Growth — A.J. Smith

Bburke is sad.

Well maybe "sad" isn't the right word. Discontent, perhaps. Or if he isn't, he should be.

He's recently divorced, overweight, aging, and the only thing he has to show for his five decades on Earth is a tremendous beer belly and a meager side-business--modest landscaping jobs and nightly lawn mowing throughout Central New Jersey.

The point is, he needs a change. Needs to shake things up.

[Enter two hipster-millennial employees. Enter the works of Dostoyevsky, Stein, Camus, and others. Enter a new and exciting romantic prospect. Enter more beer.]

But there are, of course, consequences to his reformation. As Bburke begins to immerse himself in the world of literature, love, and libations, he begins to doubt his own perceptions of the world and his place in it.

[Exeunt ignorance, complacency, and sanity.]

Told in a variety of narrative styles and with a clever weaving of literary, musical, and pop cultural allusions, Growth is a novel that questions the role of art in our lives and seeks to examine the way literature permeates our own views of reality--and the inverse.