Thumbsucker

This eighties-centric, Ritalin-fueled, pitch-perfect comic novel by a writer to watch brings energy and originality to the classic Midwestern coming-of-age story.Meet Justin Cobb, "the King Kong of oral obsessives" (as his dentist dubs him) and the most appealingly bright and screwed-up fictional adolescent since Holden Caulfield donned his hunter's cap. For years, no remedy--not orthodontia, not the escalating threats of his father, Mike, a washed-out linebacker turned sporting goods entrepreneur, not the noxious cayenne pepper-based Suk-No-Mor--can cure Justin's thumbsucking habit.Then a course of hypnosis seemingly does the trick, but true to the conservation of neurotic energy, the problem doesn't so much disappear as relocate. Sex, substance abuse, speech team, fly-fishing, honest work, even Mormonism--Justin throws himself into each pursuit with a hyperactive energy that even his daily Ritalin dose does little to blunt.Each time, however, he discovers that there is no escaping the unruly imperatives of his self and the confines of his deeply eccentric family. The only "cure" for the adolescent condition is time and distance.Always funny, sometimes hilariously so, occasionally poignant, and even disturbing, deeply wise on the vexed subject of fathers and sons, Walter Kirn's Thumbsucker is an utterly fresh and all-American take on the painful process of growing up.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Anchor Books
Published: 10/19/1999
ISBN: 9780385497091
Pages: 320
Weight: 0.50lbs
Size: 7.97h x 5.25w x 0.75d

Review Citations: Booklist 07/01/1999 pg. 1923
Publishers Weekly 08/16/1999 pg. 57
Library Journal 08/01/1999 pg. 140
Vanity Fair 10/01/1999 pg. 252
Kirkus Reviews 09/01/1999 pg. 1333
New Yorker (The) 11/08/1999 pg. 92
New York Times 10/31/1999 pg. 16
New York Times 12/05/1999 pg. 80
School Library Journal 06/01/2000 pg. 173

Accelerated Reader Quiz #/Name: 62804 / Thumbsucker
Reading Level: 4.9 / Interest Level: Upper Grade / Point Value: 10