What do you think?
Rate this book
Next
Kevin Quinn is a standard-variety American male: middle-aged, liberal-leaning, self-centered, emotionally damaged, generally determined to avoid both pain and responsibility. As his relationship with his girlfriend approaches a turning point, and his career seems increasingly pointless, he decides to secretly fly to a job interview in Austin, Texas. Aboard the plane, Kevin is simultaneously attracted to the young woman in the seat next to him and panicked by a new wave of terrorism in Europe and the UK. He lands safely with neuroses intact and full of hope that the job, the expansive city, and the girl from the plane might yet be his chance for reinvention. His next eight hours make up this novel, a tour-de-force of mordant humor, brilliant observation, and page-turning storytelling.
336 pages, Paperback
First published February 17, 2010
41 people are currently reading
1917 people want to read
About the author
James Hynes
33 books142 followersJames Hynes’ essays and book reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Boston Review, and Salon.
A native of Michigan, he attended the University of Michigan and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has taught fiction writing at the University of Iowa, the University of Michigan, Miami University, Grinnell College, and the University of Texas. He lives in Austin, Texas.
A native of Michigan, he attended the University of Michigan and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has taught fiction writing at the University of Iowa, the University of Michigan, Miami University, Grinnell College, and the University of Texas. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 312 reviews
March 30, 2010
Michael Cunningham may be a decent karaoke singer, but he is still a karaoke singer.
I believe this book will be a real hoot! Can't wait to read it!
I believe this book will be a real hoot! Can't wait to read it!
March 8, 2011
As far as reviews go, this book went from 2 stars to 4 stars in the last 50 pages, which only proves(much to my chagrin) that you shouldn't ever abandon a book. This book really kicked me on my ass and is another one outside of my typical comfort zone. I have no problem reading books with male protagonists. Sometimes I think its like seeing inside a male mind, which will always be fascinating to a girl with no brothers or boyfriends in sight. But Kevin is no ordinary man. Or at least I hope so, for the sake of humanity. After reading Franzen, I didn't think characters could get anymore self absorded, but then I was introduced to Kevin, the main character in Next. The guy would seriously not shut up. One minute he's afraid of dieing in a terrorist attack, the next minute he's fantasizing and literally chasing after women he sees on the way to an interview, even though he is in a seemingly great relationship with his sort of girlfriend. The guy was never happy, always looking for the next best thing (Ha, I think I just figured out the title!). At first I felt bad about what happened in the end, and it sort of erased my disgust for Kevin. But now I'm not so sure. What's so great about someone if they only realize they are an asshole while they are near death? Anyways, aside from the story, I do think James Hynes can write. If he's all about visceral endings, I'm not sure my emotions can handle anymore of his books, but I do understand why this was picked to be in the Tournament of Books. People in other reviews likened him to Woolf or Joyce for his modern day stream of consciousness writing. A lofty compliment for sure, but he's definitly provides something new and unusual to the contempory writers pool.
April 8, 2010
In Austin, Texas, when the heat comes, it makes the city glitter-—there’s so much light coming down that the world can’t absorb it, and as you walk the streets, you can go snowblind. I never heard anyone describe this thought, ever, until James Hynes’ NEXT.
This is a serious and seriously well-written book—so well observed in its study of one man, main character Kevin Quinn, that by the time we’re done we feel we know Kevin because we’ve become him. It’s a neat trick. Kevin, a man we follow through a few hours of downtime before a job interview in Austin, Texas, has many faults, all of them nakedly displayed, but they’re familiar and we’re beyond forgiving them because we own them. And at the same time we get to see the goodness in the guy. By the end of the book we are desperately identifying with him.
The conceit of Jim Hynes’ narrative is a moment-by-moment reporting of the thoughts of Kevin, whose life is made up of equal parts dissatisfaction and annoyance. He has a job in Ann Arbor that he doesn’t care for and is hoping the vaguely-described Austin gig might jump-start his life, or at least find him a way out of the rut his life has become. So the book begins with Kevin on a plane lusting after the younger woman next to him (always, always, Kevin is lusting,) and the narrative follows him out to the sun-baked Texas city, where he explores coffee shops, grocery stores, and green belt trails, at least one Mexican restaurant, and finally the interview, which turns out to be a more unusual experience than he expected. It’s a big day for Kevin in Austin, then, as he wanders and at every moment, from someone’s glance or comment or the song on the radio, he thinks about his own past.
That sounds so dreary, and yet it’s not—Kevin is great company as long as we’re going to hitch a ride in someone else’s brain. As he kills time, he observes the corporate luxury of Starbucks, the ubiquity of music at all times, the strange class-ism of the terminally hip, and decades of loves and losses. In this book alone he has at least two encounters with women that would be promising for Kevin’s happiness if he were wired to find happiness on this afternoon.
I loved this character in the way he constantly struggled with his baser and grander aspects. There’s a moment when he curses himself for not wanting to make anyone feel badly, even if they deserve it or if it would simply make him feel better. Hynes describes this as the curse of being able to see both sides, and so it is. There’s a moment when he apologizes for sundry small insults he has made and compares himself to a 14-year-old, and the description is honest and heartfelt. Everyone has awkward days, and Hynes observes them with scalpel precision.
Part of the magic of NEXT is that Hynes has studied his characters so well—Kevin isn’t everyman, he’s a man, from a particular place, going to a particular place, and he’s lived a particular life. Just a few clicks, a few years off Kevin’s age, and Hynes would have written an utterly different man—different songs in his head, different mentors. Change Austin to Boston and this would be an utterly different book. The particulars matter in this book, and we draw the universal truths from the book’s bravery to be particular.
A lot has been made of this books’ similarity to Mrs. Dalloway, and to that I can only say that I liked this better than Woolf’s book, but that’s probably because this is my world that Hynes is struggling to explore. Also, more happens in this book, if that matters. To say more would be criminal.
This is a serious and seriously well-written book—so well observed in its study of one man, main character Kevin Quinn, that by the time we’re done we feel we know Kevin because we’ve become him. It’s a neat trick. Kevin, a man we follow through a few hours of downtime before a job interview in Austin, Texas, has many faults, all of them nakedly displayed, but they’re familiar and we’re beyond forgiving them because we own them. And at the same time we get to see the goodness in the guy. By the end of the book we are desperately identifying with him.
The conceit of Jim Hynes’ narrative is a moment-by-moment reporting of the thoughts of Kevin, whose life is made up of equal parts dissatisfaction and annoyance. He has a job in Ann Arbor that he doesn’t care for and is hoping the vaguely-described Austin gig might jump-start his life, or at least find him a way out of the rut his life has become. So the book begins with Kevin on a plane lusting after the younger woman next to him (always, always, Kevin is lusting,) and the narrative follows him out to the sun-baked Texas city, where he explores coffee shops, grocery stores, and green belt trails, at least one Mexican restaurant, and finally the interview, which turns out to be a more unusual experience than he expected. It’s a big day for Kevin in Austin, then, as he wanders and at every moment, from someone’s glance or comment or the song on the radio, he thinks about his own past.
That sounds so dreary, and yet it’s not—Kevin is great company as long as we’re going to hitch a ride in someone else’s brain. As he kills time, he observes the corporate luxury of Starbucks, the ubiquity of music at all times, the strange class-ism of the terminally hip, and decades of loves and losses. In this book alone he has at least two encounters with women that would be promising for Kevin’s happiness if he were wired to find happiness on this afternoon.
I loved this character in the way he constantly struggled with his baser and grander aspects. There’s a moment when he curses himself for not wanting to make anyone feel badly, even if they deserve it or if it would simply make him feel better. Hynes describes this as the curse of being able to see both sides, and so it is. There’s a moment when he apologizes for sundry small insults he has made and compares himself to a 14-year-old, and the description is honest and heartfelt. Everyone has awkward days, and Hynes observes them with scalpel precision.
Part of the magic of NEXT is that Hynes has studied his characters so well—Kevin isn’t everyman, he’s a man, from a particular place, going to a particular place, and he’s lived a particular life. Just a few clicks, a few years off Kevin’s age, and Hynes would have written an utterly different man—different songs in his head, different mentors. Change Austin to Boston and this would be an utterly different book. The particulars matter in this book, and we draw the universal truths from the book’s bravery to be particular.
A lot has been made of this books’ similarity to Mrs. Dalloway, and to that I can only say that I liked this better than Woolf’s book, but that’s probably because this is my world that Hynes is struggling to explore. Also, more happens in this book, if that matters. To say more would be criminal.
April 1, 2024
I started off this novel with a feeling that it was a satirical look on a bitter and pretentious middle-aged academic named Kevin, who is at a crossroads in his life- dreading the possibility fatherhood, dating a younger woman named Stella whose energy is slowly emasculating and draining him; coming to terms with his dysfunctional family (shown in flashbacks within a narrative that does not have chapter breaks) and among other things- his failed relationships with several women: Lynda (the sex partner), The Philosopher’s Daughter (unrequited love), and Beth (the one who got away).
As he is literally experiencing a stream of consciousness-style adventure throughout the streets of Austin, Texas (following an attractive Asian-American girl named Kelly whom he sat next to on a plane from Ann Arbor to Austin) he ponders life, its meaning, and literally what’s next? Also what’s next, literally, once he makes it to a job interview at a Texan skyscraper? And what about those terrorist attacks he’s paranoid about as he flies?
“Next” wound up to be a hilarious, sexy and sad tale of a sad sack trying to make the best of things. Kevin’s meeting with Dr. Barrentos, a masculine pillar of strength and his interaction with her at a fast food restaurant after a disastrous fall in the streets of Austin; and their conversation, as well as his masturbating inside a taxicab on the way to his interview are literally the two best moments from this slow-burner of a book that will disturb you after its devastating finale.
As he is literally experiencing a stream of consciousness-style adventure throughout the streets of Austin, Texas (following an attractive Asian-American girl named Kelly whom he sat next to on a plane from Ann Arbor to Austin) he ponders life, its meaning, and literally what’s next? Also what’s next, literally, once he makes it to a job interview at a Texan skyscraper? And what about those terrorist attacks he’s paranoid about as he flies?
“Next” wound up to be a hilarious, sexy and sad tale of a sad sack trying to make the best of things. Kevin’s meeting with Dr. Barrentos, a masculine pillar of strength and his interaction with her at a fast food restaurant after a disastrous fall in the streets of Austin; and their conversation, as well as his masturbating inside a taxicab on the way to his interview are literally the two best moments from this slow-burner of a book that will disturb you after its devastating finale.
April 6, 2012
To the author, I want to say: GOOD GOD. REALLY???
Sigh.
This book had me on a roller coaster. I had read that the last 50 pages would throw you sideways. So, even after this book turned out to be one sexual fantasy and daydream and remembrance after another, and I felt way more drawn into a middle-aged-man's mind than I wanted to be, I kept plodding on.
Then, there was that moment in the restaurant with Claudia. The one where I thought it was all going to turn around. The one where I thought he was going to realize why he was how he was and begin to change himself, to infuse his life with meaning and real relationship.
And then. SPOILER ALERT
He's been deathly afraid of a terrorist attack for the whole book. And, wonder of wonders, what happens but a TERRORIST ATTACK! How original! How life-changing! God, could we have something that he could do something about? Rather than him just being victim yet again? Really. Really? Really. I am astonished and incredulous. I WASTED my spring break reading time for this???
And all this with really good writing. I just wish the content had matched it. It had so much promise....
Sigh.
This book had me on a roller coaster. I had read that the last 50 pages would throw you sideways. So, even after this book turned out to be one sexual fantasy and daydream and remembrance after another, and I felt way more drawn into a middle-aged-man's mind than I wanted to be, I kept plodding on.
Then, there was that moment in the restaurant with Claudia. The one where I thought it was all going to turn around. The one where I thought he was going to realize why he was how he was and begin to change himself, to infuse his life with meaning and real relationship.
And then. SPOILER ALERT
He's been deathly afraid of a terrorist attack for the whole book. And, wonder of wonders, what happens but a TERRORIST ATTACK! How original! How life-changing! God, could we have something that he could do something about? Rather than him just being victim yet again? Really. Really? Really. I am astonished and incredulous. I WASTED my spring break reading time for this???
And all this with really good writing. I just wish the content had matched it. It had so much promise....
December 17, 2013
With his weird and wicked academic satires -- "Publish and Perish," "The Lecturer's Tale" -- James Hynes captured the fetid anxiety of university life, but now he's graduated to the pervasive fear that defines our age. In the very first sentence of this new novel, Kevin Quinn works himself into a panic by imagining a Stinger missile hitting his plane as he lands in Austin. "Am I the only one who worries about stuff like this?" Kevin wonders. "Or does everybody, these days?" That missile doesn't strike, of course -- it's just nerves -- but what follows is the most original and poignant story I've read about living under the shadow of random acts of terror.
"Next" shouldn't work at all, let alone succeed as it does. It's a plotless, desultory novel about a commitment-phobic man walking along the hot streets of Austin as he waits for a job interview. Only two months have passed since the publication of another novel about a wandering man: Joshua Ferris's dreary, though elegantly written "Unnamed," but "Next" is a more cathartic journey. Hynes knows exactly where he's going with this story, and his compulsive patter is witty and alluring enough to keep us running alongside Kevin. Soon enough, it's obvious that what looks like a lonely guy just marking time is really a man engaged in a moving, brilliantly composed act of introspection.
At 50, Kevin hasn't so much matured as learned how to simulate maturity. He's horny enough to regard every woman he sees as a potential sexual partner, but "his default liberal guilt and his midwestern decency jerk him short like a leash." He associates all the significant moments of his life with particular songs and failed relationships, like some Nick Hornby wannabe. "He's an underachiever in every way he can imagine," Hynes writes, "professionally, personally, financially." Wandering around this strange town, "almost nauseous with melancholy," he considers that he has "no kids, no career, really, no overriding passion in his life, and an ex-girlfriend who at long last heaved him over the side to have children with a [younger] man."
In the fluid riff of cultural commentary, funny quips and rueful memories that constitute most of this novel, we learn that Kevin is running away from his new girlfriend and an editing job he loathes at a university press in Ann Arbor. He knows no one in Texas and has told no one back home that he's here for the interview -- all part of the exciting fantasy of a clean break, the promise of a new beginning. "It's not a real choice so much as it's a choice between two equally risible clichés: Count Your Blessings, or Follow Your Dreams," Hynes writes in a voice that captures Kevin's own ironic derision. "Look it up (\mid-lif kri-ses\ n) and find a line drawing of Kevin Quinn in a sporty little convertible, with his perky young -- well, younger -- girlfriend beside him, her hair loose in the breeze. See MIDDLE-AGED MAN."
This strange story is always on the go, even though its real motion is entirely internal. Instead of preparing for his job interview, Kevin spends the hours before the appointment channeling "his inner nineteen-year-old," stalking a young woman he saw on the plane -- aroused by "the mild thrill of his own shamelessness." He has no idea what he'd say if he actually made contact with her -- "What am I going to do, strike up a conversation with her like some drunken Shriner?" -- but she reminds him of past girlfriends who got away, and that inspires a free association of sexual nostalgia and humiliation, swinging wildly from inane optimism to crushing self-doubt.
All this wandering and middle-aged ogling takes place against a background of fresh terrorist acts in Europe. On the television and radio, reports are still pouring in about a set of coordinated suicide bombings. Hynes weaves these atrocities into the background of Kevin's regrets. It's a dark symphony of gallows humor, the fatalism and self-absorption that run through our distracted lives nowadays. "After the Fall of the Wall and the Fall of the Two Towers and the Fall of Kevin's Fiftieth Birthday," he really has no idea how to live -- how to stop running and shirking and avoiding. "He wishes he were a Republican," Hynes writes, "full of absolute certainty and righteous, tribal wrath."
Believing in nothing, Kevin finds the terrorists' passion as fascinating as it is frightening. But before the story reaches its devastating conclusion, he'll be given a chance to reassess himself. Hang on tight: The novel's mournful overtones rise slowly but firmly in that amazing voice -- jocular and honest, clear-eyed and tragic, always winning. By the time you notice "Next" picking up speed, it's rushing along so fast you'll be completely defenseless when it rips your heart right out.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/...
"Next" shouldn't work at all, let alone succeed as it does. It's a plotless, desultory novel about a commitment-phobic man walking along the hot streets of Austin as he waits for a job interview. Only two months have passed since the publication of another novel about a wandering man: Joshua Ferris's dreary, though elegantly written "Unnamed," but "Next" is a more cathartic journey. Hynes knows exactly where he's going with this story, and his compulsive patter is witty and alluring enough to keep us running alongside Kevin. Soon enough, it's obvious that what looks like a lonely guy just marking time is really a man engaged in a moving, brilliantly composed act of introspection.
At 50, Kevin hasn't so much matured as learned how to simulate maturity. He's horny enough to regard every woman he sees as a potential sexual partner, but "his default liberal guilt and his midwestern decency jerk him short like a leash." He associates all the significant moments of his life with particular songs and failed relationships, like some Nick Hornby wannabe. "He's an underachiever in every way he can imagine," Hynes writes, "professionally, personally, financially." Wandering around this strange town, "almost nauseous with melancholy," he considers that he has "no kids, no career, really, no overriding passion in his life, and an ex-girlfriend who at long last heaved him over the side to have children with a [younger] man."
