Contemporary Authors

• One of the Boys ( novel) Scribbler (New York, NY), 2017

1. One of the boys : a novel LCCN 2016028665 Type of material Book Personal name Magariel, Daniel, author. Main title One of the boys : a novel / Daniel Magariel. Edition First Scribner hardcover edition. Published/Produced New York : Scribner, 2017. Description 168 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9781501156168 (hardback) 9781501156175 (paperback) CALL NUMBER PS3613.A73985 O64 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Simon and Schuster - http://www.simonandschuster.biz/authors/Daniel-Magariel/2115147657

  Daniel Magariel
  Daniel Magariel is a fiction writer from Kansas City. He has a BA from Columbia University, as well as an MFA from Syracuse University, where he was a Cornelia Carhart Fellow. He has lived in Kansas, Missouri, New Mexico, Florida, Colorado, and Hawaii. He currently lives in New York with his wife. One of the Boys is his first novel.

• Electric Literature - https://electricliterature.com/speed-and-crisis-with-daniel-magariel-3a1f732b1bc9

  Go to the profile of Adam Vitcavage
  Adam VitcavageFollow
  Pop culture criticism and interviews. Words in Electric Literature, Paste, The Millions, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, more. Blog: www.vitcavage.com
  Mar 14
  Speed and Crisis, with Daniel Magariel
  The author of ‘One of the Boys’ on a father’s addiction, revision and a whirlwind literary debut

  In his debut novel One of the Boys, Daniel Magariel uses his personal history to write from the perspective of a young boy who starts a new life with his brother and father. Everything is perfect in the eyes of the preteen, but events slowly turn heartbreaking when the father’s addictions and violence begin to rise to the surface. The novel carries a lot of emotional weight in a brief space — less than 200 deeply-affecting pages.
  Magariel honed his craft throughout the years in places ranging from cafes in northern Manhattan to the foothills of the Rockies, before he ended up at Syracuse’s MFA program studying under George Saunders. Raised in Kansas City, the now-Brooklynite called to talk about how his childhood influenced One of the Boys, crafting the voice of a preteen, his obsessive editing habits, and more.
  Adam Vitcavage: Since you’re a debut author, I feel like we should start with some background so readers get to know you. How and why did you become a writer?
  Daniel Magariel: Like most writer’s, it was almost a compulsion. At some point, I started to take myself seriously. I was a senior at Columbia and I was graduating soon — this happened when I was in my final year at Syracuse as well — and there was this “oh shit, I’m about to leave college unemployed” moment. I seem to do my best writing under circumstances like that.
  I had just made the leap into writing fiction [during my senior year of undergrad]. I had been messing with non-fiction. I thought about doing long form journalism, but during that final year at Columbia, I realized I had been really holding back on what I truly wanted to work on: a novel.
  I used to frequent this little cafe on 111th and Amsterdam called The Hungarian Pastry Shop. While there, attempting to put down the first few words of fiction I’d written since a story about dragons in the first grade, I came to learn that this cafe was a workplace for the likes of Nathan Englander, Rivka Galchen, and Julie Otsuka. To be honest, I knew very little about contemporary fiction at that time, and I had no idea who they were until I googled them, but once I had, I started looking for them daily, studying their routines, watching them just sit and work. Beyond my amazement at how long they could hold it in — their pee, I mean — I was enthralled by how they showed up and stayed at it, for several hours nearly every day. There was nothing glamorous about this place — no outlets, dim light, burned coffee, tiny tables — and yet I learned something so critical by watching brilliant writers do the modest work of sitting and working. That place was my moveable feast for the several years between undergraduate and graduate.
  At 23-years-old, I moved to Colorado and got a job working the night shift at a treatment center for at-risk youth. It was a lockdown facility in the foothills of the Rockies with coyotes howling at night while these kids slept. I would try to stay up and write. A lot of what I wrote was just a bad, horrible version of what I have now.
  Vitcavage: From there you started to apply to MFA programs?
  Magariel: From there I started to apply to MFA programs. I actually moved back to New York for a year after living in Colorado for a year. I became a caterer and worked on MFA application essays. I got into Syracuse and moved to upstate New York.
  Vitcavage: Syracuse is producing a lot of great fiction lately. Was your novel a product of that program?
  Magariel: I walked in with two chapters of this book. They were my application pages: chapters five and six. I wrote them as short stories. I set it aside for two years and worked on other stuff, including a lot of short stories and another novel that I still won’t look at.
  In the third year at Syracuse, the six fiction writers get to work with George Saunders a lot more and I decided to jump back into this novel. He wasn’t in love with what I was working on so he brought up how my application stories had energy. I wrote another story and started working on them sequentially.
  He eventually became my thesis advisor and was very supportive of the energy of the project. The novel looks much different now than it did back then. Three years later I had a completed book. A very short book.
  Vitcavage: I did want to talk about the length, but first I want to make sure I know about the genesis of the book. It’s very emotional and seems very personal. It started as short stories, but were they ever meant to be linked?
  Magariel: Yeah, they were meant to be linked. As for the genesis…I don’t think I’m fooling anybody. It’s clear that to write a book that so intimately portrays so few characters in a very private environment such as addiction with parents the writer needs to connect with it. My father was an addict. My sister, my brother, and I watched — you know, I don’t even remember when we realized that he was using drugs. It was just sort of a part of our lives until it was, “Oh shit, that’s why he acts the way he does and is weird sometimes.”
  That awakening to the weird things happening behind the closed door and all the strange signs was the genesis of the book. Then my job as a fiction writer is curating, organizing, cutting, exaggerating, and escalating fact.
  Vitcavage: Why keep the boys nameless?
  Magariel: It’s funny. There are these happy accidents that people have while working with material for so long. Your instinct to do something is different than the meaning it garners by the end. I heard people say there is this anonymity with the namelessness and it sort of makes it universal. The reality is that I feel awkward in fiction when I name people. Once I name people, it doesn’t feel real. The first few stories, I didn’t want to name them. It worked, so I kept doing it.
  Vitcavage: It’s funny, I noted while reading it: “No character names — universal?” and it seems like everybody just wants to attribute that to your book.
  Magariel: Yeah, and I think it does. It works. I didn’t realize until I wrote a few chapters.
  Vitcavage: You mentioned length earlier. It’s been a trend for these emotionally draining, heavy stories that are 700 pages. A recent favorite of mine was Hanya Yanagihara’ A Little Life, which is a doorstopper and your book can literally slide under the crack of my door. What was it about keeping this story short?
  Magariel: It was voice. I started writing these chapters and velocity was the most compelling and stylistic choice. I heard, and I don’t necessarily believe this, but there are these doorstoppers and readers are losing their attention spans. Even though I don’t believe that, I thought, what if it was true, what if I wrote a book that was so fast that readers actually wanted to slow down.
  The length was a product of the style. I wanted it to be longer, but it wouldn’t get any longer. I also realized what better way would there be to describe what it’s like for a twelve year-old to be under the spell of a father who keeps setting fires everywhere. There is no time for reflection. No time to stop and take in what’s going on. You’re constantly forced into a crisis.
  I needed to find a way to do that and my solution was speed. Maybe I was able to get the reader to understand how frantic the life of the narrator is.
  Vitcavage: How did you tap into a preteen boy’s perspective so that his voice fit the literary style?
  Magariel: I upped his language abilities and his ability to reflect at times. I also made the language so clipped and even at times repetitive. My German translator said this was a deceptively easy book to translate, but it’s a difficult style to emulate. Readability doesn’t always mean a lack of style or a lack of intent in the language.
  I needed to figure out the twelve year-old narrator. You try to imagine what life was like at twelve. What it would be like to experience these things. You put him in a room and you have these dynamics. There’s an older brother, so of course a boy that age would want to be pals with his older brother. Of course he’ll want to worship his father. These things are obvious.
  Then there was the speed. The sentences become even shorter and condensed. They had to become more packed with what was essential for that moment in time. I do think the boy’s language and diction is upped.
  Vitcavage: Going back to Syracuse, when you were working with George Saunders, what was that process like? I think a lot of people who read this kind of interview were like you: younger writers who want to take this seriously. Can you sort of walk me through what your MFA experience was like?
  Magariel: I had an insane routine. I’d wake up at 6am and go to the library. I’d write for an hour. An hour doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s my rule. When I sit down I don’t want four hours or six hours. After that hour I go to the gym immediately after. I’d swim laps for an hour and then go back to the library for an hour.
  Vitcavage: Was the gym a place to reflect on what you wrote or just clear your head?
  Magariel: I’m reflecting the whole time. I’m in a no-mind mode where I can do repetitive activities. Like walking two miles anywhere. As long as my mind automatically wanders to the work. The downtime is an essential part of my writing. The more I can build it into my schedule and routine, the better the work. I discovered this a lot that year. I was looking for these intense bursts where I’d get maybe 50 words, but they were 50 solid words. I could walk away from them and think about what the next 50 words would be.
  One of the best parts of that process was that I would work my way slowly and methodically through a chapter and by the time I was done with the draft it was pretty solid.
  Then to get the writer’s saint of the 21st century — i.e. George Saunders — to look over a draft was amazing. There was something about writing those four first chapters for him that helped. He was my audience, there was no one else. So knowing that, I obviously I wanted to impress him, I wanted to give him my absolute best work so he could give me the best feedback possible.
  There was also that urgency, like in my undergrad — after my MFA was over, I wouldn’t have a job, which meant I wouldn’t have the time to write.
  Vitcavage: After writing and clearing your head, what is your editing or reflection process like?
  Magariel: At night, I like to have a stiff drink and read over everything I wrote and line edit. I edit obsessively. I write for an hour burst here and there, then at night I take a pen and just mark it up. I continue to mark up those pages until there are no pen marks. It’s likely to take six months of going back to the old stuff. Once there are no marks, I say okay and move on.
  Vitcavage: What are you editing on those nights? For voice, for grammar, for anything in between?
  Magariel: There are different stages. Grammar is one of those things writers overlook. I mean, in an MFA no one is teaching classes about grammar. When you get close to publication you realize you have to have a grammar style, too, and it has to be consistent. It’s like: obviously. Then you question yourself. Do I always need a comma after an adverbial clause that introduces a sentence? Do I need a comma after a terminal too or either? Do I need a comma following a main clause when I have a subordinate clause at the end of the sentence? Should I use italics instead of quotations when referring to something someone says?
  It all seems intuitive and obvious, but when you’re going through the work you realize there are some inconsistencies with grammar. That was my favorite part about publishing this book. I did a full grammar reboot when the copy edits came back.
  But when I’m editing, I’m also looking for anything I can cut. The best feeling in the world is when I write a beautiful paragraph and I get to cut it because the page or the scene or the chapter functions at a higher level without it. Even if it functions at the same level, I cut it. I just look for whatever in the completed work is absolutely essential. If there is any doubt, it’s not staying.
  I print out my pages every night and take a pen to it. Whatever edits I made is how I start the next day.
  Vitcavage: So, you graduate then you make all of the edits, and sell the book. It obviously happens overnight.
  Magariel: Yeah, it happens overnight. [laughs] I spent two years working before I sold the book. I mean, let’s see: the book was not sold this time last year. [Literary agent] Bill Clegg had signed me around February 18 of last year. It all happened really quickly. I wanted to turn the book in as complete as possible. I brought it to a place where I didn’t think I could take it any further. Bill saw it and gave me some notes. Then Nan Graham and Daniel Loedel brought it at Scribner and they gave me notes. Yeah, the book sold in April of last year.
  Vitcavage: Then this basically did happen overnight, which is never the case.
  Magariel: Seriously. The book will be out less than a year after it was sold.
  Vitcavage: What are you working on next?
  Magariel: A novel. A longer one this time. My wife grew up in a commercial fishing town and I’ve gotten to know a lot of the fisherman. I’ve spent a lot of time down there with them and have plans to spend more time. I’m trying to push myself to a place where I’m totally uncomfortable. The first chapter starts off with a woman reflecting on the death of her child. I’m not that.

