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The Year of the Zinc Penny: A Novel
Now in paperback, The Year of the Zinc Penny is a contemporary classic. Trygve Soren Napoli is a ten-year-old just beginning to realize that he is alone in the world. Certain inescapable quirks tip him He cannot stop himself from repeating aloud each of his sentences, even after his stepfather tapes his mouth shut. Strange black hairs grow from the back of his hand. He has a weird name, unlike the other kids in Los Angeles, his new home. Even the cousin he looks up to calls him crazy. He doesn’t have a father, but then the country is in the middle of the biggest war ever, and a lot of kids are missing dads. His uncle drinks, and Trygve sees him hit Aunt Ginger, but then it was his uncle who gave him the roll of zinc pennies—and Uncle Gerald is the one who somehow manages to lay hand on the valuable copper wire needed to build an antenna for Trygve’s shortwave radio, the boy’s one sure link to the external world.
The Year of the Zinc Penny is a masterful rendering of a young consciousness. From his war-hero daydreams, to his obsession with Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, to his first encounters with sex and violence, to his disgust and fear at the depravity of the hodgepodge adults in his life,Trygve’s search for meaning is one of contemporary literature’s most compelling.
The Year of the Zinc Penny is a masterful rendering of a young consciousness. From his war-hero daydreams, to his obsession with Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, to his first encounters with sex and violence, to his disgust and fear at the depravity of the hodgepodge adults in his life,Trygve’s search for meaning is one of contemporary literature’s most compelling.
168 pages, Paperback
First published September 13, 1989
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About the author
Rick DeMarinis
45 books6 followersRick DeMarinis (1934-) is an American novelist and short-story writer.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
December 29, 2023
"[My mother] had a way of expressing herself that was similar to her father's. She just said things, and if there was someone nearby to respond, then something like a conversation would ensue. Like my grandfather, she had a Norwegian fatalism, tough enough to outlast winter... A fatalist believes that nothing can be done, but he will allow himself to be swept along by one cause or another because he believes that being swept along is also something that nothing can be done about."
I stumbled upon Rick DeMarinis at my local library’s book sale. I found three of his books: "Scimitar," "The Burning Woman of Far Cry," and "The Year of the Zinc Penny." I thought the names and covers were interesting and the first few pages of each book led me to believe he wasn't just a pulp fiction writer so I took a chance and bought them. I started with this one, being the most popular work on his GoodReads page and because it's the shortest. I'm glad I did.
Rick DeMarinis deconstructs the idea of the happy American family united by the war efforts. I don't know too much about the propaganda pushed during WWII, but I have to assume it painted the picture of perfect nuclear family in every home. That family is nowhere to be found in "Year of the Zinc Penny."
The story follows a 10 year old boy named Trygve Napoli - an Italian/Norwegian boy who moves out of the foster care system and back in with his mother at the beginning of the story. His biological father is nowhere to be seen and barely mentioned. Instead of the nuclear picture, his family becomes a hodgepodge: his fatalistic mother, his selfish, adulterous stepfather Mitchell, his moon-eyed aunt Ginger, his abusive uncle Gerald, and his depressed cousin William. We get to know these characters intimately during the cramped year they spend in their apartment.
However, we get to know no other character more than Trygve himself who revels in his imagination, often picturing himself as anyone other than who he is, typically a war hero dying in the arms of some beautiful woman. He is impressionable and anxious. DeMarinis nails the fear children feel from simple social interactions better than most I have read. Fear is the strongest emotion a child can feel. It is fear that sticks with us more than any other emotion. Nightmares and shameful social displays particularly plague Trygve. The complex internal thoughts of a child are put in simple terms that are easy for the reader to understand.
Over the course of the book we see Trygve grow into a better and worse person depending on the influence on him. William teaches him to be mean, Mitchell teaches him to worry about his self image, Aunt Ginger teaches him to beware the growing self-consciousness he is gaining. By the end of the book, Trygve is more confident and more selfish. Personal tragedy undercuts the triumphant feeling Trygve feels as the final page turns.
What stands out to me most about this book are the symbols and motifs employed by DeMarinis. They take the form of Trygve's fixations. My two favorites are Dracula and Sylvester Snell - the former of which he sees in a movie and the latter of which sexually assaults him at the beginning of the book. They appear in the dark corners of his room, down empty alleys, and as the villains of his worst nightmares. They are representations of his fears and insecurities. They are tangible, physical threats - like the fear that Dracula will suck his blood - but they also take the form of more existential threats. Trygve often contemplates the connection between death, life, and vampires out loud which earns him the nickname of "Monk."