In the fluid riff of cultural commentary, funny quips and rueful memories that constitute most of this novel, we learn that Kevin is running away from his new girlfriend and an editing job he loathes at a university press in Ann Arbor. He knows no one in Texas and has told no one back home that he's here for the interview -- all part of the exciting fantasy of a clean break, the promise of a new beginning. "It's not a real choice so much as it's a choice between two equally risible clichés: Count Your Blessings, or Follow Your Dreams," Hynes writes in a voice that captures Kevin's own ironic derision. "Look it up (\mid-lif kri-ses\ n) and find a line drawing of Kevin Quinn in a sporty little convertible, with his perky young -- well, younger -- girlfriend beside him, her hair loose in the breeze. See MIDDLE-AGED MAN."
This strange story is always on the go, even though its real motion is entirely internal. Instead of preparing for his job interview, Kevin spends the hours before the appointment channeling "his inner nineteen-year-old," stalking a young woman he saw on the plane -- aroused by "the mild thrill of his own shamelessness." He has no idea what he'd say if he actually made contact with her -- "What am I going to do, strike up a conversation with her like some drunken Shriner?" -- but she reminds him of past girlfriends who got away, and that inspires a free association of sexual nostalgia and humiliation, swinging wildly from inane optimism to crushing self-doubt.
All this wandering and middle-aged ogling takes place against a background of fresh terrorist acts in Europe. On the television and radio, reports are still pouring in about a set of coordinated suicide bombings. Hynes weaves these atrocities into the background of Kevin's regrets. It's a dark symphony of gallows humor, the fatalism and self-absorption that run through our distracted lives nowadays. "After the Fall of the Wall and the Fall of the Two Towers and the Fall of Kevin's Fiftieth Birthday," he really has no idea how to live -- how to stop running and shirking and avoiding. "He wishes he were a Republican," Hynes writes, "full of absolute certainty and righteous, tribal wrath."
Believing in nothing, Kevin finds the terrorists' passion as fascinating as it is frightening. But before the story reaches its devastating conclusion, he'll be given a chance to reassess himself. Hang on tight: The novel's mournful overtones rise slowly but firmly in that amazing voice -- jocular and honest, clear-eyed and tragic, always winning. By the time you notice "Next" picking up speed, it's rushing along so fast you'll be completely defenseless when it rips your heart right out.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/...
January 26, 2015
I'm predisposed to, if not like, then at least appreciate this book, or the narrator anyway, being myself also a fifty-ish, bookish, leftist male raised on s & d & r&r and still disappointed that youth doesn't last forever.
Also, similarly, I appreciate a voice that takes into account the ephemera of the culture, somebody who can refer to Battlestar Galactica as well as Thomas Mann--although unlike Kate Christenson, quoted on the cover, I don't think the various references to BG, Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, etc. constitute a "recall of pop culture unparalleled in contemporary fiction," it's all completely unavoidable mainstream stuff, and if you can't do that, and you choose to address contemporary culture, you're failing in some way. (And from what I remember of In the Drink and The Great Man, the novels I've read by Christensen, she's probably just as in command of that material in her own way, but it's just a blurb, so never mind). What that's really about is the barely surviving tradition of choosing not to address these things in a literary novel, and at this point ignoring that injunction actually puts Hynes in the mainstream of high-middlebrow/literary fiction; the idea that literary authors don't talk about tv and etc. really only comes up nowadays as a sort of straw man to claim that something is bold and new, as if everybody else weren't also doing it.
Anyways…
So, I did appreciate it, was very entertained, and found his flashbacks to youth vivid and true, but still, halfway in I still didn't feel this book was something I had to read. I was not compelled, and might have put it aside and forgotten about it a couple of times. I can also see how women could easily be put off this stuff, as so much of it was a middle-aged guy thinking about young women (which I understand some middle-aged guys do).
But the thing is, you have to have the guy thinking about something in order to illustrate who the guy is, and all that self-indulgent stream-of-consciousness that makes up the bulk of the book, the life in a single day thing, as he recalls the past and is not especially interesting or admirable in the present, is entertaining enough to keep you going so that in the last act, he can address it all, have the guy's character resolve to its core in the extreme situation that Hynes springs on us (although it's inevitable from the first page, it's right there, obvious; Hynes does everything required to set it up fairly while still somehow managing to make it something of a surprise; masterfully done, really), and you can see that this too is perfectly justified, that who he could be was always present in what he was, and what he was was a self-indulgent American who always had it a bit too easy, and he could have been something else, something better, under other circumstances.
Personally, I don't go in for transcendence through love of others as the meaning of life (because, really, what's so great about them? You're both probably annoying) or getting all misty eyed over having a baby, as if that's the point of things (because, again, they're just going to grow up to be you, flailing about for meaning and getting in the way, might as well just pull the plug on the whole thing and save everyone the trouble), you ask me, it's one big circle-jerk, the circle of life, but I also can't say it's not a valid stance, and it obviously means a great deal to a great many people, and Hynes conveys that all brilliantly and convincingly. Had me choked up, and as noted, not inclined that way.
Also, and finally, on a more concrete plane of the story (AND HERE'S THE REALLY BIG SPOILER, DON'T READ THIS IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS IN THE END), we all wondered what it was like on 9/11, we all wondered what if we'd had to choose between burning and jumping, and he's done that here, imagined it for us minute by minute, and I can't imagine somebody doing a better job of it.
Also, similarly, I appreciate a voice that takes into account the ephemera of the culture, somebody who can refer to Battlestar Galactica as well as Thomas Mann--although unlike Kate Christenson, quoted on the cover, I don't think the various references to BG, Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, etc. constitute a "recall of pop culture unparalleled in contemporary fiction," it's all completely unavoidable mainstream stuff, and if you can't do that, and you choose to address contemporary culture, you're failing in some way. (And from what I remember of In the Drink and The Great Man, the novels I've read by Christensen, she's probably just as in command of that material in her own way, but it's just a blurb, so never mind). What that's really about is the barely surviving tradition of choosing not to address these things in a literary novel, and at this point ignoring that injunction actually puts Hynes in the mainstream of high-middlebrow/literary fiction; the idea that literary authors don't talk about tv and etc. really only comes up nowadays as a sort of straw man to claim that something is bold and new, as if everybody else weren't also doing it.
Anyways…
So, I did appreciate it, was very entertained, and found his flashbacks to youth vivid and true, but still, halfway in I still didn't feel this book was something I had to read. I was not compelled, and might have put it aside and forgotten about it a couple of times. I can also see how women could easily be put off this stuff, as so much of it was a middle-aged guy thinking about young women (which I understand some middle-aged guys do).
But the thing is, you have to have the guy thinking about something in order to illustrate who the guy is, and all that self-indulgent stream-of-consciousness that makes up the bulk of the book, the life in a single day thing, as he recalls the past and is not especially interesting or admirable in the present, is entertaining enough to keep you going so that in the last act, he can address it all, have the guy's character resolve to its core in the extreme situation that Hynes springs on us (although it's inevitable from the first page, it's right there, obvious; Hynes does everything required to set it up fairly while still somehow managing to make it something of a surprise; masterfully done, really), and you can see that this too is perfectly justified, that who he could be was always present in what he was, and what he was was a self-indulgent American who always had it a bit too easy, and he could have been something else, something better, under other circumstances.
Personally, I don't go in for transcendence through love of others as the meaning of life (because, really, what's so great about them? You're both probably annoying) or getting all misty eyed over having a baby, as if that's the point of things (because, again, they're just going to grow up to be you, flailing about for meaning and getting in the way, might as well just pull the plug on the whole thing and save everyone the trouble), you ask me, it's one big circle-jerk, the circle of life, but I also can't say it's not a valid stance, and it obviously means a great deal to a great many people, and Hynes conveys that all brilliantly and convincingly. Had me choked up, and as noted, not inclined that way.
Also, and finally, on a more concrete plane of the story (AND HERE'S THE REALLY BIG SPOILER, DON'T READ THIS IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS IN THE END), we all wondered what it was like on 9/11, we all wondered what if we'd had to choose between burning and jumping, and he's done that here, imagined it for us minute by minute, and I can't imagine somebody doing a better job of it.
April 10, 2010
To like NEXT, you had better like Kevin Quinn, your host for the next (get it?) 308 pp. Kevin is a middle-aged Michigander who’s held a mid-level academic job for years. He’s witty, sardonic, and probably overqualified for his job (hey, sounds like a lot of GoodRead types!). He’s obsessed with himself (check), sex (check), and terrorism (um… check). You know, the type that reads about a rash of terrorist attacks and feels convinced it will be visited upon HIM because, you know, the world revolves around him.
