The Year of the Zinc Penny

I loved this book when I read it in hardcover (from Norton) when it was first published. Kudos to Seven Stories press for putting it back in print. Funny, sad, deeply humane and beautifully written. It's a gem.

This short, comic-sad novel tells the first-person story of a ten-year-old boy living in wartime Los Angeles. The year is 1943. Men are off fighting the war; women are riveting planes in the city's aircraft factories. The protagonist, Trygve (nicknamed Monk), lives in a crowded apartment with his mother and her show-business aspiring boyfriend, her sister and her sister's Canadian husband, and his teenage son. Seen through the inexperienced but curious eyes of a boy, these characters form the center of the novel, which traces events in their emotionally tangled, often unstable lives. Impressionable and inquisitive, the young hero is continually instructed in the ill-formed opinions of the older males in his life, while his mostly sensible mother tries without much success to counter-balance her sister's other-worldly reflections on past lives and the tenuousness of this one. Meanwhile, his fevered imagination is fed by the movies and what he hears on his short-wave radio set, as he daydreams of piloting fighter jets only to die melodramatically in the arms of grade school sweethearts. Like everyday life itself, there's no particular plot line to this story, just one thing after another, finally adding up to a kind of worldly wisdom that sometimes comes in times of war, dislocation and anxiety - represented here by the image of Kilroy peeking quizzically over a fence. I recommend this novel to readers interested in the zeitgeist of the 1940s war years (the period details evoke this era wonderfully), Los Angeles, and coming-of-age stories. It will leave you with memories of those years on the verge of puberty, first love, and an ever-elusive maturity.

Maybe it wouldn't be too bad to live this story for just anyone. Some of us are more independent than others, some are just simple, and some are unemotional. But this is the story of an emotional, intelligent, and complex boy, and a brief year of life with his mother and an extended family.Paul's widowed mother has left him several times in unhappy circumstances - with his grandparents for several years, and in various institutions. When he finally has the chance to live with her in a family context, he never wants it to end. But it is wartime, and everything is much too complicated and desperate for normalcy to prevail. This is the story of Paul's manic struggle to swim rather than sink in the much-too-adult life current that has collided with his childhood. This is a very American story, and many American readers will crack a grin as they identify with Paul's maudlin escapist daydreams, as he visualizes himself at the controls of a fighter plane, coming down in enemy territory, and (of course) dying dramatically in the arms of various beautiful women! A very good read, sad and funny, with a haunting aftertaste.