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clareash's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
funny
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
kevinkearney's review against another edition
5.0
https://themillions.com/2023/04/the-quixotic-cringe-of-the-red-headed-pilgrim.html
mbesq's review
adventurous
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
1.5
Lord, what an exercise in cis, het, white, male navel-gazing. At least it was short.
jacksontibet's review against another edition
4.0
Really liked this a whole lot more than I thought I would. The writing is breezy and deadpan and actually funny in many places. Only a little bit preciously self aware in the way so many Two Dollar books can be. I definitely relate to the type of person the narrator becomes as I've known so many people just like that from a few years spent in local music scenes.
kaleidoschope's review against another edition
3.0
I got big My Year of Rest and Relaxation/Luster/You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine vibes from this novel, but I hate to say it was a lot less fun from the perspective of a white dude? Did millennial anxiety actually originate with gen Xers in Burlington, Vermont in the early aughts?
demikevy's review
adventurous
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
samarov's review
reviewed in Neutral Spaces
I find an advanced reader copy of Kevin Maloney’s ‘The Red -Headed Pilgrim’ waiting under my gate. Usually ARCs arrive after I’ve reached out to a publisher. A book I heard of and want to write about. Not this one. But when I see ‘Two Dollar Radio’ in the return address corner, I take the package inside rather than straight back to the dumpster.
I have a stack of books to read and other work to do but the bear on the cover keeps calling out to me. I think I’ll read a page or two then put it away. After all, it says right in the little circle on the bottom-right corner of the cover that it’s not even out till January 2023. But three days later I’ve read the whole thing. I didn’t want to keep reading but I couldn’t stop.
The story’s familiar enough. A guy sharing the author’s name realizes one day in middle-age that he’s been working the kind of straight job his younger self would sneer at. He goes out of his office building, lies down in the grass, and stares up into the sky, wondering where the time went, how everything’s gone wrong; or, at the very least, nothing like what his younger self planned or imagined.
What follows is a funny, sometimes sad, always openhearted tour of a man’s coming of age. Young Kevin is an idealistic seeker in the Whitman/Kerouac mold. He rages against parents who want him to study or make a living while accepting their material support for his multiple dead-end vision quests. Shy and awkward, he goes to absurd lengths chasing unavailable women who friendzone him with extreme prejudice. He falls head over heels with the first one who consents to deflower him, then won’t let go or move on, long after the corpse of their relationship has begun to reek. There’s a child involved so things get very messy.
Before Kevin gives up and gets a job in the office park, there are multiple moves from the west coast to the east and back, jobs at a food co-op, a teddy-bear factory, and a children’s camp. A college stint that leads to a failed teaching career, and many moments of inebriated embarrassment. It could have been a miserable slog of self-loathing but Maloney keeps it buoyant by undercutting his fictional stand-in’s flailing with genuine empathy. He never oversells Kevin’s suffering but doesn’t put him down so much that he comes off as terminally pathetic. This is an average guy learning life’s lessons the hard way. For many of us, that’s the only way anything penetrates our thick skulls. It’s not real if it doesn’t hurt.
Looking back at young mistakes from middle-age is a time-honored tradition. Especially for those who’ve harbored artistic or utopian dreams (or delusions, as the case may be.) Maloney doesn’t give us the wish-fulfillment ending by having Kevin quit his comfortable job and go back on the road to sound his barbaric yawp, but neither does he close the door on the possibility that some pie-in-the-sky hopes may still come true.
“There are moments in life when you wake up at 6 a.m. and everything hurts because you dig up root vegetables for a living and you’re only making a hundred dollars a week and it occurs to you that this isn’t so much an “apprenticeship” as an exploitation racket run by opportunistic hippies, but two decades later, when you’re sitting at a computer adjusting the target demographic of a Facebook ad for a healthcare organization promoting Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month, you look back and realize being exploited was the best thing that ever happened to you.”
I find an advanced reader copy of Kevin Maloney’s ‘The Red -Headed Pilgrim’ waiting under my gate. Usually ARCs arrive after I’ve reached out to a publisher. A book I heard of and want to write about. Not this one. But when I see ‘Two Dollar Radio’ in the return address corner, I take the package inside rather than straight back to the dumpster.
I have a stack of books to read and other work to do but the bear on the cover keeps calling out to me. I think I’ll read a page or two then put it away. After all, it says right in the little circle on the bottom-right corner of the cover that it’s not even out till January 2023. But three days later I’ve read the whole thing. I didn’t want to keep reading but I couldn’t stop.
The story’s familiar enough. A guy sharing the author’s name realizes one day in middle-age that he’s been working the kind of straight job his younger self would sneer at. He goes out of his office building, lies down in the grass, and stares up into the sky, wondering where the time went, how everything’s gone wrong; or, at the very least, nothing like what his younger self planned or imagined.
What follows is a funny, sometimes sad, always openhearted tour of a man’s coming of age. Young Kevin is an idealistic seeker in the Whitman/Kerouac mold. He rages against parents who want him to study or make a living while accepting their material support for his multiple dead-end vision quests. Shy and awkward, he goes to absurd lengths chasing unavailable women who friendzone him with extreme prejudice. He falls head over heels with the first one who consents to deflower him, then won’t let go or move on, long after the corpse of their relationship has begun to reek. There’s a child involved so things get very messy.
Before Kevin gives up and gets a job in the office park, there are multiple moves from the west coast to the east and back, jobs at a food co-op, a teddy-bear factory, and a children’s camp. A college stint that leads to a failed teaching career, and many moments of inebriated embarrassment. It could have been a miserable slog of self-loathing but Maloney keeps it buoyant by undercutting his fictional stand-in’s flailing with genuine empathy. He never oversells Kevin’s suffering but doesn’t put him down so much that he comes off as terminally pathetic. This is an average guy learning life’s lessons the hard way. For many of us, that’s the only way anything penetrates our thick skulls. It’s not real if it doesn’t hurt.
Looking back at young mistakes from middle-age is a time-honored tradition. Especially for those who’ve harbored artistic or utopian dreams (or delusions, as the case may be.) Maloney doesn’t give us the wish-fulfillment ending by having Kevin quit his comfortable job and go back on the road to sound his barbaric yawp, but neither does he close the door on the possibility that some pie-in-the-sky hopes may still come true.
“There are moments in life when you wake up at 6 a.m. and everything hurts because you dig up root vegetables for a living and you’re only making a hundred dollars a week and it occurs to you that this isn’t so much an “apprenticeship” as an exploitation racket run by opportunistic hippies, but two decades later, when you’re sitting at a computer adjusting the target demographic of a Facebook ad for a healthcare organization promoting Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month, you look back and realize being exploited was the best thing that ever happened to you.”
kybrz's review against another edition
3.0
A funny auto-fiction-heavy book about the continental crisscrossing adventures of a man who can't get out of his own way. The main character (also Kevin Maloney) spends much of his time searching for enlightenment (he claims philosophical but the only enlightenment he truly craves is sex).