"Kilroy was here. But now he was gone. Like the billions and billions of dead. Faceless, without identity, everywhere. Like the ghost of collective humanity itself. Or like a vampire. It made sense. Kilroy, like the vampire in the Bela Lugosi movies, was the thing that survived after its victims had been bled dry. The live-dead thing that went on and through and on throughout eternity."
I love this book. I love its characters and it's narrative. Even the prose is beautiful at times. However, I think it fails somewhat in its ending. The ending was rushed, in my opinion. Not every character got an end to their arc in a way that felt satisfying to me. Trygve’s optimism at the end of the book also feels contrived. In my opinion, he should be crushed, not hopeful. If it had been about 50 pages longer then I think the ending would succeed. I also think some of the humor falls flat. William’s fart and “gone with the wind” gag made me cringe every time it happened. And it happens a lot.
In the end, however, I think this book is criminally under-read. It would fit nicely into a high school level American literature class. I can't wait to read more of his work.
"I remembered my dream then. It came to me in clear images, and I saw that it made perfect sense. The Supreme Being was old, too old to keep himself interested in us. Watching over us all through history had made him sleepy and bored. What else could account for the state of the world? Maybe in the days of Adam and Eve he'd been wide awake. In those days everything was new and interesting and he kept tabs on each of us and nothing happened without a good reason."
I stumbled upon Rick DeMarinis at my local library’s book sale. I found three of his books: "Scimitar," "The Burning Woman of Far Cry," and "The Year of the Zinc Penny." I thought the names and covers were interesting and the first few pages of each book led me to believe he wasn't just a pulp fiction writer so I took a chance and bought them. I started with this one, being the most popular work on his GoodReads page and because it's the shortest. I'm glad I did.
Rick DeMarinis deconstructs the idea of the happy American family united by the war efforts. I don't know too much about the propaganda pushed during WWII, but I have to assume it painted the picture of perfect nuclear family in every home. That family is nowhere to be found in "Year of the Zinc Penny."
The story follows a 10 year old boy named Trygve Napoli - an Italian/Norwegian boy who moves out of the foster care system and back in with his mother at the beginning of the story. His biological father is nowhere to be seen and barely mentioned. Instead of the nuclear picture, his family becomes a hodgepodge: his fatalistic mother, his selfish, adulterous stepfather Mitchell, his moon-eyed aunt Ginger, his abusive uncle Gerald, and his depressed cousin William. We get to know these characters intimately during the cramped year they spend in their apartment.
However, we get to know no other character more than Trygve himself who revels in his imagination, often picturing himself as anyone other than who he is, typically a war hero dying in the arms of some beautiful woman. He is impressionable and anxious. DeMarinis nails the fear children feel from simple social interactions better than most I have read. Fear is the strongest emotion a child can feel. It is fear that sticks with us more than any other emotion. Nightmares and shameful social displays particularly plague Trygve. The complex internal thoughts of a child are put in simple terms that are easy for the reader to understand.
Over the course of the book we see Trygve grow into a better and worse person depending on the influence on him. William teaches him to be mean, Mitchell teaches him to worry about his self image, Aunt Ginger teaches him to beware the growing self-consciousness he is gaining. By the end of the book, Trygve is more confident and more selfish. Personal tragedy undercuts the triumphant feeling Trygve feels as the final page turns.
What stands out to me most about this book are the symbols and motifs employed by DeMarinis. They take the form of Trygve's fixations. My two favorites are Dracula and Sylvester Snell - the former of which he sees in a movie and the latter of which sexually assaults him at the beginning of the book. They appear in the dark corners of his room, down empty alleys, and as the villains of his worst nightmares. They are representations of his fears and insecurities. They are tangible, physical threats - like the fear that Dracula will suck his blood - but they also take the form of more existential threats. Trygve often contemplates the connection between death, life, and vampires out loud which earns him the nickname of "Monk."
"Kilroy was here. But now he was gone. Like the billions and billions of dead. Faceless, without identity, everywhere. Like the ghost of collective humanity itself. Or like a vampire. It made sense. Kilroy, like the vampire in the Bela Lugosi movies, was the thing that survived after its victims had been bled dry. The live-dead thing that went on and through and on throughout eternity."
I love this book. I love its characters and it's narrative. Even the prose is beautiful at times. However, I think it fails somewhat in its ending. The ending was rushed, in my opinion. Not every character got an end to their arc in a way that felt satisfying to me. Trygve’s optimism at the end of the book also feels contrived. In my opinion, he should be crushed, not hopeful. If it had been about 50 pages longer then I think the ending would succeed. I also think some of the humor falls flat. William’s fart and “gone with the wind” gag made me cringe every time it happened. And it happens a lot.
