Lawn Boy (2018) - Jonathan Evison

 

I didn’t realize what a can of worms I was opening up when I decided to read Jonathan Evison’s Lawn Boy. I don’t remember running across it at all when it was published in 2018, and it really only caught my eye now because of its unusual cover art. Only after finishing Lawn Boy, did I learn (in the author’s short essay at the end of the novel) that it is largely autobiographical. This is a book the author poured his heart and soul into, but it came back to bite him in a serious way.

The premise of the novel is this:  23-year-old Mike Muñoz, half Mexican, half white, lives with his single-parent mother and grossly overweight autistic brother in a dump they can barely afford to pay the rent on. It takes every penny Mike and his mother can earn just to keep the family sheltered, fed, and clothed even at the low standards they are forced to accept. Mike’s mother is a waitress who often works two jobs; Mike cuts grass and trims hedges for a landscaping company. Mike, though, despite barely making it through high school, is capable of more, and he knows it. But he can’t stop working his low-paying job long enough to better himself without causing his entire family to crash and burn.

“I read at least two books a week, sometimes as many as four. Call it self-improvement. You see, old Mike Muñoz would like to figure out who the hell he actually is, what he’d actually like to do with his life. He aches to be a winner. I’d like nothing more than to spread my proverbial wings and fly…"

Mike is largely self-educated because he spent so much time in a library while taking care of his autistic brother during the summers before he went to work full time to help support the family.  He wants more for himself and his family, but he doesn’t see a way out of the poverty trap he’s in. And he’s angry about it.

“After all, most of us are mowing someone else's lawn, one way or another, and most of us can’t afford to travel the world or live in New York City. Most of us feel like the world is giving us a big fat middle finger when it’s not kicking us in the face with a steel-toed boot. And most of us feel powerless."

Lawn Boy is Mike’s coming-of-age story, and it’s a fun one filled both with little victories and major setbacks along the way. Eventually, the little victories begin to add up, and Mike starts hanging on to some of the gains he makes.  

Mike’s story, ultimately, is a satisfying one, but I was often distracted by just how super- educated Mike appears to be. One minute he’s quoting Camus while trimming hedges, the next he’s explaining capitalism’s faults to the reader. It’s as if he’s read every philosopher, economist, and historian who has ever put pen to paper. He’s read it all, and he remembers it all. It was a matter of degree for me. I was willing to suspend my disbelief right up to the point that I just couldn’t go any farther and began being distracted by Mike’s amazing breath of knowledge. Then, that was all I could think about every time he opened his mouth.

Lawn Boy, as it turns out, had a rough debut, even being banned in the school libraries of several states because of its sexual content (none of which is really all that explicit). Because one sexual incident took place between two 10-year-old boys, the novel was banned as “pedophilic" by some, “pornographic” by others, and even called “grooming” by a few. The sensationalist Tucker Carlson labelled it as graphic child sex on one of his on-air rants, and from what I understand, Evison even received a few death threats at the height of the hysteria over Lawn Boy.

Having read it eight years after all the stink others attached to it, I find all of this both disturbing and surprising because my only complaint about the novel is how I reacted to Mike’s general brilliance despite him being entirely, randomly self-taught. That distraction led me to experience Lawn Boy as just a pretty good novel, and not a particularly realistic one at that. Evison is a good writer (I’ve read two others of his novels), so I don’t really think he was going for realism. This is more a fable-like story than anything else. And unlike me, you might love it for exactly that reason.