The Crowded Room by Michael Maupin

(Phlegethon Press)

Michael Maupin's novella "The Crowded Room" tells the story of a Minnesota high school senior in 1978, adding several layers of complexity to an otherwise conventional coming of age story. At times, the book appears to have been written with the critic in mind, delighting in postmodern devices and literary technique. Maupin surrounds his story with footnotes and epigraphs, as well as a teasingly unreliable postscript suggesting that he wrote the story in 1979, releasing it 25 years later in an annotated edition. To complicate matters, teenage protagonist Jeffrey Dunne narrates the story to Maupin, whose voice only surfaces in a lyrical, concluding chapter. Technical overlays aside, "The Crowded Room" is less literary than it imagines itself to be. At its core lies a surprisingly unaffected coming of age story, more S.E. Hinton that Marcel Proust.

At its best, "The Crowded Room" is bittersweet, evocative, and cinematic in effect. Like Richard Linklater's 1970s high school film "Dazed and Confused," Maupin invokes the era through musical references, with songs by Steve Miller, Fleetwood Mac and Ted Nugent providing a soundtrack in print. The details of high school life are captured with humor and insight: "When you're in the ERC or the SRC or any other resource center for that matter, you feel like you're in a furnished mine or something," reflects narrator Jeffrey Dunne.

Maupin's Dunne is intensely solipsistic; the narrator drifts from scene to scene, petulant, insular, dreamily observing, never appearing to connect with his surroundings. In an early footnote, Maupin identifies Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye" ("The Book") as an influence and Dunne often reads like a less introspective Holden Caulfield. Led Zeppelin sounds "really great," romantic failure "bugs me really bad." Parents, largely excluded from the story, are dismissed when they do appear: "I wish'd she'd go away." Although Dunne is supposedly delivering a confessional, his words are often too detached and self possessed to pass for speech. For the most part, his language reads like unedited adolescent thought, elided and gently bemused.

"The Crowded Room" resists Maupin's technical scaffolding. The footnotes rarely offer more than texture, only proving useful to readers unable to identify Steve Miller songs or those interested in technical differences between the 1979 "original" and the current edition of the story. The central narrative, stripped of all its surrounding devices, stands effectively alone. Jeffrey Dunne's raw idiom, real and unmediated, is enough.

- Sten Johnson