The Ordinary White Boy

by Brock Clarke

An over-educated, middle-class young man in a depressed, working-class town, twenty-seven-year-old Lamar Kerry faces a host of challenges as he deals with his mother's chronic illness, the disappointment in him of his father and girlfriend, the disappearance of his town's only Hispanic, who is missing and presumed dead, and the responsibilities of becoming an adult. A first novel. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

Genres: Fiction

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Brock Clarke is the author of seven books of fiction, most recently a collection of short stories, The Price of the Haircut. His novels include The Happiest People in the World, Exley (which was a Kirkus Book of the Year, a finalist for the Maine Book Award, and a longlist finalist for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), and An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England (which was a national bestseller, and American Library Associate Notable Book of the Year, a #1 Book Sense Pick, a Borders Original Voices in Fiction selection, and a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice pick). His books have been reprinted in a dozen international editions, and have been awarded the Mary McCarthy Prize for Fiction, the Prairie Schooner Book Series Prize, a National Endowment for Arts Fellowship, and an Ohio Council for the Arts Fellowship, among others.

Clarke’s individual stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Boston Globe, Virginia Quarterly Review, One Story, The Believer, Georgia Review, New England Review, Southern Review, and have appeared in the annual Pushcart Prize and New Stories from the South anthologies, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts.

Clarke lives in Portland, Maine and teaches creative writing at Bowdoin College and in The University of Tampa’s low residency MFA program.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Irony is alive and well in upstate New York. This is an amusing and entertaining tale that comes off sounding like the wise-ass little brother of Jernigan by David Gates. Lamar Kerry Jr. does not know pain, and even goes as far as to get himself beaten up, because he feels that he deserves it. He is an "ordinary white boy", who is not happy with his ordinariness. By the end he's more comfortable with being ordinary, but he has learned a few things along the way, like humility and the value of hard work...maybe.

[Drick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lamar Kelly Jr. returns home to the rural working-class town of Little Falls, NY after graduating college. He has no goals, no aspirations, just a girlfriend named Glori and his parents who wish he would make something of himself. Now 27, he works for his father's town newspaper and is content with his white boy life.

Eward Ramarez, a Puerto Rican and the only nonwhite in the town goes missing. The ruling assumption is that the murder is racially motivated, but no one in the town seems to care. Lamar tries to help solve the case, but he too lacks motivation. Finally, in an effort to prove himself, he leaves town for a week with his best friend Andrew. Both are planning to run away but end up drinking beer and fishing up in the Adirondacks. Lamar returns home having learned something about himself. The dead body of Ed Ramirez is found and the case is solved in a way no one expected, if they cared at all. Lamar gets back with Glori after a 3-week breakup and they are engaged by the end of the book. Happy ending? No. just ordinary.

Lamar Kelly's story is mildly depressing and may be a commentary on the plight of many rural white people whose towns have been passed by in the 21st century. I wouldn't know. Someone growing up in such a town would have to make that judgment.

[Ryanne Riate · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Ordinary White Boy by Brock Clarke is about Lamar Kerry, a 27 year old white man stuck in his small, depressing hometown of Little Falls, New York. He lives with his parents and has a dead-end job at his dad's newspaper. Things get a little more interesting when a local Latino jeweler(the only Hispanic in town) goes missing, and people start wondering if it was a racially motivated crime. Lamar, however, doesn't do much to help the situation. He tries talking to people but he is just as clueless as they are. The whole mystery gets wrapped up in ways that lets the town of the hook for its racism, and Lamar ends up doing nothing to change anything. The book is a bit dull and the characters are a bit flat which made the story not really go anywhere. The humor is pretty dry and the character development didn't seem very significant which made it hard to care about what happened in the story. Overall, it was sadly disappointing, though it was quick to read it was just kind of 'meh'.

[Crystal · Rating 2 out of 5]

Clarke’s novel teases crime solving, boring social commentary, and laughable moments; unfortunately, he only really delivers on the social commentary promise and it leaves much to be desired. The story of Lamar Kelly Jr. mingles with a recent death of the only minority member in his small, mostly working-class town, but the potential for the story to blossom is not fully achieved. Perhaps reading this 2002 novel in today’s social and political climate is what makes the “biting commentary” feel derivative. Or, it could be that Lamar’s voice sounds like a poorly constructed, off-brand Holden Caulfield and distracts from Clarke’s intended message. Not surprisingly, this book is best described as ordinary.

