Alan Ackmann

Jim the Boy

by Tony Earley

Earley, who teaches out of Vanderbilt, is attending this year’s Sewenee conference, and his debut novel Jim the Boy (which focuses on a young boy’s coming of age in a small, turn of the century Carolina town) impressed me.

The writing has a sturdy, short clause quality that belies its elegance, and reflects/reveals its character’s dignity. This language is also Jim’s language, and helps his voice seem honest. Also, setting the novel at the turn of the century gives Jim’s maturations some larger, faintly allegorical context and there are images—descriptions of trains first coming to town, and electricity, and celebrity—of the country itself coming into its own. There are things I didn’t like; the structure is a bit too episodic, and some chapters seem more about telling smaller stories than advancing larger ones (although this fragmentation is typical of childhood). Jim the Boy‘s greatest accomplishment, though, is its point of view. I had a professor say he wouldn’t write a story from the perspective of an eleven-year-old if you held a gun to his head, because the mix of what is noticed, what is lost, and what is understood is so peculiar, and a writer needs to describe adult events so that the child (convincingly) does not understand them, but the reader does. Jim the Boy, in addition to being a moving, touching story, is one of the few works I’ve read to accomplish this feat successfully. That alone makes it a worthwhile read.

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