Pipeliner
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For seventeen-year-old Jason Krabb, high school life in 1990s Idaho is a world of cargo shorts, cassette tapes, and junk food. Plagued equally by algebra and puberty, Jason sets out to find a girlfriend and become a rock guitarist. His quest is irreversibly jolted when he attends a bonfire and meets an alluring girl from the other side of town and a rag tag crew who are bringing gas lines through the desert in order to keep the lights on in Portland and Seattle, places where Jason hopes to find his nirvana as a guitarist. Meanwhile, things deteriorate at home. Jason's pediatrician mom, Leah, sadly faces the twilight of her parenting years while his father, Curtis, contends with the enormity of running a big ticket research laboratory and coming to terms with his son's wayward path. Pipeliner is at once a coming of age love story and a comical timestamp of early 90s family life. Set in the fictional Idaho town of Helen Springs, pop. 58,000, its characters are as vibrant as the lofty peaks and purple sunsets of the high desert. Here we find rich farmers, poor ranchers, dutiful Mormons, government honchos, disgruntled vets, drug-dealing bruisers, irksome teachers, and spirited students, all doing their best to keep the lights on.
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★ ★ 1/2 (rounded up)
This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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I just don't know what to say about this one. It's a coming-of-age story about a young man in the 1990's growing up in (what I believe is) a fictionalized Idaho Falls, Idaho. It's arguable how much Jason Krabb actually comes of age here – you could make a pretty decent case that he regresses throughout the book.
Jason's main goal in life is to become a rock star in Portland, OR or Seattle, WA – along the way, he'd like to have a girlfriend and party a lot. He spends a lot of time and energy becoming pretty mediocre at guitar, and hangs out with a poser who's new to town and a couple of older friends who are more interested in scholastic success and their futures (a concept Jason can't really wrap his brain around). He's got an older brother studying at Princeton and dating a nursing student, a very successful mother and a less-successful father who's browbeat by the other constantly.
The writing is uninspired and dull, there's no life to it at all – just a dry recitation of what's going on. To be fair, there's a bit of flair displayed when he writes little Lake Wobegone-inspired descriptions of things from Jason's mother's perspective, but I never saw the point of those, they didn't seem to add anything. The sex scenes are perfunctory and clumsy (fitting for a seventeen year-old's initial fumblings, I guess), at least those involving Jason. The one with Jason's parents was just . . . odd and unnecessary. There were a couple of anachronisms that bugged me, but by and large, his history is good – he captures the feeling of the time, while maybe overplaying the pre-dawn of the Internet as we know it a little bit.
Were I an LDS youth of that era, I might be offended at the depiction of both the straight-laced LDS and the backsliders. If I were someone who spent time with a lot of LDS at the time depicted in teh book, I might say it was pretty accurate. Either way, it's going to be divisive.
There's nothing new here – stylistically, narratively, or in terms of character. It's all cliché, it's not original, there's nothing here you haven't seen before – and likely better. It's not bad, but it's not worth your time and effort. While reading it, I spent a lot of time annoyed by the book – but there's nothing to rant about here. At Hartje tried to do something, but like Jason, did the bare minimum and it shows (not unlike what I did here).
Disclaimer: I received this book from the author in exchange for this post – sorry Mr. Hartje.
