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"The Ordinary Son" by Ron Carlson
In “The Ordinary Son”, Ron Carlson has created one of the blandest characters ever put on paper, and therein lies the story’s peculiar power.
Reed Landers is the son of a NASA scientist and a grassroots poet. In a family of geniuses, he is alone in his commonness. Nothing particularly meritorious underlies his conduct; his intelligence is average, his needs superficial. Reed’s siblings blossom under a strict moral diet of work and unheralded ‘sacrifice’. They eat sardines and crackers for dinner, refuse to mow their yard, and do without a refrigerator.
Meanwhile, Reed, meticulously normal, rebels by choosing materialism. He aspires to average friendships, to owning a car, to physical labor.
Though Reed narrates the story, he offers little in the way of self-examination. Instead, he is defined by a succession of small encounters with minor characters-his family, a few slight friends, his boss. They drift in and out of the story, pausing in their orbits only long enough to refine Reed’s sharp points by radiating their unequivocal realities on his unpolished manhood.
Ron Carlson, faced with brilliance, presents instead the unlikeliest of heroes: an Everyman captured in the twilight of youth, unable to escape the genius that surrounds him and painfully aware that he watches with a mind that will never aspire, nor know defeat.
Date: Feb 26,2022