In this 60th anniversary year of the quintessential novel of New York teen angst, Catcher in the Rye, Jesse Browner's Everything Happens Today updates Holden Caulfield and perhaps even bests Salinger with a funnier, kinder and wiser tale.
Born Leslie, Wes took up his new name when a summer campmate misheard his mumbled "Les." ("Any idea how hard it is for a boy named Leslie?") He's no alienated whiner--just a sensitive, iPhone-toting 17-year-old with a knack for creative writing and a fantasy longing for his aloof Dalton School classmate Delia. This romance is not to be consummated; instead, he loses his virginity to the school flirt Lucy after several Bloody Marys at her Upper East Side vacationing parents' apartment.
Wes's long day continues with a contemplative walk back home to Greenwich Village--a day in which "Everything had happened, and nothing had happened." He is the family caregiver, watching over his bedridden mother dying of MS; his deadbeat, philandering, "failed novelist" father; and his adorable, innocent little sister. The day ends with his surprisingly competent cooking of sweetbreads and baby bok choy in an unsuccessful attempt at a congenial family meal.
With a sympathetic understanding of today's teen world, Browner (translator, journalist and author of the surprise hit The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down) perfectly captures the language and confusion of a life that is "all too complicated; it made War and Peace feel like The Runaway Bunny." –-Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kans.