In the end, however, I think this book is criminally under-read. It would fit nicely into a high school level American literature class. I can't wait to read more of his work.
"I remembered my dream then. It came to me in clear images, and I saw that it made perfect sense. The Supreme Being was old, too old to keep himself interested in us. Watching over us all through history had made him sleepy and bored. What else could account for the state of the world? Maybe in the days of Adam and Eve he'd been wide awake. In those days everything was new and interesting and he kept tabs on each of us and nothing happened without a good reason."
October 23, 2014
A coming-of-age novel, narrated by a 10-year old, set in L.A., during WWII. Humorous, sad. I read one other novel by DeMarinis, which was quite different, A Clod of Wayward Marl, which is a funny, outrageous novel with a protagonist modeled on James Crumley. DeMarinis is a classic 70s-00s midlist literary writer, who is mostly and sadly out of print. He's 80 or thereabouts now but still plugging away. (I had a snack with him a few months ago and played some snooker with him, along with erstwhile publishers Dennis McMillan and Chas Fischer.)
Read
July 21, 2018assuming you're not invested in the novels you read having a narrative arc beyond "here's some stuff that happened to me and my family," this (like that one story in v.o.a.) is p neat in terms of how it dispels the myth that the home front in wwii was one big ol' idyll of patriotic unity
June 1, 2019
Vaguely reminds me of the Catcher in the Rye. Cute.
Read
June 29, 2019Reads like a memoir. Reminiscent of This Boy's Life.
April 10, 2012
This short, comic-sad novel tells the first-person story of a ten-year-old boy living in wartime Los Angeles. The year is 1943. Men are off fighting the war; women are riveting planes in the city's aircraft factories. The protagonist, Trygve (nicknamed Monk), lives in a crowded apartment with his mother and her show-business aspiring boyfriend, her sister and her sister's Canadian husband, and his teenage son. Seen through the inexperienced but curious eyes of a boy, these characters form the center of the novel, which traces events in their emotionally tangled, often unstable lives.
Impressionable and inquisitive, the young hero is continually instructed in the ill-formed opinions of the older males in his life, while his mostly sensible mother tries without much success to counter-balance her sister's other-worldly reflections on past lives and the tenuousness of this one. Meanwhile, his fevered imagination is fed by the movies and what he hears on his short-wave radio set, as he daydreams of piloting fighter jets only to die melodramatically in the arms of grade school sweethearts. Like everyday life itself, there's no particular plot line to this story, just one thing after another, finally adding up to a kind of worldly wisdom that sometimes comes in times of war, dislocation and anxiety - represented here by the image of Kilroy peeking quizzically over a fence.
I recommend this novel to readers interested in the zeitgeist of the 1940s war years (the period details evoke this era wonderfully), Los Angeles, and coming-of-age stories. It will leave you with memories of those years on the verge of puberty, first love, and an ever-elusive maturity.
Impressionable and inquisitive, the young hero is continually instructed in the ill-formed opinions of the older males in his life, while his mostly sensible mother tries without much success to counter-balance her sister's other-worldly reflections on past lives and the tenuousness of this one. Meanwhile, his fevered imagination is fed by the movies and what he hears on his short-wave radio set, as he daydreams of piloting fighter jets only to die melodramatically in the arms of grade school sweethearts. Like everyday life itself, there's no particular plot line to this story, just one thing after another, finally adding up to a kind of worldly wisdom that sometimes comes in times of war, dislocation and anxiety - represented here by the image of Kilroy peeking quizzically over a fence.
I recommend this novel to readers interested in the zeitgeist of the 1940s war years (the period details evoke this era wonderfully), Los Angeles, and coming-of-age stories. It will leave you with memories of those years on the verge of puberty, first love, and an ever-elusive maturity.
March 1, 2010
A good book about an 11- to 12-year-old during WW2, his memories of what his life was like but his imagination was so much better than real life -- an ordinary boy who was a "hero" in so many ways -- flying heroic missions to save everyone -- not all good times for him in his ordinary life, tho -- a book that was well written!
February 23, 2013
(review from 1994) Another wonderful story where I identified with the narrator. A fascinating slice of life I never really think about: the abandoned children of war. This is a funny book, though very sad, too.
November 19, 2007
the year 1943 they made pennies out of zinc becasue the war needed copper. coming of age book
Read
March 26, 2010Year of the Zinc Penny (G K Hall Large Print Book Series) by Rick Demarinis (1990)
July 28, 2010
Very enjoyable and highly recommended. Should be up there with the other classic coming of age novels.
October 26, 2015
If Jean Shepherd wrote "Wait Until Spring Bandini", it would be "The Year of The Zinc Penny."
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews