The childman cometh
In a piece on The Tyee’s books page, author Kevin Chong ponders the “adultescent,” which he defines as “an adult — typically, a man — who hasn’t quite traded his childlike appetites for age-appropriate attitudes and tastes.” Chong offers a reading list of novels about adultescents, which includes Montreal writer Jonathan Goldstein’s Lenny Bruce Is Dead alongside Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity.
Some of the choices, though, seem like iffy attempts at pigeonholing (whatever the narrator of Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes may be, Quillblog isn’t sure you could simply call him an overgrown teenager), and some are the stretchiest of stretches (The Metamorphosis’s Gregor Samsa? Sure, he’s a “grown man who’s unable to move out of his parents’ house,” but come on…)
Related links:
Click here for Kevin Chong’s essay
