L.A. Kid, by Kevin McAleer; PalmArtPress, £11.52
KEVIN McAleer does it again: a hilarious and thought-provoking novel with the authenticity of autobiography and the reflectiveness of history.
L.A. Kid sweeps from the 1960s to the 1980s, from a child’s earliest memories to the adult’s coming of age, amid choices of friends, locations, colleges and careers.
If this sounds commonplace, that’s the point. A formative life story is epic in the first person, replete with experiences that anchor a psychology, choices that determine a future career, and grievances and regrets that never go away.
McAleer’s distinction is his exquisite mix of profundity and casualness, such that each minor social interaction is loaded with portent, which does not become clear until many interactions turn one kid among many into a particular man.
The kid is raised in Los Angeles, which is a character in its own right – always there, influencing other characters while following its own life cycle. As the hero branches out, Los Angeles grows into California, until a novel that reads like autobiography also reads like social, cultural and political history. The State is already declining into hubris as the hero escapes his own. Already one of his schoolmates is calling it ‘Candyland . . . a pinko-commie plot!’ In an echo of Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, the kid realises ‘the cemeteries looked like golf courses and funeral directors called themselves “life-transition consultants”.’
The book contains much that triggers nostalgia or bitterness. The book starts with the kid’s realisation that Nazis are ‘everywhere’ in popular culture of the 1960s, and wonders why Disneyland doesn’t include Naziland. The kid’s father likes to describe the Korean War as ‘my war’. The kid himself has ‘never known a world without the Vietnam War and had no reason to think I wouldn’t be going’. By the 1970s, his parents send him to a better school in the hope that he’ll stop ‘using “like” and “you know” every third sentence’. A 50-year-old problem, then!
Like McAleer’s 2022 novel Post-Doc, L.A. Kid doesn’t shy from politically incorrect observations of identity. Watching the UCLA Bruins, the kid asks his father why ‘brown’ basketball players are best. His father whispers that they’re not brown, and neither better nor worse. The kid persists, ‘Then why are they better?’ The father responds with a ‘warning squeeze’ that provokes the kid’s awareness of brownness in the crowd and of the sensitivity of race. As a middle-schooler, he admits disadvantages in selling door-to-door next to those ‘ghetto kids’ with ‘their shuck-and-jive pattern, the menacing sulk, the guilt-inducing color’. When he visits a military recruiting post, he notes that it is ‘in a black neighbourhood’.
The kid is white, heterosexual, Catholic, athletic, middle-class, and a lot of other things that big authors reserve for villains. Thus, the kid’s observations on these things are novel (pardon the pun) and counter-normative.
For instance, he is taught not to hit girls, so is vulnerable to girls who threaten to bite him if he doesn’t show his ‘thing’. Then they tease him about his ‘thing’ and tell him he’s going to hell, from their denomination’s perspective.
He gets reprieve at an all-male school, where the boys describe the girls of its sister school as ‘either ‘babes’ or ‘bitches’, although a third view held that they were ‘bitchen babes’.
At the same school, he realises that ‘the Jewish guys didn’t have that ingrained competitive urge of all Catholic schoolboys to see who could be the least Catholic’.
Although the kid’s questions about identity are politically incorrect, they’re not outwardly conservative, they’re just honest and intelligent. How could a wafer be the body of Christ? How did Jesus die for our sins before we commit them? How could the son be the father too? A nun’s description as a ‘Bride of Christ . . . not only increased my catechismal confusion but made me wonder about the wedding and other marital logistics’. A depiction of heaven makes him wonder why it lacks toys and televisions. At this point I wondered whether woke attorneys at the Department of Justice would cite the narrative as yet another trajectory by which Catholics become extremists.
The cultural observations are often uncomfortable, particularly about the kid’s own family. The father leaves a cloud of lime-scented Hai Karate aftershave in the morning, comes home late – due to traffic – to warmed-up Hamburger Helper or tuna casserole, and ‘barricades’ himself behind the newspaper or in front of the television. Weekends he spends underneath Volkswagens in repair. He falls asleep on his creeper board, such that the kid imagines discovering his lifeless body. The father tries to recapture the early years of their relationship, playing wargames or watching war movies, but the kid is evasive, ‘because the shared passion of earlier days was gone and all that remained was the mocking Cheshire Cat grin of these short exchanges’. This is hard to read, as either a son or a father.
Yet the era has compensations that are realised only in retrospect. ‘Those were the days when you put a little underage kid behind the wheel of a go-kart without a helmet or any experience and if he crashed and injured himself, well, better luck next time.’
Sports are the most consistent theme of the kid’s life, and are told with such nuance that L.A. Kid, like McAleer’s 2018 Surferboy, often reads like a manual. The kid and his brother act out the fight between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali while it is playing live on the television, with tactical insights a kid shouldn’t have. The kid is a track star, a running back, but also cynical of a high-flying coach with ‘a measured Texas drawl that was polite on the surface but threatened to blow your head off with a 12-gauge shotgun if you didn’t unswervingly bow to his will’. He’s a swimmer, a polo player, a surfer, although his narrative lacks the era’s celebratory attitude towards the Californian lifestyle. Instead, ‘a pool glittered angrily in the sun’. His final college sport is crew (or rowing), which takes him to national competitions that read like the best sports novel.
L.A. Kid is a rare novel worth keeping for re-reading . . . and to lend to your self-obsessed children.