So, if you’re going to invest in a solipsistic book, as I said, be forewarned. Nothing happens and then everything happens. Cue the Beatles because it’s a “day in the life” book – which works for me, because I prefer books focusing on short sequences in time over books that span generations. Even I, however, had moments of impatience with some of the many flashbacks, asides, detours, soliloquies, and whatnots we get compliments of Kevin’s restless mind. Yet, as a middle-aged man myself, I was forgiving. And the writing is, if nothing else, sterling. Really. Hynes knows his way around a sentence. And it’s funny. Dark humor. And from a character who’s like a buck in rutting season (in defiance of his age and the elements).
Plot readers can safely give this book a wide berth. This is about character. This is about themes. And this is about mood. Reread some of the settings (like the chevrons of those yawningly-empty Texas strip mall parking lots under the withering sun) after you reach the end. Then enjoy the a-ha moments you missed on first glance.
The structure of the book can only be appreciated at second glance, too. After reading the end, you have to take in the beginning next (get it?). It’s worth it. Divided in three, it is the third and shortest section of NEXT that gets all the press. And why not? Here Hynes pulls out the stops. Here Hynes gives a master’s lesson on “compressing the moment.” Writers take note. Readers take warning. You’re either going to love this book or not. It’s like people that way. If your first impression is a good one, keep going. If not, get out while the getting is good!
So, if you’re going to invest in a solipsistic book, as I said, be forewarned. Nothing happens and then everything happens. Cue the Beatles because it’s a “day in the life” book – which works for me, because I prefer books focusing on short sequences in time over books that span generations. Even I, however, had moments of impatience with some of the many flashbacks, asides, detours, soliloquies, and whatnots we get compliments of Kevin’s restless mind. Yet, as a middle-aged man myself, I was forgiving. And the writing is, if nothing else, sterling. Really. Hynes knows his way around a sentence. And it’s funny. Dark humor. And from a character who’s like a buck in rutting season (in defiance of his age and the elements).
Plot readers can safely give this book a wide berth. This is about character. This is about themes. And this is about mood. Reread some of the settings (like the chevrons of those yawningly-empty Texas strip mall parking lots under the withering sun) after you reach the end. Then enjoy the a-ha moments you missed on first glance.
The structure of the book can only be appreciated at second glance, too. After reading the end, you have to take in the beginning next (get it?). It’s worth it. Divided in three, it is the third and shortest section of NEXT that gets all the press. And why not? Here Hynes pulls out the stops. Here Hynes gives a master’s lesson on “compressing the moment.” Writers take note. Readers take warning. You’re either going to love this book or not. It’s like people that way. If your first impression is a good one, keep going. If not, get out while the getting is good!
April 10, 2010
I've always enjoyed James Hynes as an author who writes well, can deliver a good zinger with panache, shares my bemused exasperation at the follies of academic life, and - most importantly - spins a good tale. Earlier books of his that I've read had several aspects in common - a definite sympathy for the underdog, the skewering of those in power in a plot involving some element of the fantastic (zombies, magic powers, the occult, ancient druidic ritual).
In "Next", Hynes forgoes the fantastic element in a book which is more ambitious and more serious than its predecessors. The territory is familiar - the protagonist, Kevin Quinn, an editor at the University of Michigan's Center for Asian Studies, is low man on the totem pole and has suffered his share of the petty humiliations that are the stuff of academic life. Just turned 50, Kevin is in full midlife turmoil; as the story opens we see him in midflight, bound for an interview in Austin, tormenting himself about various concerns, both personal (should he leave Ann Arbor, what about his live-in girlfriend, isn't he already over the hill?) and global (nervousness about being blown up on the plane, on the bus, at the mall). A spate of recent terrorist bombings in various European cities just adds to the general sense of menace - Quinn is particularly shaken by the fact that one of the suicide bombers in Glasgow was also named Kevin.
The entire book unfolds within the confines of Quinn's head, following his day's itinerary through Austin, with multiple flashbacks as he revisits every relationship of his adult life, the women he pursued successfully and those that got away, the deaths of both his father and his grandfather. Severe claustrophobia is inevitable. Despite some snappy writing by Hines, who never loses his sense of humor, no character is interesting enough to sustain a full 300 pages.
But of course there's that ever more noticeable drumbeat of menace as the day wears on. So one keeps on reading. Reviewers have debated whether or not the (extremely powerful) final 50 pages "justify" some of the slackness in the earlier parts of the book. I can't really answer this question, as it seems silly to me. What I can say is that you will finish the book, and you won't leave your seat for the final section.
Though I wish I felt differently, in the final analysis I think that James Hynes didn't quite pull off this ambitious effort. Even viewed as an honorable failure, "Next" is more interesting than most of its competitors.
In "Next", Hynes forgoes the fantastic element in a book which is more ambitious and more serious than its predecessors. The territory is familiar - the protagonist, Kevin Quinn, an editor at the University of Michigan's Center for Asian Studies, is low man on the totem pole and has suffered his share of the petty humiliations that are the stuff of academic life. Just turned 50, Kevin is in full midlife turmoil; as the story opens we see him in midflight, bound for an interview in Austin, tormenting himself about various concerns, both personal (should he leave Ann Arbor, what about his live-in girlfriend, isn't he already over the hill?) and global (nervousness about being blown up on the plane, on the bus, at the mall). A spate of recent terrorist bombings in various European cities just adds to the general sense of menace - Quinn is particularly shaken by the fact that one of the suicide bombers in Glasgow was also named Kevin.
The entire book unfolds within the confines of Quinn's head, following his day's itinerary through Austin, with multiple flashbacks as he revisits every relationship of his adult life, the women he pursued successfully and those that got away, the deaths of both his father and his grandfather. Severe claustrophobia is inevitable. Despite some snappy writing by Hines, who never loses his sense of humor, no character is interesting enough to sustain a full 300 pages.
But of course there's that ever more noticeable drumbeat of menace as the day wears on. So one keeps on reading. Reviewers have debated whether or not the (extremely powerful) final 50 pages "justify" some of the slackness in the earlier parts of the book. I can't really answer this question, as it seems silly to me. What I can say is that you will finish the book, and you won't leave your seat for the final section.
Though I wish I felt differently, in the final analysis I think that James Hynes didn't quite pull off this ambitious effort. Even viewed as an honorable failure, "Next" is more interesting than most of its competitors.
October 17, 2018
Wow, here's an idea no middle-aged male novelist has ever come up with: a middle-aged academic reflects on his failures while lusting after an unattainable young hottie. I mean, that's the first 67 pages at any rate. Worse, Hynes pours and pours and pours out the sensory details of taking an airplane, taking a taxi, and hanging out at Starbucks as if these were some ultra-rare experiences known only to his most privileged readers. Can't wait for the movie.
June 1, 2010
WHEN ARE THEY GOING TO GET TO THE FIREWORKS FACTORY?
...
Oh.
...
Oh.
December 2, 2012
I put off writing a review of this because I had mixed feelings, on the one hand, I had tears in my eyes and my heart in my throat as I read the last 25 pages, which had things of sheer heartbreaking beauty in them. On the other, I felt very manipulated -- bc of course it's heartbreaking and primal and incredible, but that doesn't really make up for, although Hynes wishes we would think it did, the some times aching tedium of the rest of the book, which in between sharp comic riffs on modern urban life in our medium sized hip university cities and moving meditations on aging, lust and settling/settling down, also has way too much numbing and repititive detail about Kevin's day. Soles are always heavy and slapping, feet are pivoting, air conditioning chilling, etc. etc. The lunch w. Dr. B doesn't work either, it's portentous and fraught in a very heavy handed way but none of it quite lives up to what Hynes seems to want it to.
That said, the memories of all the women Kevin's failed are poignant and well realized, the sex scenes for once do not bug, and the central conundrum -- that Kevin is 50 and still adolescent, still waiting in some very real sense for his life to begin, to be able to commit to love, career, parenthood, simultaneously beginning to decay and just starting out -- may seem absurd but rings painfully true (I know more than one Kevin). But that just makes the end a little more frustrating -- I can't tell if banal or genius -- because when you learn what it takes to make Kevin commit, you are at once moved and want to slap him, and yet taken aback at what is in fact, no commitment at all.
I could have given this book anything from a 2 to 4, even while writing this I've gone back and forth, so I'll go for the copout 3.
That said, the memories of all the women Kevin's failed are poignant and well realized, the sex scenes for once do not bug, and the central conundrum -- that Kevin is 50 and still adolescent, still waiting in some very real sense for his life to begin, to be able to commit to love, career, parenthood, simultaneously beginning to decay and just starting out -- may seem absurd but rings painfully true (I know more than one Kevin). But that just makes the end a little more frustrating -- I can't tell if banal or genius -- because when you learn what it takes to make Kevin commit, you are at once moved and want to slap him, and yet taken aback at what is in fact, no commitment at all.
I could have given this book anything from a 2 to 4, even while writing this I've gone back and forth, so I'll go for the copout 3.
