DARIUS IN THE MEANTIME

ISBN: 059540006X

Author: Devin O'Shea

Condition: Used

Review A college grad struggles haplessly to define himself in this comic coming-of-age story. After he collects his sheepskin and gets dumped by his girlfriend Brynn for not being "dangerous" enough, Darius Fitzpatrick faces the age-old dilemma about what to do with his life. Joining an insurance company will simply perpetuate his innocuousness, but robbing the bank where Brynn works to affect an outlaw soul is liable to backfire like his other initiatives and, Darius frets, lead to a long stretch of prison and rape. To distance himself from his own harmless conformity, Darius takes to carrying a gun, with which he ineptly menaces an obnoxious bicycle messenger, and then flees to Europe, where he passes time in an idyllic Irish village, then in an alienating Paris. Unlike The Graduate's muddled young hero, very much his precursor, Darius finds no great romance to prod him into breaking with convention--the closest he comes is a premature ejaculation induced by a French whore. While his fumbling attempts to engage with real-life misfire, Darius lives mostly in his head, which teems with fantasy scenarios--saving would-be suicides, being beaten up by righteous black people, committing many varieties of bank robbery--that veer between abject self-loathing and masturbatory reverie. In between his neurotic daydreams, Darius revisits scenes from a childhood scarred by his father's ghastly death and spins hilarious riffs on Nerf toys and other horrors of modern life. O'Shea's first novel sometimes seems as much a feckless shaggy-dog story as Darius's life, but its meanderings are full of dejected humor and a wry sympathy for his hero's predicament. Readers will care about this young searcher, exiled from childhood with no map to manhood. An accomplished and affecting debut. -- Kirkus Discoveries, July 20, 2007 Product Description Looking at my eyes behind the black mask, I tell myself that I'm not too far away from being a criminal. Life is in the props and I have a mask and a gun. The right props can turn you from someone the world pushes around into someone who pushes around the world.Meet Darius, an unlikely bank robber. Recently graduated from a Seattle university, he's just spent three days in a Parisian hospital recovering from pneumonia, and his lack of machismo has inspired his younger girlfriend to dump him. But now Darius' reality is in flux. He's on the run from his father's botched suicide attempt, a very boring job with an insurance company, and his lost sense of danger and potency. For Darius, waving a gun at a bank teller becomes a rejection of the life ahead of him, and, at the same time, an apology for the life behind him.Darius in the Meantime chronicles a young man's trajectory immediately after college, charting the unexpected spaces between a graduation ceremony and a bank robbery-between cap and gown and balaclava and gun. At once comic and searing, Darius in the Meantime gives a clear voice to the tensions and contradictions every graduate faces. About the Author Devin O'Shea, an award-winning writer for a well-known global design and advertising agency, was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1974 and now lives in Seattle. This is his first novel.