McDermott’s dark debut is set among a group of creative writing students in Montana, Missoula. Not that they seem to do much actual writing – protagonist Ed, who is working on a novel about homelessness narrated by an imprisoned paedophile, gets no further than tweaking his “false and tame” draft.
Ed’s boozy and listless life is given a structure of sorts when he falls in love with a small and hearteningly genuine young woman called Taylor. She persuades him to get a long-neglected lump on his arm checked out, and Ed is soon facing big questions about love and mortality that he seems utterly unable to answer.
McDermott writes about academia and small-town America with an enjoyable mix of cynicism and affection, while his account of Ed’s tumour – which is subjected to a battery of baffling tests and several not particularly helpful diagnoses – is both grim and comic. The self-absorbed and evasive Ed isn’t the most sympathetic of narrators, but he anchors a hip, touching and thoroughly readable story that presents young adulthood as a frustrating, alien place.
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