December 5, 2014
remember when hunter s thompson explained why he wrote 'fear and loathing', the time he was in la and the shit was going down in the street, and he was sitting in a bar having a drink and talk with his chicano lawyer friend about what was going on and how could people possibly change the horrible situation in usa and world? and then the riot cop burst in and shot the lawyer in the head with a rifle.
yuo can read that here Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories
this novel of hynes's is sort of like that. the part where you realize there are lots of people with rifles and they will use them (hynes does seem to forget that most of those 'riflemen' are white cops or white ex military here in good ole usa) and the best defense is hedonism. hedon in glittering streets of austin tx
yuo can read that here Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories
this novel of hynes's is sort of like that. the part where you realize there are lots of people with rifles and they will use them (hynes does seem to forget that most of those 'riflemen' are white cops or white ex military here in good ole usa) and the best defense is hedonism. hedon in glittering streets of austin tx
May 13, 2010
Upscale liberal academic professional type from Michigan walks around Austin, Texas waiting for a job interview. Bad stuff strikes in the final pages. The book seems to be mainly an exercise in sustaining a stream of consciousness narrative with an utterly mediocre character as the viewpoint. It's pointless nonsense from start to finish. Well, there's one good section of conversation between the main character and a doctor who has helped him tend a scraped leg. They share personal doubts and fears, since each assumes he or she will never see the other again. Not a very original notion, but Hynes should've made this scene into a short story and otherwise been done with this successful attempt to give new meaning to the phrase "so what?" Bleck.
April 16, 2010
This book was so well reviewed on a readers advisory blog I read that I thought it would be among my new favorites. Hate may not be too strong a word to describe my feelings about this book. Yes, I get the idea--middle-aged, angst-ridden male living in post 9/11 U.S. searches for meaning, usually trying to find it in the eyes of someone 25 years his junior. Blah, blah, blah. This character annoyed me so much. Read Joe Tropper instead. At his male characters have some self awarenesss and senses of humor.
March 8, 2013
The concluding 30 pages redeemed the book, but only to a degree. The nude model of Mrs Dalloway bothered me. The arc's return was deft and I didn't expect that.
Next should've had an enormous impact. Stray meteors in the tundra turn more dirt than this. It did garner the best novel from The Believer.
I suppose the dodge heralds an auspice.
Next should've had an enormous impact. Stray meteors in the tundra turn more dirt than this. It did garner the best novel from The Believer.
I suppose the dodge heralds an auspice.
February 23, 2011
On a sweltering spring day in Austin, Texas, Kevin Quinn spends several hours exploring the city while waiting to go to a job interview downtown. He has just arrived from Ann Arbor, where he is a small-time academic editor, and a big-time commitment-phobe with women. He is thinking of leaving his latest girlfriend, Stella, but he hasn't even told her about the interview. Over the course of the day, the reader will be thrust into the poignant loves that Kevin has left behind in the wake of the last twenty-five years.
Kevin, at 50, is used to attracting younger women, and having imagined sexual encounters, but he knows his number is up soon. His enlarged prostate and whisker-sprouting ears are a sign of the vicissitudes of middle-age. But he continues to pamper his inner adolescent, and ill-advisedly follows a comely twenty-year-old woman from the plane and attempts to keep her at close range. Perspiration accumulates on his brow and under his arms, and he makes a pretty ragged mess of his suit as he proceeds to have some risible misadventures over at the hike-and-bike trail.
As an Austin resident, I was thrilled to read such adroit descriptions of local landmarks. I don't think I can ever look at the wide bleached sky or view the Austin skylight the same ever again. Hynes' descriptions venture into the hyperreal, and he refers to the "Longhorn Tower" where he has his interview as Barad-dur, right out of the Tolkien universe. Austin occasionally lifts to fantasy heights in Hynes' literary universe.
Hynes writes with dazzling and savvy prose and has a keen eye for the details of human behavior and countenance. He described a moment dancing with a woman he loved-- "She was always watching you like she was right on the cusp of derision. But in a good way..." Kevin's vulnerability is both hilarious and heartbreaking, and his ability to acknowledge his limitations mitigates the blustery and bloated ego that keeps him at arm's length in relationships.
This darkly comic story of a man's confrontation with his moral ambiguity is biting and marvelously warped, absurd and surreal. The author structured juxtapositions between past and present with a split-second precision that fairly teeters and often had me laughing out loud. One moment he would be with Stella in an Ann Arbor food market, and the next sentence or paragraph, he would be chasing a woman at a same-named market in Austin. His scenes are elaborately detailed with spot-on timing. The results are uncanny and ripe with an ominously comic gusto.
This is an author who knows how to blend highbrow, lowbrow and pop culture to create a frenzied portrait of a desperate and appalling man that you nevertheless root for and empathize with--a lecherous loser who keeps searching, who never gives up, who strives for a tattered integrity. He knows his fatal flaws, his salacious impetuosity, his lack of engagement with the future. In a particularly revealing scene in a Mexican restaurant, he shares some pivotal moments of his past with a beautiful woman who is compelled to first share a secret of her own. If you are not touched by that scene, then this probably isn't a book you will connect with conclusively. Later, there is a mordant scene in a bathroom of a clothing store that is searingly bald and telling.
There is a moral compass here--it is cracked and bent, but Kevin is holding onto it for dear life. The author delivers a magnificent ending, a daring and audacious finale that airlifts every emotion simultaneously. Hynes gives us a complex and ultimately sympathetic character portrayed through a brutal and magnified lens.
Addendum: This author likes Firesign Theater and quoted them in the book, which indubitably delighted me--so way cool. Let's to the Winter Palace!
Kevin, at 50, is used to attracting younger women, and having imagined sexual encounters, but he knows his number is up soon. His enlarged prostate and whisker-sprouting ears are a sign of the vicissitudes of middle-age. But he continues to pamper his inner adolescent, and ill-advisedly follows a comely twenty-year-old woman from the plane and attempts to keep her at close range. Perspiration accumulates on his brow and under his arms, and he makes a pretty ragged mess of his suit as he proceeds to have some risible misadventures over at the hike-and-bike trail.
As an Austin resident, I was thrilled to read such adroit descriptions of local landmarks. I don't think I can ever look at the wide bleached sky or view the Austin skylight the same ever again. Hynes' descriptions venture into the hyperreal, and he refers to the "Longhorn Tower" where he has his interview as Barad-dur, right out of the Tolkien universe. Austin occasionally lifts to fantasy heights in Hynes' literary universe.
Hynes writes with dazzling and savvy prose and has a keen eye for the details of human behavior and countenance. He described a moment dancing with a woman he loved-- "She was always watching you like she was right on the cusp of derision. But in a good way..." Kevin's vulnerability is both hilarious and heartbreaking, and his ability to acknowledge his limitations mitigates the blustery and bloated ego that keeps him at arm's length in relationships.
This darkly comic story of a man's confrontation with his moral ambiguity is biting and marvelously warped, absurd and surreal. The author structured juxtapositions between past and present with a split-second precision that fairly teeters and often had me laughing out loud. One moment he would be with Stella in an Ann Arbor food market, and the next sentence or paragraph, he would be chasing a woman at a same-named market in Austin. His scenes are elaborately detailed with spot-on timing. The results are uncanny and ripe with an ominously comic gusto.
This is an author who knows how to blend highbrow, lowbrow and pop culture to create a frenzied portrait of a desperate and appalling man that you nevertheless root for and empathize with--a lecherous loser who keeps searching, who never gives up, who strives for a tattered integrity. He knows his fatal flaws, his salacious impetuosity, his lack of engagement with the future. In a particularly revealing scene in a Mexican restaurant, he shares some pivotal moments of his past with a beautiful woman who is compelled to first share a secret of her own. If you are not touched by that scene, then this probably isn't a book you will connect with conclusively. Later, there is a mordant scene in a bathroom of a clothing store that is searingly bald and telling.
There is a moral compass here--it is cracked and bent, but Kevin is holding onto it for dear life. The author delivers a magnificent ending, a daring and audacious finale that airlifts every emotion simultaneously. Hynes gives us a complex and ultimately sympathetic character portrayed through a brutal and magnified lens.
Addendum: This author likes Firesign Theater and quoted them in the book, which indubitably delighted me--so way cool. Let's to the Winter Palace!
May 31, 2010
After Wonder Boys, I decided to avoid the sort of novels where most of the action revolves around a middle-aged white guy rhapsodizing about all of the girls he'd ever screwed and wringing his hands over the slow, sad fact that life would not indulge him an unlimited supply of hot 25 year olds with low self-esteem. Next is even worse than Wonder Boys, keeping the Silver Fox anxieties but backdropping it with a completely unflattering depiction of Austin, Texas. The protagonist is a pretty generic urbanite - casually hostile to gentrification, worried about geopolitics, narcissistic - but all you learn about him is that he's let people down at crucial times and has been repeatedly abandoned by women, and that he's helpless.
