Whatever its faults, I was sorry it ended: Jim the Boy

Jim the Boy, a novel by Tony Earley, Little Brown (2001).

I enjoyed reading this novel, and came to feel that the young boy, Jim, his bachelor uncles Zeno, Coran, Al, and his mother Elizabeth were people I knew. Earley writes in a plainspoken, intimate manner that is just right for the characters of this rural town in North Carolina in the 1930s. Throughout the book, Jim the boy's father, who died just before Jim the boy was born, is a ghostly presence. The boy yearns to know him, to hear stories about him. To be like him. His widowed mother is courted by a man that her brother Zeno (the head of the family) approves of, and yet she cannot stop her by now morbid devotion to her dead husband. Jim the boy's search for his father ties the different chapters and stories, and small town events together. There are a number of small narratives that intersect, including Jim's awkward friendship with Penn, a boy who is both his best friend and his strongest competitor (though the character of Penn seems a little unfilled).

I sometimes felt the sentiment in the work put a kind of sentimental haze over the characters. The uncles and Jim's mother are so lovingly depicted, they seem a little too saintly. But their mishaps and pain are real enough. Earley's plain style helps prevent the sentiment from overwhelming the stories and characters. Whatever its faults, I was sorry the book ended.