[Dave Allen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've now read all of Brock Clarke's output, I think! Interesting to jump all the way back to his first novel, which foreshadows some stylistic stuff (repetition/echolalia, tortuous interior monologues) but occupies a much narrower slice of life than his later works. That modesty in scope suits the small-town setting, which he renders in claustrophobic/xenophobic apathy, and surprisingly, his investigations of race and violence in America hold up pretty well. There's no major revelation -- the way the central mystery wraps up comes as an anticlimax, which the narrator acknowledges -- but small, purposeful currents of change and self-improvement enter full flow by the end.

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title is better than the story

[Sue · Rating 3 out of 5]

kind of a boring book. maybe that was the point because the lead character is "ordinary" but sad is closer to the truth.

[Kara · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read to the end hoping for more than what I got.

[Sean Kinch · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I dance like Mick Jagger when I dance at all, which is rare, unless I am drunk, which is not so rare.”

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

I first learned about Brock Clarke, and subsequently his novels, because he was my creative writing professor for four quarters at the University of Cincinnati. Therefore, having known him personally, I had preconceived notions about what his writing might be like. He was an enjoyable teacher, and I found him funny, and because I liked some of the books I had to read for his classes (Motherless Brooklyn,The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), I really hoped I would love his books, but because of other books I read that I really didn’t like (Jesus' Son, Willful Creatures), I was equally afraid I would hate them. What I was not prepared for was, dare I say it, boredom.

First of all, to me, Lamar is not an ordinary white boy name at all. I cannot recall ever having heard of a white man named Lamar. But anyway, Lamar Kerry, Jr., the ordinary white boy to which the title refers, just wasn’t a character I could care much about. He is a lazy slacker with the notion that he is better than just about everyone in town, but does nothing to prove this. He works part time at minimum wage for the newspaper his father edits (how can he possibly support himself on those wages?), after he went to college and majored in Russian Studies, “maintained a gentleman’s C average, and acquired a barely working knowledge of the difference between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks,” (7). With a useless degree (how many Russians does Lamar encounter? Spoiler alert: it’s zero.), he manages to be both overeducated and undereducated. Despite sounding like he’s proud of his educational mediocrity, Lamar sometimes comes off as sounding smarter than he should, like referencing Mae West, Lana Turner, W.C. Fields and An American Tragedy. Lamar comes off as the type of person who is aware of hardly anything that happened before he was born, so all these references to the first half of the century surprised me. But none of these things are the real reason the book didn’t work for me. There were some lines that I could hear in Brock’s voice, but too much of it I found flat or clunky. Lamar’s narrative voice just didn’t work in my brain for some reason. Since Lamar is the first person narrator, the narration should sound something like his normal voice, but I can’t imagine any real person talking this way. It may be the scarcity of contractions:

I go down to the station after I am done with Jodi Ramirez. I have some questions for Uncle Bart about the official police investigation. My uncle is sitting behind his big wooden desk. He is sweating through his uniform shirt. It is July, after all, and nearly ninety outside. The police station does not have air-conditioning. But my uncle has been known to sweat through his shirt even in the heart of winter. In a family of rail-thin men with low blood pressure, my uncle is the one fat, hypertensive Kerry. [39]

The novel is loosely based around the mysterious disappearance of Mark Rodriguez, the lone Hispanic person in their gringo town. Lamar starts off outraged that Mark is missing and no one other than Mark’s wife and daughters seem to care, but Lamar’s actions quickly turn back to apathy after he does nothing but interview his fellow townspeople about Mark’s disappearance, and he finds out no one else feels anything but apathy too. He keeps telling us he cares about finding Mark, but his actions prove otherwise, and the last time he speaks to Jodi is less than half-way through the book. Mark’s disappearance is finally solved off-stage, which I found unsatisfactory. This book is like an anti-mystery novel: not only do we have a crime which the main character fails to figure out, but once Lamar abandons his nearly nonexistent crime-solving career to go on an “adventure” with Andrew, the importance of the crime to the plot takes a sharp nose-dive.

The book ends on a positive note, but it didn’t really leave me feeling any better. In fact, I felt depressed the whole time I was reading this book, and I was glad to move on. Since I put off writing this review for a week, I have in the mean time read Brock’s other two novels, and I am very glad to say that the writing gets progressively better in An Arsonist's Guide To Writers' Homes In New England and Exley.

