Best of 2009: James Magruder's Sugarless

James Magruder's Sugarless is my favorite book of 2009. In the book, Rick--the narrator--looks back on a formative period in his life with astonishing insight and nostalgia, feeling again, through the telling of them, all of the thrills and anguish of becoming an adult. It offers the reader the vicarious pleasure of watching Rick negotiate his initiation into the sexual world, and then complicates that pleasure with honest depictions of the failure, loss, and grief which constitute mature self-awareness and social existence.

Along the way, we experience surprisingly clear yet complex descriptions of Rick's self-discovery: puzzling out the tangles of sexual desire, family, and social relationships, and of the ways that people talk around and about both the important and trivial things of life. As confusion resolves into certainty, Rick, his world, and the important people in it hurtle with all of the intensity of adolescence to a crisis as unexpected as it seems inevitable. Rick's conflicts and strength and emotional landscape shine through the prose with amazing clarity. The last chapter, in which an older Rick looks back on his life, expresses the losses of youth with a beautifully understated profundity.

I wholeheartedly agree with Tony Kushner's applause: "The texture of Rick's world and the details of his experience ring true and important, with emotional depths that warrant and reward repeated re-readings" (from the back of the book).

You should take a look at the website for the novel--it has a great trailer (when did books start having trailers, anyway?) and lots of interesting tidbits about the author and his work:

http://www.jamesmagruder.com/