Eat Only When You're Hungry

June 5, 2017
“It felt like a gift, this possibility that GJ was just being an asshole again.” So considers Greg, an overweight, middle-aged, divorced father who has rented an RV and gone off looking for his drug-addict adult son, GJ, or Greg Junior. As he drives from his home in West Virginia to visit GJ’s mother, Marie, in Florida, where his search will begin, Greg knows that GJ might not want to be found. Over the course of his drive, Greg must also confront himself, his failures, his memories, and the indignities of later life. It is in these indignities that Hunter proves herself a particularly adept writer. Greg relishes the comfort offered by the RV’s wide, plush driver’s seat. At the strip club Greg visits on his first night on the road, he lets himself be led off to a side room, as much relieved as disappointed to find $20 in the pocket of his gym shorts instead of the $50 required. Though Greg and Marie have long been separated, he reflects on their early romance with shining tenderness. As the two search in dark alleys and liquor stores for their son, though, it’s clear that the hopefulness of their youth has long since vanished. The novel is satisfying and, despite the straightforwardness of the structure, the prose remains skillful and refreshingly concrete, full of the grease-stained fast food wrappers that litter the floor of Greg’s RV and reflect the particularly sad evidence of what no longer remains.

David LeDoux narrates this offbeat audiobook with the awkward authenticity of its protagonist, Greg--a man with blurry edges. Greg climbs behind the wheel of a rented RV on a quest to find his troubled adult son, but he does so with no true momentum. LeDoux performs Greg's story with that heavy-footed walk of the ordinary person just trying--or offering a try at trying?--to make enough sense of the world to get through it with some glimmer of happiness. Despite the bleak premise, this is an effective audiobook, full of candor and realistic conversations among everyday people. LeDoux has moments in which he sounds oddly like Charles Kuralt, reporting bits from a confused life on the road. L.B.F. � AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine