The Lost Boys Symphony

January 5, 2015
Ferguson’s debut novel begins as a coming-of-age story, with its characters in various points of crisis. College student Valerie Mitchell has left Rutgers and her boyfriend, Henry, and moved to Manhattan, transferring to NYU. Henry is so distressed that he decides to follow her. Flashbacks trace their breakup from both their perspectives, as well as Gabe’s, Henry’s roommate, who’s also close to Valerie. Henry and Gabe both struggle with mental and emotional equilibrium, verging close to full-on breakdowns; Henry eventually replaces Gabe with a pair of mysterious, omnipresent confidants identified as 41 and 80. Ferguson’s prose has familiar, often graceful, rhythms; his storytelling is accessible and intelligent, comfortably free of pretension. This story of extreme behaviors has an eerie cast, which is only intensified when the plot ventures into the realm of delusion without any change of voice. Though the plot is soapy and the questions raised about reality are not as effective when Henry addresses them directly, they are nonetheless resonant.

January 15, 2015
Ferguson's playful debut novel mixes a coming-of-age story with time travel."I feel like I should be changing," 19-year-old Val says. Henry, her high school boyfriend, no longer seems like enough, so she ditches him and his best friend, Gabe, for life at NYU. Soon after, Henry disappears, leaving Gabe to search for him and also to reconcile his latent feelings for Val. But Ferguson doesn't keep Henry's whereabouts a secret: He's been abducted by older versions of himself-one at 80, one at 41. Henry can travel through time, see, and his older versions want to help him avoid mistakes, even if it means altering their own realities. Sound confusing, like a Charlie Kaufman-esque head trip? This plot summary makes the novel seem more difficult than it is. As Henry moves through time, Gabe and Val remain in place, and Ferguson gives equal weight to each point of view. In other words, though Henry's story may be tricky, Ferguson never strays far from the anchor of the other two characters, a neat narrative maneuver that makes the novel not as confusing as it should be. Despite all the time travel, Ferguson's core is a coming-of-age tale that takes the form of a love triangle; remove the fantasy, and you have a novel as old-fashioned as Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot (2011). But that's not a bad thing-Ferguson never stresses the weirdness of his construction, focusing instead on convincingly realistic details so that even the surrealism seems earthbound. The novel never quite reaches the conclusion it deserves-Ferguson opts for mezzo piano when fortissimo would've been best-but no matter: This book, like good music, will sweep you up. An auspicious debut that blends a number of disparate-seeming tones into something surprisingly coherent-and moving.

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February 1, 2015
When his girlfriend, Val, leaves him, a devastated 19-year-old Henry feels cause and effect no longer correlate. As if to prove that, something weird then happens: walking across the George Washington Bridge, the boy encounters two men who identify themselves as 80 and 41, his future selves. Henry at first thinks he's dead. But is he? Or is he, rather, insane? And can the men really begin a new future for him and a new past for themselves, as they claim? Meanwhile, Henry's best friend, Gabe, and Val begin a relationship that will be inextricably linked with the lives of the three Henrys as they move forward and backward in time. Gabe and the Henrys have in common hearing haunting music in their heads; underscoring that, each chapter about the Henrys (they alternate with chapters about Gabe and Val) is headed with the name of a musical form or notation: scherzo, minuet, allegro, etc. Whether this abstruse and enigmatic novel has the coherence of a symphony, however, is arguable; nevertheless, its complexities are fascinating and its characters haunting. The result is a must-read for fans of the offbeat.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

October 1, 2014

About as original as it gets: heartbroken over losing Val, college student Henry decides to march straight to New York to try to win her back. Halfway across the George Washington Bridge, he's abducted by two strangers--an older and a middle-aged version of himself--who tell him, "Val is the love of your life. We've lost her, but you don't have to." The beginning of a wild ride; Wally Lamb loves it.

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