Cannibals in Love

July 25, 2016
In Roberts’s debut novel, Mike finds his way through the America of the early aughts, panicking about love, terrorism, and finding and keeping a job. The chapters jump in time and are largely unfocused. Characters come and go as Mike moves around the country finding work counting lampposts in upstate New York, painting apartments in D.C., babysitting in Portland, and writing spam emails, though his passion is working on his novel about cows, which he describes as an allegory about the Iraq War. The narrative momentarily comes together when a romance emerges between Mike and thinly sketched tomboy Lauren. One of the most frustrating aspects of the novel is that whenever Mike finds himself in trouble, it seems as though his only way to resolve issues is to walk away, which always somehow—miraculously—works for him. The world that Roberts creates is familiar, and Mike’s voice is immediately recognizable. Though at times the writing becomes repetitive, there are shining moments where Roberts’s novel moves seamlessly from humor to heartbreak and back again.

July 15, 2016
An angst-y all-American coming-of-age tale in 18 linked vignettes, Roberts' debut captures the anger and tumult of early adulthood in the George W. Bush years.Graduating from college shortly after 9/11, Mike spends his 20s butting up against a world of broken promises. ("The Baby Boomers have fucked us," he announces at family Christmas dinner.) He drifts into and out of cities and jobs: D.C., New York, Portland, and Austin; counting lampposts, writing spam emails, painting houses, substitute teaching. He's at work on a novel, a tragedy about a farmer and his cows that is "a kind of allegory about the Invasion of Iraq." Friendships and lovers fade in and out, coming into focus and flitting away again. At the center is a girl, of course, and their on-again, off-again relationship is big and destructive and passionate and mean. "I had come to understand," Mike reflects, not unromantically, "that Lauren would eventually kill me in the way that many coupling insects go." In one vignette, a washed-up co-worker introduces Mike to the depressing world of off-track betting. In another--the title story--he and Lauren are tearing each other apart in a house in D.C. He's sitting in the waiting room of a Portland Planned Parenthood reflecting on the art of email spam; he's in Austin, watching a once-wild friend raise a baby son. Much as in real life, Mike's relentlessly self-destructive millennial macho posturing can grow tiring, and Roberts' telling of it sometimes feels just a touch too invested in its own edginess. Still, impression by impression, fragment by fragment, Roberts chronicles the low-grade agony of growing up with insight and accuracy. A study of young masculinity: atmospheric, quietly aggressive, and unexpectedly hopeful.

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August 1, 2016
Roberts' enthusiastic collection of linked stories follows Mike, whose muddled postcollege aspirations lead him to situations that test his manhood, artistic goals, and sense of place in the adult world. The problem is, he keeps falling in love, and in the wake of 9/11, how can anyone feel secure about anything? Reluctantly returning home to Buffalo for the holidays, Mike struggles to connect with his childhood buddies, who remain stuck in the past. After moving from Washington, D.C., to New York City to hawk his recently completed novel, Mike drunkenly wrecks his bike, which two police officers confiscate. While painting houses and helping his brother get back on track, Mike becomes preoccupied with a sniper in D.C. Having written a novel too big to publish, and worried he's contracted AIDS, Mike takes a job writing spam e-mails targeting sex-crazed, directionless romantics like him. After moving from Portland to Austin, he befriends new parents and becomes a substitute teacher. Unapologetically political and full of youthful whimsy, Roberts' debut captures one man's reluctant search for stability.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)