SOPHOMORES

In late-1980s Texas, a small family grapples with existential questions.

Desmond’s novel follows three members of a family over a tumultuous year in Reagan-era Dallas. Dan Malone, a high school sophomore, finds himself challenged by an English class taught by an exacting instructor. His father, Pat, who works for an airline in the age of deregulation, is coming to terms with an MS diagnosis and has begun drinking heavily. And Dan’s mother, Anne, wrestles with her Catholic faith and her role as a juror in a high-profile local case involving infidelity and attempted murder. The novel spans the course of an academic year in 1987 and '88, which offers some foreshadowing to readers familiar with the period. Overall, Desmond’s novel abounds with contradictions—it wrestles with grand moral questions, such as whether flawed behavior can change, but its scale is also decidedly modest. Through Dan’s assigned reading, including a late sequence that includes Animal Farm, Desmond throws in plenty of discussion of a literary canon (or at least the literary canon as late-'80s high schoolers would have experienced it), but the nature of Dan’s reading is rarely challenged, for good or ill. The travails of the three Malones remain largely separate, and while that works well on one level, illustrating how cut off the family members are from one another, it also gives the feeling of reading a trio of interwoven novellas rather than one cohesive work. Thankfully, Desmond also works in some moments of levity, as when Dan mentally conflates coquette with croquette. Scenes like this, and a thoroughly lived-in portrait of Dallas, go a long way—but for a novel wrestling with such big issues, the stakes could stand to be higher.

Desmond’s novel is smartly written and structured but leaves a sense of unfulfilled potential.