A funny, caustic tale of a slacker’s dejected resistance to mainstream success.
A feckless young man struggles with precarious jobs and a general failure to connect in this bleakly comic novel of alienation.
McGrouchpants’ narrative follows his antihero Chris Schuyler’s progress through the 1990s as he moves from his home in Rochester, New York, to college as an English major at the University of Chicago and into a series of dead-end jobs that are the tale’s focus. They include a high school summer job as a lawn mower; a five-and-a-half-year accounting stint that Chris loses when the slot is upgraded to require an MBA; a copy-editing position that ends when he takes too many sick days; a desperate, farcical stab at selling vacuum cleaners; and a gig as a fundraising canvasser in Portland, Oregon, after which he slides toward homelessness. Chris’ story is a bildungsroman in reverse about a peculiarly ’90s brand of eternal adolescence. He’s obsessed with indie rock bands, zines, and avant-garde movies—the title refers to Ang Lee’s art house action flick—as part of his rebellion against the “stultifying suburban” lifestyle his domineering father urges on him. Yet Chris’ lot is eternally stultifying work, infrequently relieved by awkward lurches at romance, with the longed for life of urban hipster intellectualism forever just beyond his reach. Chris’ closed-in, second-person ruminations could have been claustrophobic, but McGrouchpants expands them into a keenly subversive portrait of workplace social psychology, unfolding in long convolutions threaded with scabrous attitude. The result feels a bit like The Office might if David Foster Wallace and William S. Burroughs rewrote the scripts: “Tina, who’s training you, hardly notices that you’re five minutes late (you fell asleep for 40 min. in the front seat, drooling on your steering wheel—you got back from your ‘approved’ dentist appointment early, and put that time to good—if hardly anticipated, or, even, hardly avoidable (as soon as you pulled into the place, you beelined to a spot, and fell down like a ton of bricks) use)—and, instead of remarking on your slight tardiness, with a wave of her hand (‘Ahhh!’) and a practiced, commiserative co-worker grin, buckles down to the task of your 3-hr. block of training.”
A funny, caustic tale of a slacker’s dejected resistance to mainstream success.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A classic Green portrait of young love…but here the fault is in our social media.
A relationship between young screen actors is magical, fraught, and relentlessly public in Green’s first novel for adults.
“Every movie romance needs an Obstacle, a reason the characters don’t naturally fall into each other.” In the off-screen romance between actors Juniper Castillo and Kai Laramie, the obstacle is a moving target. Juniper notices early on that as flirty and forward as Kai is, he seems “closed off to a romantic connection”; that turns out to be the tip of a very problematic iceberg. The two meet in the lobby of a Pittsburgh hotel where they will be spending the evening with Matthew Malone, the megastar playing Andy Warhol in a movie they’re about to begin shooting, Andy Warhol Never Gets Old. Kai has been cast as Andy’s intern, Juniper as a journalist who gets in over her head. This is Juniper’s first adult role after a long run as a Nickelodeon child star, and newcomer Kai’s first role of any kind. Green evokes in compelling detail all the phases and aspects of the film project, from the table read to the screening of the rough cut, from the social media fanfare to the public premiere and the press junket, moving back and forth between Juniper’s and Kai’s first-person perspectives. In a meeting with one of the ubiquitous publicists, Kai learns that somehow “the high school stuff” he never talks about—despite their growing inseparability and seemingly profound connection, he hasn’t even brought himself to share it with Juniper—has surfaced. Details emerge slowly, then blow up in the media; the book’s third act focuses on the destructive potential of celebrity culture in a climate that makes Warhol’s milieu look innocent by comparison. After a long break from writing fiction—his last two books were Everything Is Tuberculosis (2025) and The Anthropocene Reviewed (2021)—Green fills this novel with carefully observed details of Hollywood culture and characters, including running jokes about vegan cuisine, media training, and the way Kai’s agent constantly and boorishly consults his young female assistant on points of political correctness. Can he talk about “hot girls”? Can he quote T.S. Eliot? OK to say “dog vomit”?
A classic Green portrait of young love…but here the fault is in our social media.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2026
ISBN: 9780525426073
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: tomorrow
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
