Famous People

May 13, 2019
Kuritzkes’s clever debut is a hilarious probing social commentary written as an unnamed 20-something pop star’s memoir. The protagonist had a regular childhood in Minnesota, where he sang “traditional black music” in church although he’s white. A video of his take on the “Star-Spangled Banner” garners millions of views, and he becomes a chart-topping sensation at 12. After becoming famous, his family moves to L.A. where he meets Mandy, another teen pop sensation. The duo are cast as a couple because they have similar small-town backgrounds, and everyone wants to see them together. His manager-father tries to dictate his son’s sound and goes on a show called Content Bucket to talk about him, but after their first album together, the singer changes his sound, which pushes his father away. Aside from Mandy and other musicians, the narrator befriends Bob Winstock, a writer with controversial stances on minorities and gay rights who later marries his mother. Mandy is the centering person in the narrator’s life as they hook up and drift apart multiple times. In an attempt at introspection, the narrator works on a video game of his life, a secret project that seems destined for failure but that the narrator thinks will make players get to know his life and understand him. Kuritzkes flawlessly strikes the right balance between searing and comedic as his narrator searches for the true meaning of being a normal person while being famous. This is an incisive and fresh debut.

May 15, 2019
An unnamed 22-year-old pop star looks back over a decade in the spotlight and grapples with his family history. Near the end of this tautly written debut novel, structured as its narrator's memoir, he muses on his pop-culture ubiquity. "Something I've been thinking about a lot is what it would be like to read this book if you'd never heard of me before," he writes. It's a slightly self-conscious touch, but it's also understandable: This musician at times feels like a recognizable composite of a number of 21st-century singers. The narrator's relationship with his mentor, a writer named Bob Winstock with some bigoted remarks in his past, is particularly evocative of some of the more contentious aspects of Justin Bieber's public persona. Structurally, the novel is more subtle than it first appears: It begins in celebrity tell-all mode, with the narrator discussing the loss of his virginity and observing that "it's actually kind of hard for me to remember anything that happened in my life before I was famous." But the narrator reveals himself to be more empathic than he seems, yearning for a kind of self-knowledge that he's never developed the tools to manage and clearly frustrated in ways he can't articulate by his parents' divorce and his father's suicide. It's a tricky voice to pull off, and Kuritzkes occasionally overdoes some affectations of immaturity. A long subplot involving Oddvar, a scientist helping to maintain a seed vault in Svalbard, resolves ambiguously; it's unclear if the narrator is unknowingly convincing Oddvar to leave work benefitting the planet for something more ephemeral or if Oddvar himself is unsure of what he wants. But overall, this novel emerges in a less satirical, more humanistic place than it begins. A thoughtful, subtly structured exploration of fame and its discontents.

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June 1, 2019
Written as the fictional memoir of a 22-year-old singer who's been a teen idol since being discovered in a viral video at age 12, Kuritzkes's debut novel exposes the strange, disconnected lives of the ultra-famous. The unnamed heartthrob writes his life story in a diary-like format, recalling his rise to stardom while covering his real-time excursions as well. He's struggling with the suicide of his father, a musician himself and the narrator's manager until his son's fame and creative drive eclipsed his own, as well as the next step in his career. It doesn't help that his on-again, off-again girlfriend Mandy, also a child star, has begun to move away from music and the fame that goes with it. While the narrator's informal voice rings true, it can read a bit disjointedly as he jumps from subject to subject in an almost stream-of-consciousness style. That said, Kuritzkes' novel feels modern and original, capturing the bizarre life, thoughts, and rationalizations of someone who came of age in front of an audience.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)