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• Powells - http://www.powells.com/post/qa/powells-qa-daniel-magariel-author-of-one-of-the-boys

  Q&AS
  Powell's Q&A: Daniel Magariel, Author of 'One of the Boys'
  by Daniel Magariel, March 8, 2017 2:32 PM
  One of the Boys by Daniel Magariel
  Photo credit: Lucas Flores Piran

  Describe your latest book.
  One of the Boys is an urgently written coming-of-age story that follows a 12-year-old as he watches his father descend into an all-consuming crack and cocaine addiction. The novel begins in the basement bathroom of a suburban home in Kansas, where, through the coercion of the father, the narrator and his older brother drum up damning evidence against their mother to win the war — the father’s term for divorce.

  Restless and questing, the three then move westward in hope of a better life. The story unfolds in Albuquerque’s sublime, ugly Western landscape, just off the interstate: apartment complexes, biker bars, grocery stores, balloon fiestas, bus stations. The Sandias loom in the near distance. Biblical weather sometimes arrives, full of portent.

  One of the Boys is a chronicle of the vagaries and excesses of American men; it is a cautionary tale of a contemporary Gatsby trying to carve out a new life via relocation; but most importantly, it is the story of two foxhole-weary brothers banding together to protect each other from the father they once trusted, but no longer recognize.

  What was your favorite book as a child?
  2001: A Space Odyssey.

  When did you know you were a writer?
  At around 10 or 11 years old when a poem of mine was published in one of those massive anthologies done by, I believe, the National Poetry Foundation.

  Tell us something you're embarrassed to admit.
  That I splurged for my bio to be put in the back of the NPF anthology. And, of course, the poem itself, which was titled "Who Am I?" and went something like:

  I ask you who you are
  But I don’t know who I am
  I don’t know who I am
  But I know who you are

  Some men know who one man is
  But don’t know who they are
  And they may never find out
  But those who do possess a power
  To live life instead of living death.

  What does your writing workspace look like?
  A perk of having finally published a novel is that I no longer need to share my workspace with the cat box, though admittedly it worked wonders in heightening my shit-detection ability. I now share an office with a stackable washer-dryer unit.

  Introduce one other author you think people should read, and suggest a good book with which to start.
  David Markson has always held sway over me, and not just for his wild inventiveness, but for his artfully restrained pathos, as well. I would start with Wittgenstein’s Mistress.

  What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
  A logistics coordinator for a disaster relief company called American Catastrophe.

  Or

  A supervisor at a lockdown treatment center for at-risk youth.

  Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
  Not intentionally, but while an undergraduate at Columbia, I loved my work-study job at Casa Hispánica — a modest, ancient, wooden library — where around each corner the ghost of Lorca dashes.

  What scares you the most as a writer?
  Same thing that scares me as a human: my face on a milk carton.

  Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.
  “Dreaming out this sunset. Tacked up on a cross and looking down. A cradle of passive, mystifying sorrow. Flooded in tears. Never be too wise to cry. Or not take these things. Take them. Keep them safely. Out of them comes love.”

  I have never had thoughts so beautiful and deranged, but neither have I ever been as drunk as their derelict thinker, Sebastian Dangerfield of The Ginger Man.

  What's your biggest grammatical pet peeve?
  It’s not so much a pet peeve as an utter fascination. I’m enthralled by the significance of the comma that sometimes precedes the subordinating conjunction “where.”

  Take these two sentences:

  1) I went into the room where the dead puppies were.
  2) I went into the room, where the dead puppies were.

  The absent comma in the first example implies that the narrator knew the room contained dead puppies. The comma in the second example suggests the opposite, that the narrator didn’t know the room was full of dead puppies until — oh no, turn back! — he or she entered. And what does that mean for the reader? Either we are following a person who knows something about the stashing away of dead puppies or we are following a person who must be horrified having just walked into a room filled with them. What thrilling narrative potential there is in one tiny mark!

  Do you have any phobias?
  I’m petrified of driving in bad weather.

  Do you believe in writer’s block?
  No, writing is always difficult.

  What's the best advice you’ve ever received?
  I’ve tried to take to heart something that George Saunders, our 21st-century artist-saint, once said: “If we bear down on our material with a mind that is as uninflected as possible — a mind that is not judging, that is not going to stomp off in anger if things don’t go well, a mind that is patient and proactive and hopeful — that is, if we abide with the work as we would abide with a friend, a friend in the midst of some temporary difficulty — then, eventually, we will reach the beauty. We will.”

  Top five books from high school I’m happy to have finally read:
  1. King Lear
  2. Macbeth
  3. Hamlet
  4. Julius Caesar
  5. The Tempest
  ÷ ÷ ÷
  Daniel Magariel is a fiction writer from Kansas City. He has a BA from Columbia University, as well as an MFA from Syracuse University, where he was a Cornelia Carhart Fellow. He has lived in Kansas, Missouri, New Mexico, Florida, Colorado, and Hawaii. He currently lives in New York with his wife. One of the Boys is his first novel.

  8 60 3 6 106 Google +0

  Books mentioned in this post

  Wittgensteins Mistress In the Beginning Sometimes I Left Messages in the Street
  David Markson, Steven Moore

  Tempest Folger Library
  William Shakespeare

  King Lear Folger Shakespeare Library
  William Shakespeare

  Ginger Man
  J P Donleavy

  Macbeth Folger Shakespeare Library
  William Shakespeare

  Hamlet Folger Shakespeare Library
  William Shakespeare

  Julius Caesar Folger Library
  William Shakespeare

  2001 A Space Odyssey
  Arthur C Clarke

  One of the Boys
  Daniel Magariel
  Most Read

  Portrait of a Bookseller: Ronnie C. by Powell's Books
  Powell's Interview: Ursula K. Le Guin, Author of 'The Hainish Novels and Stories' by Mary Jo Schimelpfenig
  Columbo’s Eye: An Investigation of Grief by Jeannie Vanasco
  After the Eclipse by Sarah Perry
  Atrocity Story by Kurt Vonnegut
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  Q&AS
  Powell's Q&A: Daniel Magariel, Author of 'One of the Boys'
  by Daniel Magariel, March 8, 2017 2:32 PM
  One of the Boys by Daniel Magariel
  Photo credit: Lucas Flores Piran

  Describe your latest book.
  One of the Boys is an urgently written coming-of-age story that follows a 12-year-old as he watches his father descend into an all-consuming crack and cocaine addiction. The novel begins in the basement bathroom of a suburban home in Kansas, where, through the coercion of the father, the narrator and his older brother drum up damning evidence against their mother to win the war — the father’s term for divorce.

  Restless and questing, the three then move westward in hope of a better life. The story unfolds in Albuquerque’s sublime, ugly Western landscape, just off the interstate: apartment complexes, biker bars, grocery stores, balloon fiestas, bus stations. The Sandias loom in the near distance. Biblical weather sometimes arrives, full of portent.

  One of the Boys is a chronicle of the vagaries and excesses of American men; it is a cautionary tale of a contemporary Gatsby trying to carve out a new life via relocation; but most importantly, it is the story of two foxhole-weary brothers banding together to protect each other from the father they once trusted, but no longer recognize.