Walking through a chronology of every girl he's barely cared for (and at least ten pages describing his all time favorite outdoor screws and parking lot BJs) alternates with him fixating on every attractive woman he sees, which is every woman in Austin (Austin has two crucial characteristics - it is a hostile, alien place, but everyone who lives there is a potential sexual experience). He spends a good third of the book stalking a girl around downtown and making 1000 observations about the intensity of Austin weather. He never actually speaks to her. And then he meets another girl and talks to her for awhile. And then another. This repeats, pretty much without interruption, until a finale that manages to track the same structure of useless, abortive male/female communication until the ultimate and useless redemptive monologue of the last three pages.
I kept plugging away at this one only because I felt like something needed to happen to justify all of the endless details about tacos and supermarkets - Hynes seems to be engaging in a deliberate attempt to give as complete a description as he can of absolutely everything - but for most of these things, there's no payoff. Expect to read paragraphs about food, about people the protagonist is passing on the sidewalk, about planes "showing their throat" or making a "throaty roar". Austin will be described as like a Ridley Scott movie. Two pages later, it will be described as like a Pixar project. Three hundred pages, at least 10 different descriptions of women with exceptionally toned arms.
There is no payoff. I promise.
Walking through a chronology of every girl he's barely cared for (and at least ten pages describing his all time favorite outdoor screws and parking lot BJs) alternates with him fixating on every attractive woman he sees, which is every woman in Austin (Austin has two crucial characteristics - it is a hostile, alien place, but everyone who lives there is a potential sexual experience). He spends a good third of the book stalking a girl around downtown and making 1000 observations about the intensity of Austin weather. He never actually speaks to her. And then he meets another girl and talks to her for awhile. And then another. This repeats, pretty much without interruption, until a finale that manages to track the same structure of useless, abortive male/female communication until the ultimate and useless redemptive monologue of the last three pages.
I kept plugging away at this one only because I felt like something needed to happen to justify all of the endless details about tacos and supermarkets - Hynes seems to be engaging in a deliberate attempt to give as complete a description as he can of absolutely everything - but for most of these things, there's no payoff. Expect to read paragraphs about food, about people the protagonist is passing on the sidewalk, about planes "showing their throat" or making a "throaty roar". Austin will be described as like a Ridley Scott movie. Two pages later, it will be described as like a Pixar project. Three hundred pages, at least 10 different descriptions of women with exceptionally toned arms.
There is no payoff. I promise.
January 29, 2011
This is really a 3.5 (and the .5 is from the ending). My problem here is that basically, the author has put all of his metaphorical eggs in one basket. The payoff of the entire novel is predicated on the payoff of the last section and if you haven't bought into the preceding sections it or aren't willing to follow the author as he goes from the normal meanderings of a middle-aged man's mind and into the stark reality of a terrorist attack then the whole thing falls flat. That being said, even though I didn't completely buy into the emotional resolution, the last section of the book still hit me like a gut punch. After spending the first two thirds of the book following this stunted, emotional disaster of a man around as he effectively lets his libido drag him around an unfamiliar city, it was a complete shock to end on such a sudden, emotional and serious note.
That being said, even though the last section of the book is a great piece of writing, especially the last few pages as Kevin slips into a stream-of-consciousness wish for the future, the emotional climax felt false to me. Perhaps I am being cynical but I didn't buy that he had a life-altering epiphany halfway to the ground and realized that he did after all love the girlfriend he had spent the entire novel feeling ambivalent about. It felt more that he knew he was on his way out and was trying to make his exit on a good note. After all, who wouldn't want a deathbed epiphany? Especially one that involves a hypothetical child that will carry part of you into a future that no longer have a part in.
Still, it is truly a powerhouse finale and a severe emotional twist that gave the novel a lot more heft and meaning than it might otherwise have held.
That being said, even though the last section of the book is a great piece of writing, especially the last few pages as Kevin slips into a stream-of-consciousness wish for the future, the emotional climax felt false to me. Perhaps I am being cynical but I didn't buy that he had a life-altering epiphany halfway to the ground and realized that he did after all love the girlfriend he had spent the entire novel feeling ambivalent about. It felt more that he knew he was on his way out and was trying to make his exit on a good note. After all, who wouldn't want a deathbed epiphany? Especially one that involves a hypothetical child that will carry part of you into a future that no longer have a part in.
Still, it is truly a powerhouse finale and a severe emotional twist that gave the novel a lot more heft and meaning than it might otherwise have held.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 28, 2012
As I've been pondering this review, and this book, over the last day or so after having finished reading Next, I've been fluctuating between thinking of it as a five-star book and a four-star book.
It potentially falls short of a five-star book in a few ways: First, despite Hynes's minutely rendered prose (in which he follows his protagonist, Kevin, on a day-long trip to and through the city of Austin, Texas), which impressively evokes real life in a surprisingly tangible way, some of the early spontaneous conversations between Kevin and the characters he bumps into in downtown Austin, seem idealized and scripted (and, hence, unrealistic), which put them disappointingly at odds with the rest of the book in tone and substance. Second, some of Kevin's thoughts are uncomfortably, obliviously chauvinistic, which dampened my enthusiasm for the book.
But it's a five-star book in a lot of ways: First, I related to the protagonist's internal soliloquies (the chauvinistic ones notwithstanding, of course) to such a degree that more than once I said to myself, "This is me." (Which is not the same as thinking "This is my life," because Kevin's life and mine have very little in common, fortunately.) In fact, the book's first sequence is so close to a short story I wrote in college--except that Hynes's prose is so much better than mine--that I had to laugh. Apparently, Next is the book I was trying to write twenty years ago. Second, the book culminates in such a beautiful, poignant way, that it has one of those endings I'll remember, and think about, for a long, long time. For that reason, despite its flaws, I give it five stars.
It potentially falls short of a five-star book in a few ways: First, despite Hynes's minutely rendered prose (in which he follows his protagonist, Kevin, on a day-long trip to and through the city of Austin, Texas), which impressively evokes real life in a surprisingly tangible way, some of the early spontaneous conversations between Kevin and the characters he bumps into in downtown Austin, seem idealized and scripted (and, hence, unrealistic), which put them disappointingly at odds with the rest of the book in tone and substance. Second, some of Kevin's thoughts are uncomfortably, obliviously chauvinistic, which dampened my enthusiasm for the book.
But it's a five-star book in a lot of ways: First, I related to the protagonist's internal soliloquies (the chauvinistic ones notwithstanding, of course) to such a degree that more than once I said to myself, "This is me." (Which is not the same as thinking "This is my life," because Kevin's life and mine have very little in common, fortunately.) In fact, the book's first sequence is so close to a short story I wrote in college--except that Hynes's prose is so much better than mine--that I had to laugh. Apparently, Next is the book I was trying to write twenty years ago. Second, the book culminates in such a beautiful, poignant way, that it has one of those endings I'll remember, and think about, for a long, long time. For that reason, despite its flaws, I give it five stars.
September 6, 2012
This novel is worth every second of the time spent to read it, and then some. On the surface, it's a story about a man named Kevin, a middle-aged editor living in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who has flown to Austin, Texas without telling his live-in girlfriend about his one day trip for a job interview. Yes, Kevin, in middle-age, may yet change the direction of his life.
The story starts out simply enough as you traverse the inner canyons of Kevin's mind: his thoughts, ruminations, regrets and memories of his life over the years. He has a few hours to kill while waiting for the interview, and in a moment of hormone-driven impulsivity, decides to follow through the streets of Austin, a young woman who had been sitting next to him on the plane. It's benign enough, except that during this travelogue through Austin's streets, Kevin's life story (and all his foibles) emerge in this interior novel, and some strange (and revealing) things happen.
I never throw spoilers into the mix but let me say Kevin's few hours in Austin turn into quite an adventure with the book's climax coming out of nowhere like a freight train on steroids.
This is a wonderful read, and the reader gets not only a penetrating view of the workings of Kevin's mind-all his mistakes and regrets, his loves and losses-but luxuriates in an hilarious dissection of the culture in which we live . A true gem of a novel. Five well-deserved stars!
The story starts out simply enough as you traverse the inner canyons of Kevin's mind: his thoughts, ruminations, regrets and memories of his life over the years. He has a few hours to kill while waiting for the interview, and in a moment of hormone-driven impulsivity, decides to follow through the streets of Austin, a young woman who had been sitting next to him on the plane. It's benign enough, except that during this travelogue through Austin's streets, Kevin's life story (and all his foibles) emerge in this interior novel, and some strange (and revealing) things happen.
I never throw spoilers into the mix but let me say Kevin's few hours in Austin turn into quite an adventure with the book's climax coming out of nowhere like a freight train on steroids.
This is a wonderful read, and the reader gets not only a penetrating view of the workings of Kevin's mind-all his mistakes and regrets, his loves and losses-but luxuriates in an hilarious dissection of the culture in which we live . A true gem of a novel. Five well-deserved stars!
