Arithmetic

by Todd McEwen

All Joe Lake has to do, according to his Dad, is GO TO SCHOOL. But evil spirits have driven his parents from their dream home. Joe's models melt, his baseball cannot be caught. He discovers baleful connections between astronauts, dirty laundry, roasted chickens, Nixon, castro and dog pooh. Joe's sunny Southern California becomes a pandaemonium of crappy feelings bowing to one malevolont arithmetic. The spirits assume many the hulking scout Gomez, Walt Disney, finally Joe's affable Dad, who becomes a mathematical tyrant. With his best friend, the plucky Fard, and Dr Herbert S. Zim, his naturalist hero, Joe attempts to flee, to find the America he knows to be pure- the country of cartoons. In this brilliant novel, Todd McEwen reminds us that children already have a civilisation ARITHMETIC palpably re-creates the horrendous experience of growing-up, and makes of it a subversive comic classic.

184 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Todd McEwen (b.1953) is an American writer. A graduate of Columbia University, he has been a resident of Scotland since 1981 and is married to novelist Lucy Ellmann. He has published four novels: Fisher's Hornpipe (1983), McX: A Romance of the Dour (1990), Arithmetic (1998) and Who Sleeps with Katz (2003). He has also written for Granta magazine and contributed book reviews to The Guardian and other newspapers. He teaches creative writing at the University of Kent.

Reviews

[🐴 🍖]

in terms of how it inhabits & expresses the kid mindset -- the skewed priorities, the weird thrills & anxieties, the shame of throwing up banana taffy in front of your dad -- this is just astonishingly good, but the general shapelessness of it was p frustrating to this reader. "hey," you might rightly retort, "didn't you give a pass to that steve katz novel for having no plot earlier today?," to which i would counter (a) i'm fickle af, and (b) there at least seemed to be a rationale as to where the katz book started and ended, whereas this just halts in its tracks as though mcewen ran outta ink. i mean, read it still for sure, but in the words of bunk moreland, "i need more, jimmy!" -- jimmy in this instance being a creative spelling of "todd"

[Katherine Catmull · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dreamy and for me extremely evocative (as someone who grew up in similar suburbs not long after the book is set) story of aan American childhood. But that sounds dull, and McEwen's writing is the opposite of dull. Have not read this in years -- I should come back to it.