Review: A Map of Tulsa - Benjamin Lytal

‘I came back to Tulsa that summer for different reasons. To prove that it was empty. And in hopes that it was not.’

For Jim Praley, college freshman and aspiring poet, his hometown is a kitschy accessory; an aspect of his past that he can patronise or romanticise for effect in the cultural circles he has begun to move in. Tulsa may not quite be a foreign country, but it is sufficiently strange to imbue him with a degree of exoticism, if handled correctly, ‘mentioning at just the right moments that I was raised Southern Baptist, had shot guns recreationally, had been a major Boy Scout’. Although he has only been away for a year, the city has already taken on a fixed impression in his mind, becoming ‘a minor classic, a Western, a bastion of Republican moonshine and a hotbed, equally, of a kind of honky-tonk bonhomie’. Over the course of his debut novel, Benjamin Lytal will examine the way we build up these mental maps of our past, and how radically they can differ from the territory they describe, in a classic American narrative of self-determination and loss...

Benjamin Lytal's debut novel is out today from And Other Stories. Read my full review at The Literateur