  What was your favorite book as a child?
  2001: A Space Odyssey.

  When did you know you were a writer?
  At around 10 or 11 years old when a poem of mine was published in one of those massive anthologies done by, I believe, the National Poetry Foundation.

  Tell us something you're embarrassed to admit.
  That I splurged for my bio to be put in the back of the NPF anthology. And, of course, the poem itself, which was titled "Who Am I?" and went something like:

  I ask you who you are
  But I don’t know who I am
  I don’t know who I am
  But I know who you are

  Some men know who one man is
  But don’t know who they are
  And they may never find out
  But those who do possess a power
  To live life instead of living death.

  What does your writing workspace look like?
  A perk of having finally published a novel is that I no longer need to share my workspace with the cat box, though admittedly it worked wonders in heightening my shit-detection ability. I now share an office with a stackable washer-dryer unit.

  Introduce one other author you think people should read, and suggest a good book with which to start.
  David Markson has always held sway over me, and not just for his wild inventiveness, but for his artfully restrained pathos, as well. I would start with Wittgenstein’s Mistress.

  What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
  A logistics coordinator for a disaster relief company called American Catastrophe.

  Or

  A supervisor at a lockdown treatment center for at-risk youth.

  Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
  Not intentionally, but while an undergraduate at Columbia, I loved my work-study job at Casa Hispánica — a modest, ancient, wooden library — where around each corner the ghost of Lorca dashes.

  What scares you the most as a writer?
  Same thing that scares me as a human: my face on a milk carton.

  Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.
  “Dreaming out this sunset. Tacked up on a cross and looking down. A cradle of passive, mystifying sorrow. Flooded in tears. Never be too wise to cry. Or not take these things. Take them. Keep them safely. Out of them comes love.”

  I have never had thoughts so beautiful and deranged, but neither have I ever been as drunk as their derelict thinker, Sebastian Dangerfield of The Ginger Man.

  What's your biggest grammatical pet peeve?
  It’s not so much a pet peeve as an utter fascination. I’m enthralled by the significance of the comma that sometimes precedes the subordinating conjunction “where.”

  Take these two sentences:

  1) I went into the room where the dead puppies were.
  2) I went into the room, where the dead puppies were.

  The absent comma in the first example implies that the narrator knew the room contained dead puppies. The comma in the second example suggests the opposite, that the narrator didn’t know the room was full of dead puppies until — oh no, turn back! — he or she entered. And what does that mean for the reader? Either we are following a person who knows something about the stashing away of dead puppies or we are following a person who must be horrified having just walked into a room filled with them. What thrilling narrative potential there is in one tiny mark!

  Do you have any phobias?
  I’m petrified of driving in bad weather.

  Do you believe in writer’s block?
  No, writing is always difficult.

  What's the best advice you’ve ever received?
  I’ve tried to take to heart something that George Saunders, our 21st-century artist-saint, once said: “If we bear down on our material with a mind that is as uninflected as possible — a mind that is not judging, that is not going to stomp off in anger if things don’t go well, a mind that is patient and proactive and hopeful — that is, if we abide with the work as we would abide with a friend, a friend in the midst of some temporary difficulty — then, eventually, we will reach the beauty. We will.”

  Top five books from high school I’m happy to have finally read:
  1. King Lear
  2. Macbeth
  3. Hamlet
  4. Julius Caesar
  5. The Tempest
  ÷ ÷ ÷
  Daniel Magariel is a fiction writer from Kansas City. He has a BA from Columbia University, as well as an MFA from Syracuse University, where he was a Cornelia Carhart Fellow. He has lived in Kansas, Missouri, New Mexico, Florida, Colorado, and Hawaii. He currently lives in New York with his wife. One of the Boys is his first novel.

  8 60 3 6 106 Google +0

  Books mentioned in this post

  Wittgensteins Mistress In the Beginning Sometimes I Left Messages in the Street
  David Markson, Steven Moore

  Tempest Folger Library
  William Shakespeare

  King Lear Folger Shakespeare Library
  William Shakespeare

  Ginger Man
  J P Donleavy

  Macbeth Folger Shakespeare Library
  William Shakespeare

  Hamlet Folger Shakespeare Library
  William Shakespeare

  Julius Caesar Folger Library
  William Shakespeare

  2001 A Space Odyssey
  Arthur C Clarke

  One of the Boys
  Daniel Magariel
  Most Read

  Portrait of a Bookseller: Ronnie C. by Powell's Books
  Powell's Interview: Ursula K. Le Guin, Author of 'The Hainish Novels and Stories' by Mary Jo Schimelpfenig
  Columbo’s Eye: An Investigation of Grief by Jeannie Vanasco
  After the Eclipse by Sarah Perry
  Atrocity Story by Kurt Vonnegut
  Blog Categories

  INTERVIEWS ORIGINAL ESSAYS LISTS Q&AS PLAYLISTS PORTRAIT OF A BOOKSELLER REQUIRED READING ON THE TABLE BEYOND THE HEADLINES READERLY TERMS
  Post a comment:
  *Required Fields
  Name*
  Email* (won't be published)

