Zachary Lazar: Aaron, Approximately
Many novelists, particularly first-time novelists, have a coming-of-age story to get out of their systems. Fortunately for them, there's an eternal audience willing to identify with coming-of-age stories, even if the genre itself is among the most personal around. There's a reason that both The Sorrows Of Young Werther and The Catcher In The Rye have been said to inspire powerful anti-social behavior, while the same isn't said for, say, A Tale Of Two Cities. Both those works, along with A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man and Quadrophrenia, get name-checked in Zachary Lazar's Aaron, Approximately. Lazar's awareness that he's writing the latest installment in a long tradition of coming-age-stories—and not the ultimate example of the form—helps Aaron, Approximately sidestep the overwrought teen angst you might expect from a glance at the book's dust jacket. Narrated by its protagonist Aaron Bright, an intelligent, creatively inclined, restless Jewish kid from Colorado, Aaron, Approximately jumps back in forth chronologically to cover various rites of passage in his life. These begin with the death of his father, a popular host of a local children's variety show, in a skydiving accident, and continue through flirtations with punk nihilism; an intense teenage love affair; self-conscious, beat-inspired college pretentiousness; and, inevitably, adulthood. Lazar comes from a generation as conversant with Jello Biafra as Rainer Maria Rilke, and it's to his credit that he is able to illustrate the importance of both without getting bogged down in cultural references. The characters are fully realized, and Lazar skillfully handles the story in a way that keeps the angst in check without softening it. Whether Aaron, Approximately finds a receptive audience remains to be seen, but by itself, it's a promising debut that makes Lazar's next work worth anticipating, now that the requisite bildungsroman is behind him.