THUMBSUCKER
By Walter Kirn
Broadway Books, 300 pages, $14 paper
Consider these two (completely bogus) statistics: 98 percent of readers of contemporary fiction have thumbs; 87 percent deeply resented holstering them to march off to 1st grade . . . or 8th grade . . . or prom. In other words, the dark possibilities of thumb ownership are known to most of us, even without a valid statistical sampling. In naming his third novel, “Thumbsucker,” Walter Kirn took advantage of that familiarity and of the charged nature of the word. As Tom Wolfe demonstrated in a recent exchange with Kirn in the on-line magazine Salon, calling your novel “Thumbsucker” is like tethering an Indian elephant to your living room couch: in neither instance is a lack of reaction going to be your most pressing problem. Kirn marks off the territory of the novel with its title and, thanks to the gleeful creation of its every-boy-a-narcissist narrator, “Thumbsucker” more than lives up to the deliberate bravado of its name.
“It was the one thing I’d always done. Even breathing did not go back to the womb. Being part of a circle of shoulder, arm, hand, mouth, connected me to myself. This circle is what they tried to break the summer I turned fourteen.”
The thumb sucker under siege is Justin, the older son of Mike and Audrey. Audrey is a trauma nurse who, after particularly bloody late-night ambulance calls, wakes Justin up to sit on the edge of his bed with a drink. He pinches himself to stay awake because it’s the only time she talks about her past. Mike played football at Michigan and won Audrey as a kind of consolation prize after a career-ending injury. He runs a sporting goods store in Shandstom Falls, Minn., calls his family ” `You people’ ” and makes a habit of singing “high and tunelessly about the suppliers to his sporting goods store: `Oh, Orvis . . . get off my back,’ or `Give me a break, Smith & Wesson, just one small break.’ ” Justin’s younger brother Joel is an athlete, and acceptable to his father for that reason; Justin has (is) nothing his father wants.
As the novel opens, Mike has adopted as a project taking the thumb out of Justin’s mouth for good. Mike hectors his son, he applies Suk No More to his thumb, he inks his own initials on the thumb and checks at night for signs of wear, he grouses about insurance costs going up but shells out for more dental visits. What Mike does not do, ever, is listen to Justin–which works out, in a way, since Justin’s To Do list for getting out of his adolescence alive does not include, “Tell Dad Truth About Anything.” We listen to Justin talk, though, and so we grasp what his father cannot: the profound disconnection his son is addressing every time his thumb rises to his mouth. We haven’t known Justin long, in fact, before we begin to see exactly what his thumb offers him that his father does not. The thumb is accessible, after all; the thumb has no history, or self-interest, or motives, apart from Justin’s own.
But Justin loses his battle to “keep” his thumb, although not directly to his father. The man who succeeds in taking away the pleasures of his thumb is Justin’s dentist, Perry Lyman, who consistently beats Mike in athletic competitions around town. He hypnotizes Justin, and his thumb becomes “a neutral object, like the end of a broomstick in my mouth.”
But anyone who thinks Justin is going to go quietly hasn’t been paying attention. When his thumb is out of his mouth, the novel begins again, in a sense, since he has to find something to take its place. What he tries includes speech competitions at school (“concentrating on what came out of my mouth instead of what went into it”), eating, smoking, downing cough syrup, smoking marijuana and, sort of, dallying with girls. But nothing fills the hole in him, “a hole I sometimes feared was larger than I was.”
Against a background of escalating trouble in Justin’s family, “Thumbsucker” continues to document his efforts to fill the hole inside. Post-thumb, there is also Ritalin, and spying on his mother, and a gas-station job, and a disturbing family outing to Montana with his father, mother and brother:
” `And we call this a family,’ ” Mike says, as they begin a hike together. ” `What a joke. We can’t even walk up a hill together. . . . I hate to think what would happen if times got hard.’ “
” `Times are hard,’ Audrey said. `You make them hard.’ “
Just how true that is about Mike as husband and father comes clear on the trip to Montana, when Justin emerges as the strong one in the family, a fact even his father acknowledges. But, Justin laments, “I’d hoped we’d be strong together, not just one of us. I hadn’t planned on being strong alone.”
By now there’s not much hiding how much has gone wrong in this family, even from themselves–and that’s the moment Kirn sends two Mormon missionaries to their front door.
Throughout the novel, Kirn has a field day with various aspects of American popular culture (celebrities in rehab, celebrities on gelatin boxes, celebrities who never were celebrities at all). But bringing religion to this particular family–which seem to believe only in its own pain–delivers a new set of possibilities to the novel. This is not a novel in which redemption can ever come in the standard package, but Justin still manages to save himself.
“Thumbsucker’s” principal strength is in the creation of its narrator, who sees the world, unashamedly, through a distorted lens, part pain, part anger, all self-absorption. And the scenes of forced intimacy with his father–in which the point is to avoid any intimacy at all–are some of the best in the novel. That’s particularly true of a fishing trip in which Mike and Justin speak to each other in the voices of their bait–leaches named Leif and Luscious.
Walter Kirn has written a funny novel in which the laughs come mostly from uncomfortable moments of recognition.