  reCAPTCHA challenge image

  Type the text
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  HELPGUARANTEEMY ACCOUNTCAREERS ABOUT US SECURITYWISH LISTPARTNERSCONTACT USSHIPPINGNEWSLETTERSSITEMAP© 2017 POWELLS.COM TERMS800-878-7323
  ShareThis Copy and Paste CART | | MY ACCOUNT | WISH LIST | HELP | 800-878-7323 HELLO, | LOGIN advanced BROWSE USED STAFF PICKS GIFTS + GIFT CARDS SELL BOOKS BLOG EVENTS FIND A STORE PowellsBooks.Blog Authors, readers, critics, media − and booksellers. Q&AS Powell's Q&A: Daniel Magariel, Author of 'One of the Boys' by Daniel Magariel, March 8, 2017 2:32 PM Photo credit: Lucas Flores Piran Describe your latest book. One of the Boys is an urgently written coming-of-age story that follows a 12-year-old as he watches his father descend into an all-consuming crack and cocaine addiction. The novel begins in the basement bathroom of a suburban home in Kansas, where, through the coercion of the father, the narrator and his older brother drum up damning evidence against their mother to win the war — the father’s term for divorce. Restless and questing, the three then move westward in hope of a better life. The story unfolds in Albuquerque’s sublime, ugly Western landscape, just off the interstate: apartment complexes, biker bars, grocery stores, balloon fiestas, bus stations. The Sandias loom in the near distance. Biblical weather sometimes arrives, full of portent. One of the Boys is a chronicle of the vagaries and excesses of American men; it is a cautionary tale of a contemporary Gatsby trying to carve out a new life via relocation; but most importantly, it is the story of two foxhole-weary brothers banding together to protect each other from the father they once trusted, but no longer recognize. What was your favorite book as a child? 2001: A Space Odyssey. When did you know you were a writer? At around 10 or 11 years old when a poem of mine was published in one of those massive anthologies done by, I believe, the National Poetry Foundation. Tell us something you're embarrassed to admit. That I splurged for my bio to be put in the back of the NPF anthology. And, of course, the poem itself, which was titled "Who Am I?" and went something like: I ask you who you are But I don’t know who I am I don’t know who I am But I know who you are Some men know who one man is But don’t know who they are And they may never find out But those who do possess a power To live life instead of living death. What does your writing workspace look like? A perk of having finally published a novel is that I no longer need to share my workspace with the cat box, though admittedly it worked wonders in heightening my shit-detection ability. I now share an office with a stackable washer-dryer unit. Introduce one other author you think people should read, and suggest a good book with which to start. David Markson has always held sway over me, and not just for his wild inventiveness, but for his artfully restrained pathos, as well. I would start with Wittgenstein’s Mistress. What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had? A logistics coordinator for a disaster relief company called American Catastrophe. Or A supervisor at a lockdown treatment center for at-risk youth. Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage? Not intentionally, but while an undergraduate at Columbia, I loved my work-study job at Casa Hispánica — a modest, ancient, wooden library — where around each corner the ghost of Lorca dashes. What scares you the most as a writer? Same thing that scares me as a human: my face on a milk carton. Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer. “Dreaming out this sunset. Tacked up on a cross and looking down. A cradle of passive, mystifying sorrow. Flooded in tears. Never be too wise to cry. Or not take these things. Take them. Keep them safely. Out of them comes love.” I have never had thoughts so beautiful and deranged, but neither have I ever been as drunk as their derelict thinker, Sebastian Dangerfield of The Ginger Man. What's your biggest grammatical pet peeve? It’s not so much a pet peeve as an utter fascination. I’m enthralled by the significance of the comma that sometimes precedes the subordinating conjunction “where.” Take these two sentences: 1) I went into the room where the dead puppies were. 2) I went into the room, where the dead puppies were. The absent comma in the first example implies that the narrator knew the room contained dead puppies. The comma in the second example suggests the opposite, that the narrator didn’t know the room was full of dead puppies until — oh no, turn back! — he or she entered. And what does that mean for the reader? Either we are following a person who knows something about the stashing away of dead puppies or we are following a person who must be horrified having just walked into a room filled with them. What thrilling narrative potential there is in one tiny mark! Do you have any phobias? I’m petrified of driving in bad weather. Do you believe in writer’s block? No, writing is always difficult. What's the best advice you’ve ever received? I’ve tried to take to heart something that George Saunders, our 21st-century artist-saint, once said: “If we bear down on our material with a mind that is as uninflected as possible — a mind that is not judging, that is not going to stomp off in anger if things don’t go well, a mind that is patient and proactive and hopeful — that is, if we abide with the work as we would abide with a friend, a friend in the midst of some temporary difficulty — then, eventually, we will reach the beauty. We will.” Top five books from high school I’m happy to have finally read: 1. King Lear 2. Macbeth 3. Hamlet 4. Julius Caesar 5. The Tempest ÷ ÷ ÷ Daniel Magariel is a fiction writer from Kansas City. He has a BA from Columbia University, as well as an MFA from Syracuse University, where he was a Cornelia Carhart Fellow. He has lived in Kansas, Missouri, New Mexico, Florida, Colorado, and Hawaii. He currently lives in New York with his wife. One of the Boys is his first novel. 8 60 3 6 106 Google +0 Books mentioned in this post Wittgensteins Mistress In the Beginning Sometimes I Left Messages in the Street David Markson, Steven Moore Tempest Folger Library William Shakespeare King Lear Folger Shakespeare Library William Shakespeare Ginger Man J P Donleavy Macbeth Folger Shakespeare Library William Shakespeare Hamlet Folger Shakespeare Library William Shakespeare Julius Caesar Folger Library William Shakespeare 2001 A Space Odyssey Arthur C Clarke One of the Boys Daniel Magariel Most Read Portrait of a Bookseller: Ronnie C. by Powell's Books Powell's Interview: Ursula K. Le Guin, Author of 'The Hainish Novels and Stories' by Mary Jo Schimelpfenig Columbo’s Eye: An Investigation of Grief by Jeannie Vanasco After the Eclipse by Sarah Perry Atrocity Story by Kurt Vonnegut Blog Categories INTERVIEWS ORIGINAL ESSAYS LISTS Q&AS PLAYLISTS PORTRAIT OF A BOOKSELLER REQUIRED READING ON THE TABLE BEYOND THE HEADLINES READERLY TERMS Post a comment: *Required Fields Name* Email* (won't be published) Privacy & Terms Please note: All comments require moderation by Powells.com staff. Comments submitted on weekends might take until Monday to appear. HELPGUARANTEEMY ACCOUNTCAREERS ABOUT US SECURITYWISH LISTPARTNERSCONTACT USSHIPPINGNEWSLETTERSSITEMAP© 2017 POWELLS.COM TERMS800-878-7323 CART | | MY ACCOUNT | WISH LIST | HELP | 800-878-7323 HELLO, | LOGIN advanced BROWSE USED STAFF PICKS GIFTS + GIFT CARDS SELL BOOKS BLOG EVENTS FIND A STORE PowellsBooks.Blog Authors, readers, critics, media − and booksellers. Q&AS Powell's Q&A: Daniel Magariel, Author of 'One of the Boys' by Daniel Magariel, March 8, 2017 2:32 PM Photo credit: Lucas Flores Piran Describe your latest book. One of the Boys is an urgently written coming-of-age story that follows a 12-year-old as he watches his father descend into an all-consuming crack and cocaine addiction. The novel begins in the basement bathroom of a suburban home in Kansas, where, through the coercion of the father, the narrator and his older brother drum up damning evidence against their mother to win the war — the father’s term for divorce. Restless and questing, the three then move westward in hope of a better life. The story unfolds in Albuquerque’s sublime, ugly Western landscape, just off the interstate: apartment complexes, biker bars, grocery stores, balloon fiestas, bus stations. The Sandias loom in the near distance. Biblical weather sometimes arrives, full of portent. One of the Boys is a chronicle of the vagaries and excesses of American men; it is a cautionary tale of a contemporary Gatsby trying to carve out a new life via relocation; but most importantly, it is the story of two foxhole-weary brothers banding together to protect each other from the father they once trusted, but no longer recognize. What was your favorite book as a child? 2001: A Space Odyssey. When did you know you were a writer? At around 10 or 11 years old when a poem of mine was published in one of those massive anthologies done by, I believe, the National Poetry Foundation. Tell us something you're embarrassed to admit. That I splurged for my bio to be put in the back of the NPF anthology. And, of course, the poem itself, which was titled "Who Am I?" and went something like: I ask you who you are But I don’t know who I am I don’t know who I am But I know who you are Some men know who one man is But don’t know who they are And they may never find out But those who do possess a power To live life instead of living death. What does your writing workspace look like? A perk of having finally published a novel is that I no longer need to share my workspace with the cat box, though admittedly it worked wonders in heightening my shit-detection ability. I now share an office with a stackable washer-dryer unit. Introduce one other author you think people should read, and suggest a good book with which to start. David Markson has always held sway over me, and not just for his wild inventiveness, but for his artfully restrained pathos, as well. I would start with Wittgenstein’s Mistress. What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had? A logistics coordinator for a disaster relief company called American Catastrophe. Or A supervisor at a lockdown treatment center for at-risk youth. Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage? Not intentionally, but while an undergraduate at Columbia, I loved my work-study job at Casa Hispánica — a modest, ancient, wooden library — where around each corner the ghost of Lorca dashes. What scares you the most as a writer? Same thing that scares me as a human: my face on a milk carton. Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer. “Dreaming out this sunset. Tacked up on a cross and looking down. A cradle of passive, mystifying sorrow. Flooded in tears. Never be too wise to cry. Or not take these things. Take them. Keep them safely. Out of them comes love.” I have never had thoughts so beautiful and deranged, but neither have I ever been as drunk as their derelict thinker, Sebastian Dangerfield of The Ginger Man. What's your biggest grammatical pet peeve? It’s not so much a pet peeve as an utter fascination. I’m enthralled by the significance of the comma that sometimes precedes the subordinating conjunction “where.” Take these two sentences: 1) I went into the room where the dead puppies were. 2) I went into the room, where the dead puppies were. The absent comma in the first example implies that the narrator knew the room contained dead puppies. The comma in the second example suggests the opposite, that the narrator didn’t know the room was full of dead puppies until — oh no, turn back! — he or she entered. And what does that mean for the reader? Either we are following a person who knows something about the stashing away of dead puppies or we are following a person who must be horrified having just walked into a room filled with them. What thrilling narrative potential there is in one tiny mark! Do you have any phobias? I’m petrified of driving in bad weather. Do you believe in writer’s block? No, writing is always difficult. What's the best advice you’ve ever received? I’ve tried to take to heart something that George Saunders, our 21st-century artist-saint, once said: “If we bear down on our material with a mind that is as uninflected as possible — a mind that is not judging, that is not going to stomp off in anger if things don’t go well, a mind that is patient and proactive and hopeful — that is, if we abide with the work as we would abide with a friend, a friend in the midst of some temporary difficulty — then, eventually, we will reach the beauty. We will.” Top five books from high school I’m happy to have finally read: 1. King Lear 2. Macbeth 3. Hamlet 4. Julius Caesar 5. The Tempest ÷ ÷ ÷ Daniel Magariel is a fiction writer from Kansas City. He has a BA from Columbia University, as well as an MFA from Syracuse University, where he was a Cornelia Carhart Fellow. He has lived in Kansas, Missouri, New Mexico, Florida, Colorado, and Hawaii. He currently lives in New York with his wife. One of the Boys is his first novel. 8 60 3 6 106 Google +0 Books mentioned in this post Wittgensteins Mistress In the Beginning Sometimes I Left Messages in the Street David Markson, Steven Moore Tempest Folger Library William Shakespeare King Lear Folger Shakespeare Library William Shakespeare Ginger Man J P Donleavy Macbeth Folger Shakespeare Library William Shakespeare Hamlet Folger Shakespeare Library William Shakespeare Julius Caesar Folger Library William Shakespeare 2001 A Space Odyssey Arthur C Clarke One of the Boys Daniel Magariel Most Read Portrait of a Bookseller: Ronnie C. by Powell's Books Powell's Interview: Ursula K. Le Guin, Author of 'The Hainish Novels and Stories' by Mary Jo Schimelpfenig Columbo’s Eye: An Investigation of Grief by Jeannie Vanasco After the Eclipse by Sarah Perry Atrocity Story by Kurt Vonnegut Blog Categories INTERVIEWS ORIGINAL ESSAYS LISTS Q&AS PLAYLISTS PORTRAIT OF A BOOKSELLER REQUIRED READING ON THE TABLE BEYOND THE HEADLINES READERLY TERMS Post a comment: *Required Fields Name* Email* (won't be published) Privacy & Terms Please note: All comments require moderation by Powells.com staff. Comments submitted on weekends might take until Monday to appear. HELPGUARANTEEMY ACCOUNTCAREERS ABOUT US SECURITYWISH LISTPARTNERSCONTACT USSHIPPINGNEWSLETTERSSITEMAP© 2017 POWELLS.COM TERMS800-878-7323 ShareThis Copy and Paste

• The Holborn - https://theholbornmag.com/2017/05/09/qa-daniel-magariel/

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  Q&A – DANIEL MAGARIEL

  Daniel Magariel’s debut novel, One of The Boys, is a disquieting read. After a messy divorce, two boys abscond with their father to begin a new life in Albuquerque. Enthralled by their charismatic dad, the brothers eagerly try to sooth, please and placate him, while overlooking a pattern of increasingly erratic behaviour. The halcyon days are short lived. Soon begins a devastating downward spiral as the father’s drug addiction upends life as they know it.

