Narrator doesn’t ring true, author does

Benjamin Lytal's beautifully paced debut novel “A Map of Tulsa” is, like many first novels, a coming-of-age story. But it's also a story about returning to your hometown. In the case of Jim Praley, our narrator, that town is Tulsa, Ok., and over the course of the novel he returns twice: once after finishing his first year of college and again, at 24, in response to a tragedy.

During his first trip, Praley begins a summer relationship with former high school classmate Adrienne Booker, a member of a wealthy Tulsa oil family. She is charming in her own way, but his pretensions make him stuffy. Praley asks Booker's friend for her number in this way: “What Edith maybe didn't understand was the intuitive validity of my interest: that simply I ought to get what I want. ... I said to Edith, ‘I think you are meant to give me her number.'” This is a young man who, when nervous about coming home to his parents after an evening of drunken, backyard sex, says: “a sense of moment that bore me in my car was like a heavy, Wagnerian music.”

While Praley is pompous, readers who have left home and returned changed can relate to him in certain moments of self-reflection, especially when he returns again in response to a tragic motorcycle accident. He becomes more self-aware with age: “There goes Jim,” he thinks. “Running away from life ... leaping to the aid of those who do not need him.” However, far more common are the passages where Jim thinks how, if this tragic experience had happened earlier in his life, he could turn it into a great college application essay.

Lytal explores some wonderful, genuine topics in this novel: first love, first home, and how these experiences shape us - even when we reject them. We can look forward to his next book, when he hopefully also explores a more genuine narrator.