Philadelphia City Paper // Bitter Milk by John McManus

Picador, 208 pp., $13

Having written two well-regarded collections of stories, Stop Breaking Down and Born on a Train, and winning a Whiting Award along the way, John McManus has now focused his insightful gaze on a longer project. His first novel, Bitter Milk, will sting you like a blast of rock salt packed into a sawed-off 20-gauge.

The narrator, Luther, may or may not actually exist: He appears to be the product of Loren Garland's imagination. Loren is a chubby, bright fourth-grader beset on all sides with enough problems to fill a double LP of Johnny Cash ballads. His mother, Avery, suffers from gender dysphoria and desperately wishes she were a man. When she splits, possibly to an insane asylum, Loren is left in the care of his Tennessee hillbilly relatives. McManus is from Tennessee himself and somehow gets away with drawing caricatures of rednecks. The cantankerous Papaw is a riot even when being especially cruel to Loren: "If you think your mama's so nice and everyone else is so mean, how come she give birth to you here the middle of all this ignartness? It ain't cause I didn't bring her up right, I brought her up same as everybody else, and she was fine till you ate so much."

To make matters worse, Loren's own gender issues begin to cause considerable anxiety — and having Luther's voice in his head doesn't make his life any easier either. When that clever, dual-narrator device fades to the background, Bitter Milk turns into a more conventional novel than it first appears to be. Nevertheless, Loren's eccentricities are rich enough to make him nearly as compelling as Benjy in The Sound and the Fury. You're going to read a number of comparisons to Faulkner over the coming years, maybe to Cormac McCarthy too, and if Bitter Milk has shown anything it's that McManus has the talent and the smarts to live up to them.