October 3, 2012
I don't know if I regret reading this book or not. The first two thirds follows this creepy man as he stalks a woman less than half his age around Austin and replays in his mind all the sex he's had with other women throughout his life. At one point he compares the blow jobs of different women. Literally every girl he sees there is a gratuitous description of her body. I almost gave up before I finished part one. Then part two was almost as bad and I wanted to scream.
I assume you're supposed to empathize with this skeeveball because he's not intentionally a skeeveball, but just unwilling to accept that he's middle aged and hot little things don't want to fuck him anymore. But I guess I just don't have it in me. So when I get to the third part, I am almost hoping for something bad to happen to him.
*** small spoiler alert ***
Yet when something bad finally does happen to him I feel bad. So I guess the moral of the story is there are some things that are so bad I wouldn't even wish them on a stalker skeeveball.
And I hate that the author tried to play on 9-11 fears. Such a cheap shot... Especially because he did it with no nuance whatsoever. His beating the readers over the head with it makes the whole 3rd part seem overdone and corny.
I assume you're supposed to empathize with this skeeveball because he's not intentionally a skeeveball, but just unwilling to accept that he's middle aged and hot little things don't want to fuck him anymore. But I guess I just don't have it in me. So when I get to the third part, I am almost hoping for something bad to happen to him.
*** small spoiler alert ***
Yet when something bad finally does happen to him I feel bad. So I guess the moral of the story is there are some things that are so bad I wouldn't even wish them on a stalker skeeveball.
And I hate that the author tried to play on 9-11 fears. Such a cheap shot... Especially because he did it with no nuance whatsoever. His beating the readers over the head with it makes the whole 3rd part seem overdone and corny.
April 16, 2010
Take this review with a grain of salt because I am clearly not the target audience for a book about a middle-aged man having a mid-life crisis. I picked it up because I'd adored one of the author's previous books, Kings of Infinite Space, and this new one has a great ra...ting on Amazon. I probably should have paid more attention to the plot and reviews before I read it. The main character spends half of the book checking out younger women, he contemplates leaving his young girlfriend even though she sounds like a pretty decent person, and he waxes on incessantly about his previous paramours. As a result he was irritating and not at all sympathetic to me. The only interesting part of the book is his journey through Austin, which is full of vivid detail about what I assume are actual sites found in the city and it gave me a nice feel for the setting. I don't mean to give the book a wholly negative review as the writing is good and parts of the story are engaging but it's just not for me.
June 10, 2010
Holy shit... this was the book I've been avoiding for the past 8-1/2 years. But I'm glad I read it, and I think it was so well done. Very well-controlled plotting, and the end just knocked me sideways -- I don't really want to say more because it would be a big old spoiler. Definitely unsettling, but in the best way, and very worth reading.
December 11, 2019
Arghh! I was going to give this 2 stars until the ending. The main character is pretty much a piece of crap horndog who apparently views himself as a great catch, is constantly looking to trade in for a younger girlfriend, and can't fathom why these lovely ladies continually look at him with complete disgust. Why was I leaning toward an extra star? Well, honestly, he's a pretty good storyteller. Although the irritating parts were really, really irritating, I didn't have any trouble keeping the pages turning. Also, I used to live in Ann Arbor, and he totally nailed it. How did it lose that extra star? I thought the end was completely unearned, and seemed to belong to a totally different book.
March 2, 2012
This will be the first Hynes I've read, Kindle. There's a couple thingies from others in the white pages before the story begins...something from Virginia Woolf...two things, one from something called Diary and another from Mrs. Dalloway. Too, there's a quote from a movie that James Coburn was in, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, screenplay by Rudolph Wurlitzer:
Comes an age in a man's life when he don't want to spend time figuring what comes next.
More than one time, I'd hazard.
Part One of the story is called: The Battle of Bertrand Russell
Story begins:
As the ground rushes up to meet him, Kevin thinks about missiles again. One missile in particular, a shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile, blasted from a tube balanced on the bump where some guy's clavicle meets his scapula. What guy--a Saudi? An Egyptian? A Yemeni? Some pissed-off Arab anyway, kneeling in the bed of a dinged-up pickup truck with Texas plates, or crouching on the springy backseat of a rented convertible on a dirt track just outside the airport fence...
Update
I tried to update the other day at the 18%-complete mark, had several paragraphs here about as long as those above, got it ready, quick-check for spelling errors, a nod to grammar (I'm a carpenter and I'm often amazed at the number of experts not working in the field.) though we all know that's a hoot....ummm. Hit "save". And I got the little girl doing her homework or whatever it is she is doing...temporarily unavailable....
Could almost be a theme of this story...
Gaaaaaaa!
The story, as you can see above, is told present-tense. Nice, for when the 3rd-person limited narrator views the past (often....much of the book....er, kindle?)...there's that handy tense-shift if one pays attention. I say "pays attention" for often I get lost in the story and there is at least one major instance when the past is displayed as present....tense....and I noticed we were still in present tense about the time Kevin wondered if they were going to topple over the railing into the flowers below. Maybe sex is always here and now.
The objective of Kevin Quinn is change...or maybe more precisely, for things to stay the same and that means he must flee Ann Arbor, a place he enjoys, and travel to Austin where the heat is a factor. He fixes on the young lady sitting next to him on the plane and after arriving in Austin, he happens to see her on the street, and he begins to follow her. Eeeeeeew....right?
All the while he stalks her, he travels in memory to past relationships...there's about 4-5 major relationships that is his focus, including the current one, with Stella, whom he has neglected to tell that he has gone to Austin for a job interview. He's 50 or so....52 maybe...50...
So....the several relationships from his past influence him, still have a hold on him to a degree...he's been hurt, one girlfriend or almost-girl-friend or whatever even told him why she could never love him...she told him. Another told him that she is pregnant, with another man's child, and that was that. Kevin meets her at different times in his life, all viewed through the present of Austin, where he stalks Miss Joy Luck Club, an American of Oriental roots, whose named it turns out, is Kelly....Kevin is there, in a coffeehouse, stalking her, so the reader hears her name the same time Kevin does.
There's a Spring Spaniel in the story, Barney, who topples Kevin and when Kevin comes-too, another woman is bent over him, asking him if he's okay....the good doctor, Claudia...and the story focuses on Kevin and her, then. His pants are ripped, his knee is bleeding, etc....it's hot...he has a job interview in a couple three hours....etc...
Miss Joy Luck, Kelly, is gone...the good doctor is the focus now, though Kevin looks back with longing and regret at different scenes w/girlfriends....one he was...married? shacked-up?....something....for 13 years or so.
Anyway, things continue to the end...to write more might could be spoiler-material...might could be what is above constitutes "spoiler" material for some. Maybe that's why jacket blurbs sound so asinine...they're trying to sound like they read the book w/o spoiling....we never get off the playground.
Comes an age in a man's life when he don't want to spend time figuring what comes next.
More than one time, I'd hazard.
Part One of the story is called: The Battle of Bertrand Russell
Story begins:
As the ground rushes up to meet him, Kevin thinks about missiles again. One missile in particular, a shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile, blasted from a tube balanced on the bump where some guy's clavicle meets his scapula. What guy--a Saudi? An Egyptian? A Yemeni? Some pissed-off Arab anyway, kneeling in the bed of a dinged-up pickup truck with Texas plates, or crouching on the springy backseat of a rented convertible on a dirt track just outside the airport fence...
Update
I tried to update the other day at the 18%-complete mark, had several paragraphs here about as long as those above, got it ready, quick-check for spelling errors, a nod to grammar (I'm a carpenter and I'm often amazed at the number of experts not working in the field.) though we all know that's a hoot....ummm. Hit "save". And I got the little girl doing her homework or whatever it is she is doing...temporarily unavailable....
Could almost be a theme of this story...
Gaaaaaaa!
The story, as you can see above, is told present-tense. Nice, for when the 3rd-person limited narrator views the past (often....much of the book....er, kindle?)...there's that handy tense-shift if one pays attention. I say "pays attention" for often I get lost in the story and there is at least one major instance when the past is displayed as present....tense....and I noticed we were still in present tense about the time Kevin wondered if they were going to topple over the railing into the flowers below. Maybe sex is always here and now.
The objective of Kevin Quinn is change...or maybe more precisely, for things to stay the same and that means he must flee Ann Arbor, a place he enjoys, and travel to Austin where the heat is a factor. He fixes on the young lady sitting next to him on the plane and after arriving in Austin, he happens to see her on the street, and he begins to follow her. Eeeeeeew....right?
All the while he stalks her, he travels in memory to past relationships...there's about 4-5 major relationships that is his focus, including the current one, with Stella, whom he has neglected to tell that he has gone to Austin for a job interview. He's 50 or so....52 maybe...50...