  Daniel Magariel (c) Justine Magariel

  Despite its brevity (it spans just over 170 pages), One of The Boys asks big questions. On a human level, we’re invited to question the nature of forgiveness. Can abusive actions be seen as a lapse from a person’s ‘true nature’ or do people become defined by these acts? What remains of the abuser once they begin their fall from grace? On a broader level, we’re given a snapshot of America itself, witnessing a culture of facilitation that allows many to fall through the cracks.

  Abuse, as a topic, has always occupied a precarious role in fiction. There seems an inevitable conflict of interests: writers are expected to make their work engaging, enjoyable, yet to entertain readers with acts of cruelty seems fairly exploitative. This problem has had renewed interest since Hanya Yanagihara’s much lauded A Little Life, sparked debate with its 2015 Booker nomination. While some found her uncompromising depictions of rape important and worthy of exploration, others deemed it offensively sensationalist. The literary dispute reached an unusually emotive crescendo after a critic and the book’s editor exchanged a spat of angry letters in The New York Review of Books.

  We caught up with Daniel to discuss these ideas, exploring the particular difficulty of approaching abuse as a topic. We also looked at some of the bigger issues at play in his striking debut.

  2017-03-27-one-of-the-boys-mcarrasquero-001

  Can you talk a bit about your development as a writer?

  There were zero books in my childhood home in Kansas, the heart of America’s heartland. Oddly enough, though, a desire to be a writer emerged in me at a young age, long before a love of reading. Perhaps even more odd is that as a young writer my self-confidence was kept intact because I was uninhibited by comparisons to authors I hadn’t read and would have certainly admired so much that I’d have stomped away from my desk in frustration. Anyway, until about twenty-two, I mostly wrote poetry, and then something changed. In the space of a few weeks, I read James Salter’s Light Years, Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I was enthralled by the beauty, precision, compression, confidence of all three books, different as they might be. I was desperate to try fiction, a desperation that has persisted for over a decade now. I spent the next two years attempting to perfect two short stories, which would later become chapters five and six of One of the Boys. With those pages I was fortunate to gain admission into Syracuse University’s MFA program, where a brilliant collection of writers teach. My last year there, George Saunders gently nudged me away from this big, atmospheric, domestic terrorism, militia movement novel I was failing at, and steered me back to the submission pages he recalled fondly. That very week, I tapped a vein in my writing that continued to draw blood for the next three and a half years.

  One of the Boys is a consistently tense, at times gruelling, read. Does writing about abuse take an emotional toll?

  Writing a book in itself takes a toll; it’s a years-long, tight-rope marathon of sustained concentration. That said, writing about abuse is most draining when you not only love your characters, but you genuinely like them. I didn’t always know that the father would come so close to losing his humanity. I didn’t always know that the boys would be so completely abandoned by the adults in their lives. And I resisted some of these revelations as long as I could. I do remember gearing up emotionally to write the final chapter—I don’t mean the epilogue, but chapter ten rather—and discovering a certain darkness in myself. Even the still, warming moments in life were suddenly shaded from sun. I took a fishing trip to Maine the summer I finished the book, for example, and I recall being struck by the state’s natural beauty—fields of wild flowers, bushes bursting with blueberries, humming birds thirsting on sugar water, rainstorms kicking up from nowhere and passing just as quickly—but then my mind would warp these images in sinister service of the book I was so desperate to complete.

  Daniel Magariel 2017 (c) Lucas Flores Piran

  It must be difficult to strike a balance between making the content enjoyable and satisfying without being sensationalist. How do you negotiate this?

  As a rule, writers should be careful when working from a child’s perspective. It’s nearly cheating. Like animals, children are shortcuts to empathy in fiction, especially where abuse is concerned. On the other hand, overt sentimentality and sensationalism are certain, ugly deaths for art. The ferocious loyalty and hero-worship exhibited by the boys is one of the ways I negotiated the balance. If the two brothers always had a logos to work from—the idea that to be one of the boys is ideal—the sons would continue to orbit their father, as codependents do, no matter how ruthlessly he reinforced his power; and I think the reader might, therefore, fall short of gawking. The other way to navigate some of the sensationalism is through speed. The story is told at an urgent clip so to emulate the frantic lives of children of addicts and to justify the lack of insight into their circumstances. When a child is running from fire to fire, the realization that dad keeps striking the match comes later than one might hope. Then again, One of the Boys is a story about love as much as it is a story about abuse. When will a child stop loving an abusive parent? Where is the threshold between familial allegiance and self-protection? And how do these questions compel two brothers, emboldened by love for each other, to stand shoulder-to-shoulder against the father they no longer recognize?

  Primarily, the book offers an intimate family portrayal but you also seem to be hinting at the broader social context, the particular conditions that allow people to slip between the cracks. Were there any political messages you were hoping to convey or any ideas regarding America’s vulnerable?

  My first job out of college was as a supervisor at a lockdown treatment facility for at-risk youth. While there, one of the kids I worked with had been so severely and repeatedly raped by his step-father that he was incontinent. When I knew him, he had zero caretaking skills and a frighteningly low threshold for distress. How many adults in this kid’s childhood had suspicions that abuse was ongoing? Likewise, how many peripheral characters in One of the Boys wondered if the father was an addict or even violently temperamental? The art of the manipulator is found in the craftwork of keeping a potential whistleblower’s suspicions at bay, but I’m more interested in the self-doubting mechanisms that we all seem to have, myself included. What makes us ignore obvious or latent signs of potential cruelty and ill-treatment—a shouting mother threatening violence to a crying toddler on the subway or a father who in every social setting gets aggressively drunk and irritable, for example? What justifications do we drum up to block out the threats as we uncomfortably await our train stop and what thoughts immediately enter our minds as we wave goodbye to the children in the backseat as their father angrily fumbles for the car keys?

  Are there any artists who’ve had an impact on your own approach to writing?

  Neil Young; George Saunders; Isaac Babel; Gustavo Santaolalla; Oskar Kokoschka; Denis Johnson; Terrance Malick; Kazuo Ishiguro; Marc Chagall; Flannery O’Connor; James Salter; Georgia O’Keeffe; Joseph Conrad; John Steinbeck; Charles Brown; Federico Garcia Lorca; Sergio Leone; Max Beckman; Cormac McCarthy; Bob Dylan; Nina Simone; Paul Thomas Anderson; Rainer Maria Rilke; Leo Tolstoy; Johnny Cash; James Baldwin; James Joyce; Raymond Carver; Ernest Hemingway; W.B. Yeats; Alfred Hitchcock; among many others…

  Interview by Sean Gilbert

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• Brooklyn Daily Eagle - http://www.brooklyneagle.com/articles/2017/4/4/brooklyn-author-explores-%E2%80%98shattered-family%E2%80%99-new-book

  Brooklyn author explores a ‘shattered family’ in new book
  Daniel Magariel. Photo by Lucas Flores
  Daniel Magariel. Photo by Lucas Flores

  Brooklyn BookBeat
  Brooklyn Daily Eagle
  When a 12-year-old boy and his older brother side with their father through a bitter divorce and custody war, they are united by the exciting possibility of carving out a new life together. They move from Kansas to Albuquerque where they enroll in a new school, begin to make friends and join the basketball team, but what started as a grand adventure soon deteriorates into a desperate game of survival. The boys watch their father become an erratic and violent embodiment of the man they loved and trusted. They share a confined apartment in sprawling suburban New Mexico while their father descends into addiction. With stunning prose and chilling clarity, Daniel Magariel’s “One of the Boys” conveys a young boy’s desperate struggle to hold onto the dangerous pieces of his shattered family.

  Booklist compared the book’s “scenes of paternal neglect under the Southwestern sky” to “certain chunks of Donna Tartt’s ‘The Goldfinch.’” George Saunders, author of “Tenth of December,” called “One of the Boys” “brilliant, urgent, darkly funny, heartbreaking — a tour de force with startling new things to say about class, masculinity, addiction and family.”

  Magariel, originally from Kansas, received a B.A. from Columbia University and an MFA at Syracuse University, where he was a Cornelia Carhart Fellow. He currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife.

  Published by Scribner, “One of The Boys” was released in March.

