A resonant collection of stories that channels the longings and discontents of the slow drift toward adulthood in suburban New Jersey
“What possible fuckup could I have committed that would have given away my parents’ impending divorce?”
Tweens, teenagers, young adults, and moody combinations of the three fill these pages. Nights are spent sitting beside empty concrete pools; days are spent with rule-breaking, drunk, exceptionally literary substitute teachers. This is the world of Empty Calories and Male Curiosity, a linked short story collection that follows its narrator from grade school through community college and vague imaginings of a future beyond it all.
Stories include “Forever Town,” which is about a town fair and a boy who “pinballed [between] Mom-Dad-Emily, Emily-Dad-Mom…without ever attaching to any,” a boy who experiments with drugs and chases after the love of friends, girls, and parents. The blurry milieu of 90s debauchery, loneliness, and almost painful yearning is familiar, but McLoof imbues the territory with soulful and unsettling prose.
“We were latchkey kids with nothing to do after school except watch TV. We knew the Cool Teacher trope and weren’t going to be taken in so easily; no amount of desk-sitting or Thanks, Bob’s could change that.”
The narrative voice linking these stories is strikingly unsentimental, moving away from easy nostalgia in favor of hard-nosed, raw honesty. A teenage boy, masturbating to his crush’s yearbook picture when she knocks on his window, simply goes with the flow rather than devolving into comic embarrassment or anxiety. Already, he has the world-weary quality of a kid who’s had to look after himself far more, and for far longer, than should be the case.
This comes through in the continuity of the narrator’s observations of himself and others across years. His eyes are innocent, searching, and protective as he interprets his parents’ progressive distancing—from taking separate beds to ignoring each other in the house—and matter-of-factly recalls the demise of a friendship years in the future. This is a voice that accumulates power over time, allowing the collection to feel less like discrete stories and more like the long, unbroken aging—childhood confusion becomes uneasy self-awareness, despair becomes sober acceptance. By condensing this stretch of time into a singular voice, lines between past and future get blurred and we find ourselves living in the mind of someone who is forever caught in the place and time they were born into.
“I’d met Kayla at orientation. She was a pretty girl, the first I’d ever met who I hadn’t grown up with.”
The writing itself has a smooth, adept quality that creates room for riotous lines (a father trying to get along with his son says “I got icicles hanging off my testicles,” to which the son responds, “Iceticles”) and sudden shocking moments, as when a story becomes a recounting of 9/11’s aftermath from a Jersey teenager’s perspective across the water. Such idea-driven pieces are a recurring structure. Many stories take a singular image—looking out at the absence of the Twin Towers from a high New Jersey cul-de-sac; Tom Cruise losing the Best Supporting Actor Oscar award to Michael Caine in 1999—and unfurl it into an evocative vignette. These are all the more impressive when they retain the continuity of time. Often, entire stories play out like stage plays, with neither action nor timelines ever breaking. At a technical level, this an impressive feat, and thematically it manages to metastasize the frustration and ennui on the page into an oppressive claustrophobia off of it. Neither reader nor character can escape the moment.
“We called each other ‘estrogen twin’ and ‘testosterone clone’ because we felt we were the negative- print gender versions of each other, hence our tattoos of the Gemini twins, a couple of idiot brothers who Zeus made immortal in the stars.”
At times, however, this commitment to capturing the place and time leaves the narrative arc unresolved. We occasionally pull up short on the story in efforts to capture the often-unfulfilled stories of youth, but this tendency can sometimes make a story feel fragmentary and elusive.
In the end, the collection is a truly vivid portrait of adolescence, taking place in one tiny part of this massive country—Midland Park, NJ. Almost by necessity, these are partial, foggy, frustrated understandings of a partial, foggy, frustrated season of life. An impressive collection that hones in on the quiet frustrations and ungraspable tragedies of small-town adolescence.
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