The aging millennial characters in the eight stories of Greg Jackson's brainy and funny debut collection are indeed prodigals--imprudent wanderers like the famous lost-and-found son of the biblical parable. The lot of them in "Wagner in the Desert" (originally published in the New Yorker) are described by the story's narrator as "a particular sort of modern hustler: filmmakers and writers... sustainability experts, P.R. lifers... social entrepreneurs, and that strange species of human being who has invented an app." He might have added, frequently stoned out of their heads during a Palm Springs "Baby Bucket List" debauch, before the advent of children, real estate and corporate cubicles.
Not all of these smart stories are so filled with profligacy, but most of Jackson's characters are searching for something to give meaning to their aspirations beyond society's predictable template. The last, longest and most ambitious story, "Metanarrative Breakdown," comes closest to defining the intellectual context of these conflicted almost grown-ups. Its narrator returns to his dying nonagenarian grandfather's mansion to mingle with family and sort out his life's metanarrative ("Whatever distinguishes narrative from, like, litany. Or accident."). He walks the town's beaches, listening on earbuds to the "grounding cadence" of a Terry Gross podcast. With a glimmer of optimism, he concludes: "This is what a person does. You make peace with the melancholy.... You clean, you shop. You go for runs. Sometimes you cry... trying to make more right decisions than wrong, trying to balance the love we owe one another with the inevitable and proper love we must save for ourselves." Jackson's Prodigals is a fine debut with panache. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.