I fell in love with Tony Earley’s work when I was in college and he published a short story titled “Charlotte” in Harpers. If you had grown up in the Atlanta suburbs, as I did, and gone to college in Chapel Hill, as I did, with a bunch of people from Charlotte, you would have come to think of Charlotteans just as I did: nouveau riche johnny-come-latelies whose hometown rolled up the sidewalks at night, had no soul, and, in general, sucked. (I knew even then, of course, that Atlantans are the last people on earth who should think of anyone else in those terms, but back then we were fixin’ to host The Olympics and were Hot Stuff. Seems like eons ago.)

“Charlotte” was, on one level, about a guy who hung around a fern bar in the city of the same name where all the regulars moaned about the good ol’ days and lamented the fact that all the professional wrestlers had decamped from their city for Ted Turner’s filthy lucre. It captured what I disliked most about Charlotte and was, at least as I recall it, very, very snarky.

Tony Earley’s novels, Jim the Boy and The Blue Star, are the exact opposite of snarky. I love them anyway. They ease right up to the edge of nostalgia and sentimentality without quite tipping over.

If my folks hadn’t moved to Atlanta I would have been something like a 7th- or 8th-generation North Carolinian, and some of my people grew up in towns very much like Earley’s Yoknapatawphic Aliceville, N.C. The funny uncles in Jim the Boy and The Blue Star remind me a lot of my funny uncles. The pride of place and intense connection to family that Earley’s Jim feels, mixed with equal parts of the sheer boredom of small-town life and desire to get away from confining surroundings, strike me viscerally, even though my experience has been a few degrees removed from the experience Earley writes about so movingly. (I’m sure that my parents moved to Atlanta at least in part because their hometown was too much like Aliceville.)

One astute reviewer of The Blue Star pointed out that in these books Earley uses the techniques and conventions of young adult fiction to explore adult themes. I wish I’d been smart enough to notice that on my own, but I think it describes these novels perfectly and helps describe the tension that the novels create without seeming to create any tension at all. In any case, I identify with Earley’s characters totally and want to see them succeed and be happy.

Speaking of tension… I don’t know what it was–I guess the pollen count in the beach house where I read The Blue Star must have been really high or some sand blew in my face or something–but if you had watched me read the last 30 pages of this book, you would have seen a 37-year-old man struggling with all his might to contain a tsunami of sniffles.

I can’t wait to see what Jim gets up to next.