  Cover image designed by Thomas ColliganCover image designed by Thomas Colligan

  April 4, 2017 - 1:12pm
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10/8/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Print Marked Items
Magariel, Daniel: ONE OF THE BOYS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Magariel, Daniel ONE OF THE BOYS Scribner (Adult Fiction) $22.00 3, 14 ISBN: 978-1-5011-5616-8
In an apartment complex in suburban Albuquerque, a middle schooler and his older brother watch their father circle the
drain and come very close to taking them down with him."This will end the war," says the boys' father the day they
leave Kansas. "No custody. No child support....In New Mexico I'll be a kid again. We'll all be kids again." Actually, the
day they leave town with their father, having conspired with him to have their mother stripped of parental rights, is the
beginning of the end of their childhood. Shortly after they move into their new apartment, the narrator breaks into his
father's locked room when he's out, hoping to find some change to buy food. Instead, he finds his father--with a metal
pipe, a plate of white powder, and a lighter. So thoroughly has this man already twisted his son's thinking that the boy's
first worry is that he'll be sent back to live with his mother. But of course he won't be. "We are all entitled to one bad
habit," explains his father. "You guys have bad habits too. You pop your knuckles, don't you?" As the man keeps his
younger son out of school, sabotages his older son's basketball career, whips them with the buckle end of his belt for
imagined infractions, and leaves them to care for themselves for weeks on end, their allegiance becomes an act of
ferocious, misguided heroism. "Sometimes in my mind I was my father. After all, weren't he and I totally beyond
forgiveness?" Joining Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life in its brilliant picture of a boyhood twisted by abuse and Justin
Torres' We the Animals in both its concision and its portrait of the bond between brothers, Magariel's debut is sure,
stinging, and deeply etched, like the outlines of a tattoo. Belongs on the short shelf of great books about child abuse.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Magariel, Daniel: ONE OF THE BOYS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA487668411&it=r&asid=db879c428d2a5cbf7af5143ebedb23e9.
Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A487668411
10/8/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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One of the Boys
Courtney Eathorne
Booklist.
113.11 (Feb. 1, 2017): p20.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text: 
One of the Boys.
By Daniel Magariel.
Mar. 2017. 176p. Scribner, $22 (9781501156168).
This short but haunting novel opens with a father and his two sons on the run. Having won "the war" (a cutthroat
custody battle) against the boys' mother, the three Y-chromosomed members of the family are headed for a new life in
Albuquerque, New Mexico. If the first chapter leaves readers skeptical because of possible antifeminist themes, they're
urged to hang on. The story unfolds quickly from there. The father is soon discovered to be a heroin addict with an
ever-present hankering for physical abuse. The boys come to regret their allegiance to their psychopathic father, longing
to be back in Kansas with their victimized mother. The boys focus on survival, while their father flirts with the law and
the laws of drug overdose. Scenes of paternal neglect under the Southwestern sky call to mind certain chunks of Donna
Tartt's The Goldfinch (2013). Told from the younger son's point of view, Magariels debut is a stunning discussion of
parent-child loyalty, masculinity, and how the only person we can truly save is ourselves.--Courtney Eathorne
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Eathorne, Courtney. "One of the Boys." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 20+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481244762&it=r&asid=579eeef179217d23422760a4528236c1.
Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A481244762
10/8/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1507496164288 3/4
One of the Boys
Publishers Weekly.
264.4 (Jan. 23, 2017): p54.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
* One of the Boys
Daniel Magariel. Scribner, $22 (176p) ISBN 978-1-5011-5616-8
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The unnamed boys of the title of Daniel Magariel's spare and piercing debut novel are the 12-year-old narrator, his
older brother, and their father. The trio are headed from Kansas to New Mexico to begin a new life after a brutal divorce
and custody battle referred to by the father as "the war." The narrator, complicit in lying about his mother's negligence
so his father could gain custody, at first treats his new life like the adventure he was promised that it would be. But
when his father's violent tendencies and severe drug addiction become increasingly apparent, the narrator finally begins
to make sense of the divorce and the true source of the family's demise. The urgent present action of the novel--in
which the brothers adapt to their new life while tiptoeing around their erratic and largely absent father--is combined
with flashbacks portraying life before the family's collapse, ultimately creating a stunning and tragic portrait of both the
joys and limitations of love. Agent: Bill Clegg, the Clegg Agency. (Mar.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"One of the Boys." Publishers Weekly, 23 Jan. 2017, p. 54. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479714151&it=r&asid=4c3b4b4a8417b14f8b977286daa0222f.
Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479714151
10/8/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1507496164288 4/4
Briefly Noted
Charles Shafaieh
The New Yorker.
93.8 (Apr. 10, 2017): p68.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast
Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
Full Text: 
Briefly Noted
One of the Boys, by Daniel Magariel (Scribner). In this haunting debut novel, two unnamed brothers move from
Kansas to New Mexico with their mercurial, charming father in the wake of a divorce and custody battle. They initially
see the move as a grand adventure, but slowly discover the extent of their father's addiction to crack cocaine. As he
becomes increasingly paranoid and violent, the brothers, trapped with him in a claustrophobic apartment, desperately
form a pact to escape. "Our dad was an act with a single end," the younger boy observes. "And it wasn't that I didn't
care anymore. He was my father. It was just that we had spent far too long as his audience."
Class, by Lucinda Rosenfeld (Little, Brown). Karen, a self-proclaimed liberal whose inner monologue provides the
fabric of this satirical novel, is dedicated to the disadvantaged in both her professional and her personal life. She works
for a nonprofit organization called Hungry Kids and sends her daughter to a public school whose racial mix is a source
of both pride and, increasingly, angst. When she illegally transfers her child, it is the first in an escalating series of risky
misdemeanors. Karen's relentless self-doubt and hypocritical attitudes to race and class make her a hard character to
sympathize with. But, by the same token, Rosenfeld's attack on upper-middle-class pieties is unerring in its aim.
The Great Leveler, by Walter Scheidel (Princeton). Death is proverbially a leveller, but this sweeping and provocative
study, which examines economic trends from the earliest societies to now, takes the idea further. Scheidel finds that
protracted periods of peace, whether in ancient Rome or in contemporary America, have tended to produce social and
economic stratification, while cataclysms such as the plagues of medieval Europe and the twentieth century's world
wars have brought greater equality. All major redistributions of resources have been preceded by one of what he calls
the "Four Horsemen"-state failure, pandemics, "mass mobilization warfare," and "transformative revolution." Scheidel
refrains from developing an overarching ethical or economic theory of inequality, but his reading of history leaves him
pessimistic about how much can be achieved by policymaking alone.
Word by Word, by Kory Stamper (Pantheon). The compiling of dictionaries may seem a quiet topic, but this
memoiristic account of the lexicographer's art, by an editor at Merriam-Webster, is an unlikely page-turner. Offering a
nuts-and-bolts exploration of the English language, Stamper displays a contagious enthusiasm for words and a
considerable talent for putting them together, as when describing "the fusty glut of old papers bunged hastily into metal
bookshelves" that fills the basement of Merriam-Webster. Her discussion of the role of language in culture is
illuminating, and she is a reliable guide to such issues as the tension between a dictionary's descriptive and prescriptive
roles, explaining, for instance, why "irregardless," though widely loathed as a solecism, is no more illogical than
"inflammable," and merits inclusion.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Shafaieh, Charles. "Briefly Noted." The New Yorker, 10 Apr. 2017, p. 68. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA490480264&it=r&asid=c4e553a6495b092249810b00ec4d8e69.
Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A490480264

"Magariel, Daniel: ONE OF THE BOYS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA487668411&it=r. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017. Eathorne, Courtney. "One of the Boys." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 20+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481244762&it=r. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017. "One of the Boys." Publishers Weekly, 23 Jan. 2017, p. 54. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479714151&it=r. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017. Shafaieh, Charles. "Briefly Noted." The New Yorker, 10 Apr. 2017, p. 68. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA490480264&it=r. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.

• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/04/one-of-the-boys-by-daniel-magariel-review
  Word count: 1547

  Fiction
  One of the Boys by Daniel Magariel review – a father’s abuse
  This powerful debut explores the manipulation and lies of a crack-addicted father through the eyes of his 12-year-old son
  Daniel Magariel
  Lucid and unsparing … Daniel Magariel
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  Sandra Newman
  Thursday 4 May 2017 09.00 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 20 September 2017 05.35 EDT
  In the opening of Daniel Magariel’s debut novel, the 12-year-old narrator is coerced by his father into punching himself in the face. The purpose is to photograph the resulting injuries in order to “prove” the boy’s mother is beating him, so the father can get sole custody of his two sons. When the narrator shows reluctance, his father says, “I thought you wanted to come with us. I thought you were one of the boys.” At this, the narrator makes up his mind and hits himself over and over until he looks sufficiently like an abused child. The photographs are then a team effort: “My brother pulled each photo from the mouth of the camera. My father kept clicking until the button stuck. After they developed, we chose five of the Polaroids to show Child Protective Services.” Mission accomplished, “the boys” leave their home in Kansas and set out for a new life in Albuquerque.

  Among the many ironies of the novel’s opening is its parody of masculinity. Here, being “one of the boys” means joining a conspiracy of lies, harming yourself in vile and stupid ways, then blaming it all on a woman. It’s also notable that masculinity is not about being a man, but a boy. Maleness is a kind of unrepentant childishness, without any mother/wife to criticise and lay down rules. The father even promises his sons that, once they arrive in Albuquerque, “I’ll be a kid again. We’ll all be kids again.”

  Soon we learn that, in addition to being a misogynist and an abuser, the father is a crack addict. (“We’re all entitled to one bad habit, aren’t we?” he tells his sons. “You guys have bad habits, too.”) He is also a compulsive manipulator: he flatters and threatens his sons; he makes them collaborators in his petty crimes; he isolates them from the outside world and makes them repeat cultish maxims such as “Family is all we have”. When his power is threatened, he becomes hysterically, explosively violent.

  Perhaps the most painful part of this book is its depiction of how victims can collude with an abuser. The boys don’t just cover up for their father, they hurt each other at his command, and in one particularly ugly flashback, take part in the physical abuse of their mother. Magariel’s portrayal of this process is remarkably lucid and unsparing. Some passages feel so true, you keep wanting to put the book down to applaud.

  Virtually every adult is a seedy, frightening derelict to whom the boys are exposed through the father’s neglect
  However, because it hones in on instances of abuse to the exclusion of all else, it risks feeling like a deposition rather than a story. Whenever the father appears, he is doing another thing that would scar a child for life. Virtually every adult is a seedy, frightening derelict to whom the boys are exposed through the father’s neglect. The only character we meet from their school is a basketball coach who punishes the older son for being late to practice – which, of course, is his father’s fault. Every event is fraught with blame and fear, and even the scenery is uniformly ominous: “A shadow crept across the fields. Crows looked on from power lines. The warning siren wailed.” While the low-life characters and grim settings are wonderfully drawn, you begin to wonder: could Albuquerque really be that bad?

  In a book of only 160 pages, much of this might be justified as focus, but it seems like a mistake when it extends to the inner lives of the boys. Their father is their only world. They have no friends. They have no crushes on girls. They don’t have hobbies or habits or favourite TV shows or likes or dislikes. In real life, even the most brutalised children are more than the sum of their abuse. The main conflict of the book concerns whether the narrator will ultimately break free from his father – but he never develops enough of a psychology for us to see the decision as his. Abusive relationships can make victims feel their identity has been stripped away, that nothing remains of them but a series of reactions dictated by the abuser’s behaviour. One wishes Magariel had been able to evoke this experience while also conveying that it’s not true.

  This is not to dismiss what he has achieved. In one of his many crises, the father challenges his sons, “Tell me one true thing about life … Either of you. Tell me one true thing.” Magariel has triumphantly, unforgettably, told us one true thing.

  • Sandra Newman’s latest novel is The Country of Ice Cream Star (Vintage). One of the Boys is published by Granta. To order a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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  Hector Hajnal 4 May 2017 16:38

  1
  2
  It sounds like the kind of work which takes all the very bad things of a social regular issue to the extreme. I found quite interesting this kind of works since every person can suffer abuse from family or his social net. Many times the abuse is evident but many is disguised. Nonetheless the patterns are the same. Many people which have had been abused live thinking that their not because in their abuse there was no: beatings, bad words, physical violence, etc. And many times the abuser is kind an a good member of society and even many times the abuser don't even know is abusing. So this kind of works which magnifying the issue help to people which had lived it like that or worst but also for does which lived it in a different form. Is good to get rid of abuse trauma and it doesn't mean break with the past or people completely. It means that some times people that actually are loved and good are not perfect. Or maybe is people that really need to be cut completely it all depends. Acceptance, self freedom, awareness and love is the answer

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• The New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/books/review/one-of-the-boys-daniel-magariel.html
  Word count: 1604

  BOOK REVIEW | FICTION

  Two Sons Witness the Grip of Addiction in This Gritty Divorce Drama
  By ANTONIO RUIZ-CAMACHOAPRIL 21, 2017
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  Daniel Magariel Credit Lucas Flores Piran
  ONE OF THE BOYS
  By Daniel Magariel
  168 pp. Scribner. $22

  “My job is to take care of you,” the protagonist of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” tells his son at one point, and it’s a mission he takes so seriously he’s ready to become a monster if necessary: “I will kill anyone who touches you.” Some fathers, however, choose the opposite path when everything falls apart. Consumed in a do-it-yourself circle of divorce and domestic hell that at times feels as inescapable as McCarthy’s apocalypse, the father in Daniel Magariel’s feral and tender first novel, “One of the Boys,” won’t hesitate to use his own children as human shields, no wounds spared. Told from the perspective of his 12-year-old son, this is a gorgeously tight tale swelling with wisdom about the self-destructive longing for paternal approval and the devastating consequences of clinging to rotten models of masculinity.

  The story opens in Kansas in the final days of “the war,” as the father calls the custody battle over his two boys. (In keeping with the book’s spare tone, they all go unnamed.) After Mom has struck the narrator with a telephone, the father asks him to exaggerate the violence to convince child protective services, and his older brother, that she’s the enemy to defeat.

  “Now, son, try to look how you felt when she hit you,” he suggests as they take pictures to document the abuse.

  “I could try slapping him,” the older boy jokes — at which point the father begins to reveal himself: “How would you feel about that, son?” When the children waver, torn between worship and disgust as they will be throughout, their father pushes harder. “I thought you wanted to come with us,” he wheedles. This will bring back the happy days, he promises; this will set them free. And, in an early glimpse of the grim ride ahead, the boy gives in.

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  “With my right hand I slapped my right cheek. The left cheek with my left hand, then again, harder … so that eventually my head turned not from the flinch but from the blow. … I faced my father. ‘Now,’ I said. ‘Take it now.’”

  Photo

  Magariel knows that nothing drives men more than the fear of losing Dad’s love, but “One of the Boys” is not about filial shortcomings. This is a novel about conquering the addiction to abuse and the perverse idea that it’s somehow a form of loyalty. That’s not an easy notion for the young narrator to give up. Before he learns that being a man sometimes means becoming the opposite of your father, he will submit again and again.

  The father’s plan is to move the boys to Albuquerque, where the prospect of life away from Mom beckons. The mirage that they’ve left the real threat behind is enhanced, for a while, by the analgesic beauty of the Southwest. As they come to the brutal, liberating realization that they are on their own, the boys look at the sky and the land with abductee hope, allowing Magariel to revel in piercing descriptions of place, as when he renders the looming mountains “red as stirred embers.”

  Settled in New Mexico, they indulge for a time in the high of starting afresh. They pick new schools, the older brother poised to become the star of his basketball team. But the father’s ghosts check in sooner than they are prepared for.

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  What emerges is the portrait of a man obliterated not just by a crack addiction he can’t shake but by the demands of single parenthood. His sons are a source of devotion and repugnance in equal measure. He might say aloud that he never really wanted to become a father, but he also announces, after the boys have a fight, that it was “my idea to have both of you. … You wouldn’t exist without me. You boys, you’re so close in age, you’re supposed to be there for each other. … What are you looking at me for? Look at your brother. … This is your brother for life. You are his last line of defense.”

  This is a novel without much in the way of humor, or even chances for the boys to be carefree adolescents, and those that it does have feel tinted dark. Rather than providing a breath of relief, they harden the novel’s pathos. Respite comes as nostalgia. At the peak of violence, Magariel often cuts to memories of better times — the boys playing with Dad, all three kids again. This leitmotif, hinted at in the title, also shapes the book’s affecting outcome.

  Yet for all the pain they inflict on one another, for all the betrayal and resentment trapping them together, Magariel’s characters — the male ones, anyway— never feel typecast or pitied. (The mother’s presence is too scant for her characterization to become as sage or nuanced.)

  One day, after Dad has spent weeks holed up in his room to nurse his addiction, the boys finally see him again. “I didn’t recognize him,” the narrator says. “The frays of his cuffs dragged across the carpet like uprooted plants. … He was an electronic device running out of charge.” When a police officer comes knocking, the father and boys panic and hide, “crammed together under his desk, my father in the middle. The plan was: Keep quiet and wait for the cop to leave. … My father shook horribly, his muscles convulsing. I put my arms around him, squeezed as hard as I could. … My eyes met my brother’s, and while mine expressed gratitude to him for locking up, for being reliable and doing his job well, I was devastated to find his full of disgust for the scene of me cradling our dad.”

  Magariel’s gripping and heartfelt debut is a blunt reminder that the boldest assertion of manhood is not violence stemming from fear. It is tenderness stemming from compassion.

  Antonio Ruiz-Camacho is the author of the story collection “Barefoot Dogs.” He’s at work on his first novel.

  A version of this review appears in print on April 23, 2017, on Page BR10 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Papa Don’t Preach. Today's Paper|Subscribe

  Continue reading the main story
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• NPR
  http://www.npr.org/2017/03/29/521912696/one-of-the-boys-tells-the-story-of-a-corrosive-father-son-relationship
  Word count: 1039

  REVIEW
  BOOK REVIEWS
  'One Of The Boys' Tells The Story Of A Corrosive Father-Son Relationship

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  March 29, 20171:19 PM ET
  Heard on Fresh Air

  MAUREEN CORRIGAN
  Fresh Air
  One of the Boys
  One of the Boys
  by Daniel Magariel

  Hardcover, 168 pages purchase

  I was in the mood for reading "lite" this week. It was a nice fleeting thought. Instead, I took a detour because I got curious about Daniel Magariel's slim debut novel, One of the Boys, which is adorned with raves from writers who mostly don't generate such blurbs.

  I found myself reading the novel in one still afternoon. A slim, deeply affecting and brutal story, One of the Boys is about the fierce power of a father-son relationship, which, in these pages, all but grinds a young boy to a pulp.

  The unnamed narrator of One of the Boys is 12 years old. His parents are recently divorced, and he and his older brother have sided with their charismatic father against their mother.

  The first scene here clues us in to both the father's manipulative personality and to our young narrator's terror of being left out, of being found unworthy to be "one of the boys." The father finds out his ex-wife has accidentally struck our narrator with a telephone, and he pressures the boy to pose for Polaroids.

  The father figures he can wangle out of spousal support and gain sole custody of his sons if his ex-wife is deemed abusive. He tells his sons they'll then be able to leave their old life in Kansas and drive off to start afresh in Albuquerque, N.M. — a place the father has randomly fixated on.

  But there's a hitch: The red marks on the boy's face are fading too fast. So the sly father hints that his older son should slap his brother. That's when our young narrator, the miniature caretaker of this broken family, bravely takes charge. Here's the boy's account of what happens next:

  "Wait," I said
  "What?" my father said.
  In the mirror I remade my face with sorrow. This will get us free, I told myself. This was what they needed from me. With my right hand I slapped my right cheek. The left cheek with my left hand, then again, harder, alternating sides, following through a little further each time so that eventually my head turned not from the flinch but the blow. ... I faced my father. "Now," I said. "Take it now. ...."
  My father kept clicking till the button stuck. After they developed, we chose five of the Polaroids to show Child Protective Services.
  Out in Albuquerque, the boys and their father move into an anonymous apartment development. The boys enroll in school; the dad works long-distance as a financial adviser — that is, on those days when he bothers to work. As our narrator later says, "Our dad was an act with a single end. His trajectory: down, down, down."