So....the several relationships from his past influence him, still have a hold on him to a degree...he's been hurt, one girlfriend or almost-girl-friend or whatever even told him why she could never love him...she told him. Another told him that she is pregnant, with another man's child, and that was that. Kevin meets her at different times in his life, all viewed through the present of Austin, where he stalks Miss Joy Luck Club, an American of Oriental roots, whose named it turns out, is Kelly....Kevin is there, in a coffeehouse, stalking her, so the reader hears her name the same time Kevin does.
There's a Spring Spaniel in the story, Barney, who topples Kevin and when Kevin comes-too, another woman is bent over him, asking him if he's okay....the good doctor, Claudia...and the story focuses on Kevin and her, then. His pants are ripped, his knee is bleeding, etc....it's hot...he has a job interview in a couple three hours....etc...
Miss Joy Luck, Kelly, is gone...the good doctor is the focus now, though Kevin looks back with longing and regret at different scenes w/girlfriends....one he was...married? shacked-up?....something....for 13 years or so.
Anyway, things continue to the end...to write more might could be spoiler-material...might could be what is above constitutes "spoiler" material for some. Maybe that's why jacket blurbs sound so asinine...they're trying to sound like they read the book w/o spoiling....we never get off the playground.
September 19, 2016
I approached this book with optimism having so enjoyed Professor Great Lectures on Writing Great Fiction. However, I was disappointed. If the good professor was trying to write a best-seller he failed miserably. He used ten dollar words that weren't relevant to the normal reader who says I went to the toilet to micturate. Why not I went to take a piss.
There was much too much exposition and not enough dialogue and action. All of the exposition made the story drag. Kevin the main character is unlikable as he wanders in his mind with backstory about all the women he has F___, but not loved in his life.
I can't see it as a work of literary fiction either as it is more the rant of a middle-aged man who is still in his adolescence. That he dies, in the end, is fitting. Any author would like to kill off this character
There was much too much exposition and not enough dialogue and action. All of the exposition made the story drag. Kevin the main character is unlikable as he wanders in his mind with backstory about all the women he has F___, but not loved in his life.
I can't see it as a work of literary fiction either as it is more the rant of a middle-aged man who is still in his adolescence. That he dies, in the end, is fitting. Any author would like to kill off this character
November 15, 2020
With a blurb from Jim Crace on the back, I was very hopeful, and parts of the book were fabulous - namely the excellent sharp-as-a-tack retro- and pop-culture references and the crazy ending. Claire Messud says it best: I was left "impressed but finally unsatisfied."
Kevin Quinn of Ann Arbor Michigan is going to a job interview in Austin TX. The scope of the story is a single day, very Joycean, very circadian, (heck, Hynes quotes "Mrs Dalloway," which is also set in a single day) and it starts w/ a plane ride. Kevin is sitting next to a beautiful Asian girl 25yrs his junior. Kevin is in Austin secretly - no one knows, not his employer nor his girlfriend Stella; this is his midlife crisis, an opportunity to jettison girlfriend and job for a new start - and even Kevin knows what a cliche this is. Kevin is a pretty average middle-aged (50-year-old) guy - wondering if he's had enough wild sex, longing over his lost youth, watching the young people in Austin like a starving man at a banquet, but with a jaded, ironic eye. Just last week, there were a series of terrorist attacks in Europe, and Kevin is on edge. When he's not thinking of terrorism, he's thinking about the women in his past and in his immediate present. All the women he meets are lustfully assessed, and Kevin comes across as a bit of a pig, a bit shallow. Over the course of the day, he lustfully recalls some of his best intercourse while wondering whether he was ever in love. What comes next for Kevin (the last 50-odd pgs), isn't really next but last. (I felt some unease: Is the ending a gimmick? How does one write about such things w/o coming across as such? Does it take a certain number of other literature w/ a similar theme to elevate the subject?)
The cover design is beautiful - Keith Hayes.
Kevin Quinn of Ann Arbor Michigan is going to a job interview in Austin TX. The scope of the story is a single day, very Joycean, very circadian, (heck, Hynes quotes "Mrs Dalloway," which is also set in a single day) and it starts w/ a plane ride. Kevin is sitting next to a beautiful Asian girl 25yrs his junior. Kevin is in Austin secretly - no one knows, not his employer nor his girlfriend Stella; this is his midlife crisis, an opportunity to jettison girlfriend and job for a new start - and even Kevin knows what a cliche this is. Kevin is a pretty average middle-aged (50-year-old) guy - wondering if he's had enough wild sex, longing over his lost youth, watching the young people in Austin like a starving man at a banquet, but with a jaded, ironic eye. Just last week, there were a series of terrorist attacks in Europe, and Kevin is on edge. When he's not thinking of terrorism, he's thinking about the women in his past and in his immediate present. All the women he meets are lustfully assessed, and Kevin comes across as a bit of a pig, a bit shallow. Over the course of the day, he lustfully recalls some of his best intercourse while wondering whether he was ever in love. What comes next for Kevin (the last 50-odd pgs), isn't really next but last. (I felt some unease: Is the ending a gimmick? How does one write about such things w/o coming across as such? Does it take a certain number of other literature w/ a similar theme to elevate the subject?)
The cover design is beautiful - Keith Hayes.
October 5, 2011
This is a difficult novel to recommend, for several reasons. One, I have trouble remembering the author’s name, James Hynes, and the title, Next. It’s also difficult to recommend because it’s a difficult novel to read and understand. That said, it’s a tour de force and if you like edgy, contemporary literary fiction that isn’t afraid to taunt you about conventional beliefs and the biggest of all ideas, Death, then I do indeed recommend you read this novel.
Hynes’ character Kevin is the cohering point of the novel: what’s next? The first 70 pages are a slog through his self-absorption and lack of much self-consciousness to an ending that at once fulfills his mindless fear of flying [no, not the Erica Jong type] and drives home the notions of, as Sting sang, how fragile we are and how little we understand just exactly what’s next at any level of the content and context of Life. I’m being rather obtuse, I know, but that’s because there is a plot, and things happen, and you will learn about them, but they are there more so that you think about their meaning and implications rather than for the what-happens aspects.
I also reflect on what a masterpiece of writing it is. This is not a novel that the writer cranked out on a first draft; no, there are layers and layers of context and content that only come about through thoughtful and incessant revision.
This novel, the title and author of which I have to dig to remember, is nevertheless stuck in my memory. I think about it often, recalling the power of it in myriad connections with everyday life. I dare you to read it.
Hynes’ character Kevin is the cohering point of the novel: what’s next? The first 70 pages are a slog through his self-absorption and lack of much self-consciousness to an ending that at once fulfills his mindless fear of flying [no, not the Erica Jong type] and drives home the notions of, as Sting sang, how fragile we are and how little we understand just exactly what’s next at any level of the content and context of Life. I’m being rather obtuse, I know, but that’s because there is a plot, and things happen, and you will learn about them, but they are there more so that you think about their meaning and implications rather than for the what-happens aspects.
I also reflect on what a masterpiece of writing it is. This is not a novel that the writer cranked out on a first draft; no, there are layers and layers of context and content that only come about through thoughtful and incessant revision.
This novel, the title and author of which I have to dig to remember, is nevertheless stuck in my memory. I think about it often, recalling the power of it in myriad connections with everyday life. I dare you to read it.
July 27, 2010
I loved this book almost to the point of addiction. The epigraph at the start from Mrs. Dalloway was the perfect introduction, as the format of the story was third-person stream-of-consciousness. The themes of aging and regret were reinforced throughout in flashbacks and perspectives that were heartbreaking, hilarious, nostalgic, and often all three at once. I both liked and disliked Kevin, the protagonist, because he was flawed and very human. There was such detail provided about his past, his perspectives, and his thought process that you felt as if you knew him intimately at the end of the story - even more than his girlfriend or his wife. The male s-o-c was interesting to me, a woman, as it was both eye-opening and truthful.
It took me a little bit to get into the novel, as it's hard to accept s-o-c at first generally, but once I did, I was hooked. The cyclical nature of the plot itself paired with Kevin's relentless flashbacks and memories complimented one another and really reinforced some other themes of the story: confusion, desire for change, and being caught in a rut.
The novel was at times very funny, sexy, crude, human, and also tragic. The ending simply blew me away, leaving me feel raw... as if I'd lost an intimate friend.
It took me a little bit to get into the novel, as it's hard to accept s-o-c at first generally, but once I did, I was hooked. The cyclical nature of the plot itself paired with Kevin's relentless flashbacks and memories complimented one another and really reinforced some other themes of the story: confusion, desire for change, and being caught in a rut.
The novel was at times very funny, sexy, crude, human, and also tragic. The ending simply blew me away, leaving me feel raw... as if I'd lost an intimate friend.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 312 reviews