By Liz Soares
Jim Praley is a good boy who returns home to spend the summer with his parents after his freshman year at college. He intends to write poetry, but is drawn to self-consciously revel in the flatness--both literally and figuratively--of his hometown.
Enter Adrienne Booker, high school dropout, heiress, artist, and musician. Jim is infatuated with this cold and self-obsessed enigma. He abandons his writing, and follows her through the empty streets of downtown Tulsa, sleeping on the floor of her studio as she paints, making the bed in her penthouse bedroom.
Jim resists the urge to stay in Tulsa, and returns to college back east. Recovering his creative spirit is not so easy--and he doesn’t hesitate to go back to Oklahoma when disaster strikes.
A Map of Tulsa is a beautifully written book that perfectly captures a type of American city that has no center and no discernible soul. It is natural for young people to want to name and describe their roots once they leave and become just another student. They pin their individuality on the locales they once abhorred. Jim sees the city with the eyes of a poet, perhaps imparting values that aren’t there.
Author Benjamin Lytal’s style occasionally verges on the precious. After spending pages with Jim’s summer adventures, the reader is startled when he returns to college and gets his first job in a couple of paragraphs. Lytal keeps a distance from his characters, who are all annoying to one degree or another, yet they are still irresistibly charismatic.
The reader may be surprised to find herself furiously turning pages in the final third of this nearly plotless novel.
When Jim returns to Tulsa a year after he graduates from college, his parents have retired and moved to Texas. All he has left are the lonely, windy streets of the city, shadowed by skyscrapers, where he once wandered with Adrienne. The reader can only hope he finally makes that connection between what he learned that fateful summer, and the man he hopes to become.
When Jim returns to Tulsa a year after he graduates from college, his parents have retired and moved to Texas. All he has left are the lonely, windy streets of the city, shadowed by skyscrapers, where he once wandered with Adrienne. The reader can only hope he finally makes that connection between what he learned that fateful summer, and the man he hopes to become.
