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Will Leitch’s “Catch” — relive your awkward days

Hey there, Blogebrikids. I didn’t forget you, I just willfully abandoned you. And I’ve been so neglectful, hiding Will Leitch’s young-adult novel from you.

Leitch’s Catch, the story of a high school graduate’s transformative last summer at home, came out in early December (which means used copies are up at Amazon, but you know you’d prefer a shiny new copy). It’s hit the most obvious readers, the sports-friendly teens, but it’s charming enough for a wider audience.

Leitch’s choice of “young adult” isn’t a beginners’ copout; he has a full CV of book, magazine, and online work (most recently on the grand-slamming Gawker Media blog Deadspin). This urbaneness might be Leitch’s one flaw. He can’t help but crack a few jokes at his computer-illiterate protagonist’s expense, and the narration feels a bit too society-gossip for a small-town high-school baseballer. But there are worse errors of style, and Leitch still captures the spirit of the age (the age being 18, give or take some months).

This spirit is one of apprehension about the future, realization of a larger world where one has to re-establish one’s worth in the new society of college. This makes perfect nostalgia reading for those of us still finishing our degrees. As much as college students — and, as I recall, many high schoolers — shy away from the usually insipid “young adult” genre, the older end of Generation Y may be able to relate to this bildungsroman more than the teens who haven’t yet spent that shaky summer of leaving friends and experimenting before the next four years of schoolwork.

Leitch’s narrator, Tim Temples, is the son of a local minor-league baseball hero. Born with greatness, he has always assumed leadership and looked down with pity, though not unkindly, at lesser souls like his friend Jessica’s absent-minded father, Tim’s immature posse, and his harrassing boss. But Tim questions his smug superiority when his role model, an older brother who wasted a college scholarship with a failed baseball career, comes home from college unkempt, pot-bellied, and uselessly rebellious.

In the course of one summer, Tim is transformed by a harsh but relatable introduction to the small-minded cruelty of blue-collar workplace politics, an equally common relationship with an older working girl who nurses a gen-X single-mother crush for her boy toy, and the distancing from his old friends that we all felt in that last summer before college. It’s the commonality, the recognizability of these situations that makes each detail stand out on its own merit — the disgusting thicket of Doug Temples’s beard, the third-person speech habit of Tim’s co-worker Larry. Leitch doesn’t need to wow us with an untold story of heroism and the human spirit. The often-told story, with which any small-towner now finding a life in the world at large can identify, is worth telling again.

This entry was posted by Nick Douglas on Friday, January 6th, 2006 at 3:16 pm and is filed under Nick Denton, Review, Will Leitch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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