[John Beck · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://andalittlewine.blogspot.com/2013/01/review-ordinary-white-boy-by-brock.ht...

The blurb on the back of Brock Clarke's The Ordinary White Boy could be about me:
At twenty-seven years old he can't dance unless he's had more than a few drinks. His wardrobe is uninspired, at best. He has returned after college to Little Falls, his miserable, working-class hometown in upstate New York...
And we love to read about ourselves don't we?

I've been told, and to a sense I agree, that the history of literature is too often regarded as the history of white men. Look at the top ten of the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels: Irish man, American man, the same Irish guy again, Russian man, British man, another American man, a third American man, a Hungarian-British man, another British man, a fourth American man. You have to go #15 to find a woman (Virginia Wolff), to #19 (Ralph Ellison) to find the first non-Caucasian, and I lost interest in searching before I found someone not born in American or Europe.

So, yes: discrimination! But...
I wouldn't say any of those top ten books reflect who I am, beyond the broadest strokes: white men, educated in the Western Judeo-Christian canon, alive in the 20th century...

Sometimes a list of the most important novels of the 20th century is just a list. And sometimes the murder of the only hispanic man in a lily white Upstate New York town is just a murder.

That's the dynamic The Ordinary White Boy explores. And I see so much more of my life in it than in most books.

Stephen Daedalus is exceptional, like Joyce. For White Boy's protagonist Lamar (and for me, and for, I suspect, Brock Clarke) exceptionalism is a less certain thing.

But the expectation of exceptionalism hangs there. Like the narrator of The Zeroes, much has been expected for Lamar from a young age, and his early twenties were supposed to be the launch point. He graduated from college and was ready to set off into the world a man.

Only Lamar wasn't much of a man yet, and he didn't quite set off (the phrase "Failure to Launch" comes to mind). So at 27 going on 28, Lamar is not much more than he was at 22.

He tries. He wants so badly to be galvanized by what is happening in his small town- for a recent murder to kickstart his failed ambitions, as we've seen traumatic events do so often in books and films (think about the long string of films featuring Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell, a genre [I think] subverted by Judd Apatow).

Only the kickstart doesn't take. Lamar, perhaps a little too self-aware for his own good, can't get beyond the reductive drag of modern life. A thing has happened and we should be outraged. And maybe we are, but nothing changes, so when it happens again we can't muster the same level of outrage, and we find that the world goes on just fine in that case too. So long as the tragedy doesn't happen to me, I don't have to care. In fact, it's safer not to care, since no one around you will get all that worked up either.

That's modern life. Caring only as much as is safe.

And that's all Lamar can bring himself to do, and I've read plenty of reviewers that hate him for that. And I agree with their disappointment, and I agree with their indignation. But ultimately, I agree with Lamar- ordinary and safe and predictable bring so many challenges, more challenges than we can possibly overcome, so why bother tilting at windmills?

[Greg Carmichael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very early in The Ordinary White Boy one thing becomes clear: the protagonist, Lamar Kerry, Jr., regards himself as anything but ordinary. Contrary to his claims, he sees himself as the one extraordinary person trapped in a very ordinary town. So why not move? Maybe he secretly enjoys his perceived superiority. He regards just about everyone in the town, girlfriend and family included, with condescension. To him, they are a variety of uneducated, racist, ridiculous characters to be analyzed. Lamar maintains a veneer of humility because he is self-deprecating and detached. An observer by profession, he rarely acts or publicly holds an opinion lest he be committed to any one person or idea. The rest of the town seems to reciprocate his contempt.

Through the first third of the novel, I feared that Clarke had created a character he admired. This is not a farfetched notion—many white, liberally educated Gen-Xers maintain a similar apathetic attitude with pride. They regard the world as their laboratory and seek to avoid criticism by shrugging off anything that might be construed as a cause. Sadly, I am often pulled into this mentality and, to my dismay, saw a lot of myself in this character. There are hints of what is to come when we understand that Lamar is genuinely bothered by letting so many people down—particularly his parents and girlfriend.

The Ordinary White Boy is about someone who begins to realize that some things are worth taking seriously. I felt like it wrapped up a little too neatly, but realizing that Clarke saw the flaws in Lamar and wrote about redemption made this an enjoyable read. I was also impressed with the way the novel approached race. Never did it come across as hackneyed or preachy. The issue lurks in the background as racism tends to do. The author acknowledges that part of the problem is not just overt acts of hate but also apathy that leads to inaction.

