A Map of Tulsa by Benjamin Lytal
Monday, April 15, 2013 at 1:57PM
TChris in Benjamin Lytal, General Fiction, Recent Release

Published by Penguin Books on March 26, 2013

A Map of Tulsa is both a love story and a coming of age novel. The former is more successful than the latter.

Jim Praley is back in Tulsa for the summer, having finished his freshman year of college. He soon finds himself hanging out with Adrienne, the sexually adventurous daughter of a wealthy family. Having dropped out of high school, Adrienne wants to be an artist (an avocation Jim encourages by sharing the knowledge he gained in the art history class he took during his freshman year) or a singer.

Jim is an odd duck, sometimes too odd to believe. He tells us that buying condoms is an "embarrassment that was endemic to my heart." Apart from his questionable use of the word "endemic," this story isn't set in the 1950s when buyers had to ask a pharmacist for condoms that were kept behind the counter. I find it hard to believe he couldn't go to Target (his favorite store in Tulsa) and toss a package of condoms into his shopping cart without upsetting his heart. Jim can't take Adrienne to Target because Target reminds him of his childhood and he "kept certain parts of myself back," including -- for reasons I can't begin to fathom -- shopping at Target. Jim seems to think that's deep, but I thought it was a little silly.  Too many instances of silliness masquerading as depth mar this novel.

Part one establishes Jim's relationship with Adrienne. Part two begins with Jim's return to Tulsa five years later. Adrienne's life has changed drastically, while Jim (despite living and working in New York) hasn't changed in any meaningful way. In a conventional coming of age novel, the protagonist makes a life-altering decision, faces a moral crisis, or in some other way loses innocence, gains wisdom, or takes a significant step toward maturity. True to the convention, Jim does learn something about himself in part two, although I'm not sure he's any more "adult" at the end of the novel than he was at the beginning. More significantly, he learns something about the meaning and nature of love,.  While the lesson isn't terribly enlightening, it is the novel's strength.

Benjamin Lytal conveys honest emotion when he writes about Jim's feelings for Adrienne. In other respects, his prose is troubling. A writing style that seems determined to be witty or ironic or profound too often comes across as childish. I had the impression that Lytal was striving for the voice of an eloquent Holden Caulfield. The result is discordant and occasionally jarring. In his apparent determination to be literary, Lytal produces sentences like "She was unconscious, but her lips were grim and full of knowledge." Whatever does that mean? Her lips were ready to take their SATs? I was equally puzzled when, referring to the exhaust from cars on the highway, Jim says "I took in the fumes like sea air." Poisonous gasses are like sea air? Literary prose should seem effortless, while too many of Lytal's sentences are forced. He has some skill as a writer; I hope his next effort is more consistent.

Lytal makes some noteworthy observations about the nature of friendship, particularly the American tendency to abandon old friends and seek out new ones as we move on with our lives. Jim's reflections on his time with Adrienne seem genuine, although they're never as moving Lytal must have intended them to be. I can't say that A Map of Tulsa is a successful novel, but it has its moments.   There are just too few of them.

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