Yes, on some level he's trying to figure out himself, but it's not self-conscious. His reflections on what he sees and experiences—some of his descriptions are wittily good—don't come off as condescending because he's always one step behind everyone. Always scrambling.
It took me almost the entire book to figure out that the whole time he was suffering a broken heart. (He never cried. Guys hold a lot inside). But even though Potter is kind of sad and lonely, and he's in that time of life between leaving adolescence and defining one's adulthood, you know things are going to change for him. He even says that at one point, that things are always changing. And yet still there are those constants you can rely on—which is what I got from the end of this book: his dad, his mom, a friend, and baseball season.
September 18, 2009
what an interesting book. i don't want to compare it to AHWOSG, but it was the same type of 'hmm, i haven't seen that writing style before' and it does take a bit of time to adjust to it. not sure i actually adjusted to it by the end of the book.
it's different in the sense that this isn't a long book, but it isn't a quick read. i went back numerous times to the paragraph i had just read thinking 'huh, i must have dazed out there b/c all of the sudden i'm somewhere and i'm not quite sure where'. nope, i didn't daze out, it was just the writing style. i appreciate that considering where the potter is at in his life. i thought it was an effective tool to make the reader more able to relate to him.
i don't have all that much in common with him, but there were a number of times that i put down the book to think back on my own life because of a memory that was sparked.
oh, and i almost forgot to mention the numerous giggles i emitted during this book.
i await, with great anticipation, his next book.
it's different in the sense that this isn't a long book, but it isn't a quick read. i went back numerous times to the paragraph i had just read thinking 'huh, i must have dazed out there b/c all of the sudden i'm somewhere and i'm not quite sure where'. nope, i didn't daze out, it was just the writing style. i appreciate that considering where the potter is at in his life. i thought it was an effective tool to make the reader more able to relate to him.
i don't have all that much in common with him, but there were a number of times that i put down the book to think back on my own life because of a memory that was sparked.
oh, and i almost forgot to mention the numerous giggles i emitted during this book.
i await, with great anticipation, his next book.
June 7, 2011
Based on responses from some whose opinions I respect very much, I really wanted to love this book. Unfortunately, it just didn't float my boat all that much. It was a fine book with some very fine writing in it. At his lyrical best, Beachy is a very solid writer. But on the whole, I just felt sort of meh about the story and lacked the sense of place that seems to make the book appeal to many reviewers.
I do find myself wondering if this isn't a book that appeals to a younger audience than I (oh dear) find myself these days to belong to. Maybe I'm getting too old and crotchety to very much enjoy a coming-of-age story.
All that said, I'd read another of Beachy's, as I do see potential there. This one just wasn't my particular style.
I do find myself wondering if this isn't a book that appeals to a younger audience than I (oh dear) find myself these days to belong to. Maybe I'm getting too old and crotchety to very much enjoy a coming-of-age story.
All that said, I'd read another of Beachy's, as I do see potential there. This one just wasn't my particular style.
February 22, 2013
Like most kids out of college these days moving back home is a must while tackling the career world, but sometimes being at home can get a little too…not comfortable per se, but put you in a rut…a very, very deep one. For twenty-two year old Potter Mays, in The Slide by Kyle Beachy, that is the case. While having breakfast prepared every morning by your mother and having your best friend as your life coach might sound fine and dandy; it’s all a mirage. The underlying issues of home, relationships, and real life are overwhelming there ready to explode and at the end of it all Potter will have to grow up.
*posted on shelftalk.spl.org
*posted on shelftalk.spl.org
March 4, 2009
realistically speaking, I thought this was a pretty decent first novel. I'm giving it 2 stars because of failed potential. Beachy introduces a plethora of engaging characters, but the problem is there's a plethora of them. some of the better ones, like Zoe, Potter's "angelic" 16 year-old neighbor, get such little focus that it's difficult to consider them anything less than devices to move the unoriginal plot along. maybe if Potter Mays, Beachy's main character, was half as sympathetic of a character as Beachy wants him to be, this major fault would be more forgivable. but he's not.
this was an alright book that would have been much better if it were a good 10,000 words longer.
this was an alright book that would have been much better if it were a good 10,000 words longer.
Read
December 24, 2010The Slide is a great novel. It's wonderfully and uniquely descriptive on every page, triggering little recognitions or discoveries. The characters' voices are perfect; he's drawn together a wonderful mix of people who seem eccentric and totally normal at the same time. After being surprised by some turn of events, I would then realize that the event made perfect sense; he had subtly set it up earlier. The characters manage to be hip and cool like modern people, but not in an annoying or ironic or shallow way. Beachy is unafraid to get at the uncomfortable, vulnerable truth underneath the surface.
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