[Djrmel · Rating 2 out of 5]

I forever will think of this book as "Wordy White Boy", rather than its given title, because no matter what else this book has going for it, that is what I have taken away from it. Clarke takes his main character on a journey from slacker to ...well, I'm not convinced that he ever actually arrived anywhere. There's lots of talk, both inner dialog and between characters, as Lemar Jr acknowledges his ordinariness and attempts to go beyond that (and I do mean LOTS of talk), but is there any resolution?

In all fairness, I must give Clarke credit for writing a truly wonderful description of women of a certain age: ....have reached an age where casual and formal cothes meet, and the common ground is glitter. I'm going to remember that one, and it's enough to move this one star book up to two stars.

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

An ordinary story about a very ordinary (read: boring) white boy.

There were some bizarre dialogs that I enjoyed in this book.

But Lamar... sigh. Nowhere as fascinating as the do-nothing Peter Gibbons of Office Space (who at least did something). I guess it's as well some interesting descriptions of some of the smaller places in US - too small to live in, and that Lamar seems to get too. For most of the book I was internally screaming "get out of there and get a life", the rest wondering if he'd actually do that. Well, he did something... but why stay somewhere where there is nothing? He does manage to see clearly the shortcomings of the people around him too. But what does he really like? And why does he stay in that horrible small "city"? BC

[Darrin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Ordinary White Boy was set near where I grew up. The main character even ends up in the county where I was born & raised in NY state for a chapter or two.

I could relate to the main character just a little too much for my own comfort. While I found the book to be generally well written I felt the ending was a bit limp. It almost felt as if Clarke got bored of writing it so he just ended it abruptly on the fly. Despite hitting a little too close to home at times I did enjoy it (up until the end at least).

I much preferred Clarke's The Arsonist's Guide to Writer's Homes in New England but I enjoyed this book enough to read some of Clarke's other novels (if he has any).

[Zack · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well--this book was okay, but all throughout, I kept revising and condensing all the paragraphs and sentences. Clarke falls prey to the (unfortunately predominant) bad habit of over-elaboration, and keeps (in my opinion unnecessarily) switching from past to present to future tense--like he'll tell you everything about a topic, then introduce a character who tells him "everything I just told you" instead of just letting it happen--for sake of what? But for all I know, this was the editor's fault, not his own. It held my attention in a lukewarm sort of way, despite all these shortcomings, so he must be on to something.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

You either love or hate this book. I find Brock Clarke to be a master of analyzing the inane thoughts that some of us have on a daily basis and putting them on paper. It is the story of a boy who isn't too special, but unique in his own way who wakes up one day to find that something has changed. He goes on a journey to find himself. Whether he does or not (based on the reviews on this site) depends on how you see things! I love Brock Clarke and all of his other books as well - his short stories are amazing!

[Yeti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reminiscent of "Lucky Jim" and "A Catcher in the Rye." Here you have an ordinary white boy, fresh out of college, still unsure of what he wants out of life (which basically means he doesn't yet know what life expects of him) so he does the one thing that comes natural for him - he runs away rather than become embroiled in a small town race war. The end result is a compassionate, and honest account of people settling for what they have as opposed to always wondering what they could have had.

[Liz · Rating 1 out of 5]

As my wise friend, ED, said, "Maybe you shouldn't put 'Ordinary' in the title, because then it is...." I guess I shouldn't put that in quotes because it's actually a paraphrase, but I think she'll beokay with it! This book was not that great.

[Karl Kronlage · Rating 2 out of 5]

I kept thinking - I'd never act like this. I'd get frustrated with the narrator. To make it worse, the narrator seemed to feel the same. It kept my interest until the end - enjoyable, but not great.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was pretty good, but nothing too special. All in all, pretty forgettable.

[Kathy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Certainly lived up to its title.

[Lori · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ordinary white book.

[Beth Shields-Szostak]

1st edition

[Jes · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book went somewhere, but not very far. Very slow, prolonged, and unnecessarily wordy. If you've already started reading it, I'm sorry. If you were thinking about it, don't.

[Kurt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe this would appeal more to millennium males.

[Shawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

a middle class white boy, after ups and downs, resolves to be an ordinary white boy (as opposed to a daring other kind of person).

[Randy Waite · Rating 1 out of 5]

Quite boring, and there were no likeable characters.

[Russell · Rating 2 out of 5]

blah. The book is as about as exciting, interesting, and insightful as its title suggests.