Welcome to the Tortuga Library Podcast. This week we review Current Affairs by Cairo Smith.
“I’ve really screwed things up.” “How so?” said Madeline. “I packed the wrong clothes for one,” Calvin sighed. “That, and with this whole Rebecca and Imogene thing, I don’t know. She was bawling her guts out to me this morning, Imogene, not Rebecca, and I realized I’d read the whole thing wrong. I’ve been selfish. Worse, I’ve been a coward.”
The book starts out of nowhere. We have Calvin Munn in Honolulu. He came here in his clothes from New York, which are very fancy and fashionable, but he’s very sweaty. He’s talking to a woman who is the most beautiful woman he could possibly imagine, and he says, “I’ve screwed up.”
Then we flash back to when Calvin is in high school, in Chester, Iowa. He’s very excited about the upcoming release of the video game Civilization VII, February of 2005, and he meets this girl. They went to high school together, but never knew each other. They meet, there is an attraction, but she moves away and he goes off to college. The story moves on linearly from there.
At heart it is a young man’s coming of age story slash romance.
Cairo Smith is the Hunter S. Thompson or Tom Wolfe of the Zoomers. For him, it is the Zoomers who are going to be the new Greatest Generation. They are rising to meet the threat, whatever it turns out to be.
The tone of the book overall is optimistic and patriotic. Not in a heavy-handed way, but nonetheless, it is pro-American. Who ever heard of such a thing?
He had broken his own heart the way one might break his own nose by walking into a wall.
It’s really refreshing to see an author who’s willing to point at someone making mistakes and call them mistakes. He doesn’t have an axe to grind, or if he does, he doesn’t show it in his work. He really tells you what it’s like to be a Midwesterner in New York.
Current Affairs is light and fun without being frivolous and serious without being depressing. It’s not nuanced, it’s not objective, it’s better than either of those things.
Download the sample on Kindle, and it’s got you. If you get two chapters in, you’re done. Start it late in the day because you won’t sleep.
Mentioned in this episode: Strauss and Howe, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Napoleon Dynamite, Starship Troopers, Homonoid, The Fallujiad.
Join us next time for The Earthen Dark by Brad Kelly.
