Mama's Boy

November 15, 2010
Gus Reppo, the nice guy hero of Demarinis's slight latest, joined the Air Force "to get away from his doting parents but they followed him." As it happens, this isn't a good move for anyone. Though Gus's father tries to push him into the family business of dentistry, Gus ends up a radio repairman on a base in remotest Montana, where there is little to do but get in trouble. While Gus is nothing if not decent, he still can't get things quite right; "You just seem like the kind of guy that attracts trouble. You don't look for it, but it finds you anyway," a girl tells Gus before they drive her car out onto a frozen lake just for yuks. Indeed, trouble finds Gus repeatedly, but there's never a sense that it affects him all that much. Demarinis (The Year of the Zinc Penny) wrangles an endearing cast into a straightforward story of a man whose life falls apart around him, but the narrative, with all of its inconsequential developments, lacks urgency. It's competently written, but, like Gus, it falls into trouble despite pure intentions.

December 1, 2010
If anyone still thinks the 1950s were an era of serene conformity, DeMarinis newest novel will finally burst the bubble. Gus Reppo is a gawky only child nearly suffocated by his parents love. His father, a Republican nicknamed FDR, banked on Gus taking up the family business, dentistry, but Gus recoils and joins the air force, hoping to escape his plodding retiree father and Flora, his quivering mother. Instead, they follow him anxiously from base to base, even when Gus is assigned to a radar squadron at the bleak Milk River Air Force Base in Montana along the Canadian border, where he watches for Russian bombers and gets into mischief in town. And Flora isnt the only mama Gus has troubles with. Sardonic and absurdist in the mode of Albee and Shepard; a nuclear-age, X-rated Twain; and one of our best underappreciated writers, DeMarinis (Apocalypse Then, 2004) takes lunacy to new dimensions as he toys with archetypal tales of incest and warriors betrayed in this droll, furious, heartbreaking cold war saga of wars long shadow and loves torments.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)