  It doesn't take long for the boys to discover the white powder that's pulling their father down. In fact, the boys like it better when dad is on a binge because he's docile. Other times, he rages, bloodies his sons with his belt buckle and becomes increasingly distrustful.

  Here's our narrator's description, towards the end of the novel, of the family's sun-baked apartment redecorated in paranoid style:

  The blinds stayed drawn. ... The folding room screens that once separated my father's office from the living room now blockaded the glass porch door. For a while he'd moved a pizza box from window to window to keep the light out.
  Why, you may well ask, would any reader want to enter this disturbed space? You hear the answer in those passages I've already quoted from One of the Boys. There's nothing fake or forced in Magariel's writing; he even pulls off the trick of relying on a 12-year-old narrator without pandering to sentimentality or wise-child syndrome.

  Those are some of the pitfalls Magariel avoids; what he achieves is a novel that makes readers feel what it would be like to live on high alert all the time; to be at the mercy of a father's addictions, crackpot whims and surges of violence. He also makes us feel what it would be like to still love such a father.

  The subject of One of the Boys is archetypal, but Magariel's novel depicts it with the power of stark revelation. We cannot turn away.

  Read an excerpt of One of the Boys
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• Lonesome Reader
  http://lonesomereader.com/blog/2017/4/10/one-of-the-boys-by-daniel-magariel
  Word count: 2517

  One of the Boys by Daniel Magariel

  Boys face particular challenges growing up. There’s often a weight of expectation to conform to certain gender stereotypes: to be strong, aggressive and withhold emotion. As adults we can more easily see how hollow this armour is, but when we’re young it’s difficult not to modify your personality trying to fit in with this brotherhood of masculinity. I grew up in a rural environment where I certainly felt this pressure. Men I knew hunted and made jokes while carving and gutting the corpses of deer they shot. They fished for the sport of it and released their living catch to swim frantically away, trailing a line of blood behind them in the water. Boys chased and sexually teased girls and laughed at them when they cried. I was ordered to chop wood outside for our fireplace while my sister had to stay inside to help with the housework. Whenever I questioned these gender roles I was laughed at or ignored. But most of the time I didn’t see the stark gender divisions in my community because it was all I ever knew.

  I was deeply moved reading Daniel Magariel debut novel “One of the Boys” by the way he presents an intense domestic situation of a boy living with his older brother and domineering father. He learns about what it means to join in with this cult of masculinity: its benefits and its pitfalls. There’s an exquisitely played out tension between his desire for validation from the men in his life and his desire to supersede or reject them. He and his brother choose to live with his mother over his father because “our loyalty had always been to our dad. He was stronger. We feared him. He needed us. His approval always meant so much more than hers – it filled me up.” The way in which they creatively expunge their mother from their lives is truly horrifying. His father continues to act badly becoming a habitual drug user, bullying people who oppose him and physically abusing his boys. What’s especially tragic about this is how the boy narrator learns that “My father would get away with this for a lifetime – the arrogance, the self-regard, the lack of consequences.” Boys see how abominably and brashly men can act without being taken to task for it and the result is that many of those boys grow into men who act the same.

  What’s so impressive about Magariel’s style of writing is the crisp way he presents these ideas about gender in short declarative sentences that cut right to the heart of the boy’s experience and emotions. For example, after long periods of abuse from his father he paradoxically finds that “I didn’t want his kindness. His cruelty was less confusing.” With deft, impactful prose the author conveys complex ideas about the way this boy’s specific upbringing warps his conception about his identity, life and the way men should behave. This is also a short book, but the depth of this dramatic story of addiction, betrayal and poverty runs deep. It makes an interesting contrast to Edouard Louis’ recently translated novel “The End of Eddy” which presents a different portrait of how boys are inducted into typical masculine behaviour – especially when growing up in a working class community. It also reminds me of Justin Torres’ powerful novel about brotherhood “We the Animals” and interestingly Torres has a blurb on the book calling it “a captivating portrait of a wayward father.” With its moving story, this novel delicately prompts readers to consider how gender played a role in their own childhood and, for that reason, I think it will continue to resonate with me for a long time.
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  April 10, 2017
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• Stand Magazine
  http://www.stand-magazine.com/stand-recommends-one-of-the-boys-by-daniel-magariel/
  Word count: 548

  STAND RECOMMENDS ONE OF THE BOYS BY DANIEL MAGARIEL

  JULY 30, 2017 BY STAND MAGAZINE

  Told from the perspective of an unnamed twelve-year-old boy, Daniel Magariel’s debut novel is a darkly humorous and heart-rending story of a boy who accompanies his older brother and father as they escape their old life in Kansas to start anew in New Mexico, following a divorce and custody battle.

  Not long after settling in to a new life and school things start to take a darker, and more violent, turn. After getting in a fight, the boy is concerned that his father will be angry. His older brother jokes with him: “You’re first fight, son,” he impersonated our father. “You’re not a child anymore. Welcome to manhood. You carry your own sins now.”

  Their father is not quite so philosophical though and proceeds to violently beat his young son with a belt. The narrator tells us “I was horrified and confused. I’d seen him whip my mother with a belt before…. Never before, though, had he handled either of us boys so violently. Until now his brutality had been reserved for her.”

  ……..
  “You’re first fight, son,” he impersonated our father. “You’re not a child anymore. Welcome to manhood. You carry your own sins now.”
  ……..
  In addition to the violence, the boys are also subject to their father’s increasing withdrawal and descent into drug addiction. Soon they decide to make an escape.

  Magariel’s engaging and poignant novel explores loyalty, masculinity, domestic violence, addiction, and the relationship between brothers, and fathers and sons.

  One of the Boys
  Daniel Magariel
  Scribner, 2017
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• The Boston Globe
  https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2017/03/23/striking-debut-follows-two-boys-and-manipulations-their-addict-father/yr4slBGd5NRxiF1Y1XiOaP/story.html
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  Striking debut follows two boys and the manipulations of their addict father

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  By Michael Andor Brodeur GLOBE CORRESPONDENT MARCH 24, 2017
  In his debut novel, “One of the Boys,” Daniel Magariel takes a significant risk: He leaves its three main characters — two boys and the tornado of their abusive father — nameless.

  We’ve seen this kind of anonymity in fiction tuned to achieve a range of effects, from the universal proxy of “Everyman’’ to the no-use-for-a-name nihilism of Samuel Beckett. In Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” for instance, the world inhabited (and embodied) by the unidentified father and son is one “shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities,” with “the names of things slowly following those things into oblivion.” Names reduce us to nouns.

  Magariel’s party of three joins a noted recent uptick in nameless fictional characters, but in his novel, the effect is more difficult to discern. Sometimes this tale of two brothers swept by the storm of their abusive father from Kansas to New Mexico feels like an allegorical space for readers to occupy with their own experience; other times it feels like a story hovering somewhere between pure fiction and halting memoir.

  But the tactic is most effective when it helps impart some of the suffocation of life in an abusive family. We are confined throughout to the perspective (and occasionally interrupting memory) of the youngest brother, and the namelessness helps reduce the three characters from independent selves down to codependent roles: “My father,” “your brother.” The absent mother, too, remains nameless on the periphery of the book, emerging only a voice over the phone or hanging in the memory, and, as eventually comes clear, a tidal force that pushes the boys away and pulls them back in. Without names, the bare leverage of family is exposed.

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  In a way, Magariel takes a cue from the father, blocking out the windows, bolting the doors, keeping us from meeting too many outsiders, and telling us only what is required to shape our loyalty. “One of the Boys” is a book about taking control, marking territory, and choosing sides; and Magariel knows how to make life beyond the reach of abuse seem distant enough not to see, if not impossible to imagine.

  What the absence of names doesn’t do in the case of “One of the Boys” is soften the impact of any of the cruelty, anger, bitterness, and manipulation that move the story (and force the family) forward. Magariel writes the father’s ingratiating charm more effectively than the voices of either child, but this imbalance only makes the former sound more sinister. It’s a novel of short, blunt, often powerful sentences — some a bit too insistently doing their Ernest best to project a masculinity as still and arid as the Albuquerque air.

  Magariel’s writing really takes off when he turns his gaze toward nature — like a sudden storm kicking up, he can grow musical and painterly within the space of a few lines, as though not having to process motive or imagine dialogue sets his vision free like “an enormous flock of birds warp[ing] in the wind.”

  In one of several flashbacks that steal us mercifully away from the house in Albuquerque, the boy recalls a day spent fishing with his father, with the only fond memories the moments he spent alone:

  “The sun was bright. The water at the surface of the lake was molten. The first patches of fall had blossomed in the tree line. Small waves from a soft breeze swayed the boat gently. Enormous rocks slept beneath us like dormant elephants. And then the fish would tail-slap the bucket again.”

  It’s the kind of evocative writing that I wish charged through the entire book, short as it is. But Magariel’s careful way of doling out these measured portions of beauty plays against the stalling stiffness of his prose elsewhere, and it comes across less like the stumbles of a first-time novelist and more like the structured reward of the manipulator.

  Which, I should be clear, is not to say Magariel is nearly as cruel as the father he’s written, but he’s at least as clever. He knows, for instance, that abuse isn’t something you can see through the windows — the only way to show us is to bring us inside. And he also knows the ways abuse inhabits other words: “love” or “loyalty” or “family” — that is, he knows that names can often can conceal more than they reveal.

  ONE OF THE BOYS

  By Daniel Magariel

  Scribner, 168 pp., $22

  Michael Andor Brodeur can be reached at mbrodeur@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MBrodeur.
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• The Irish Times
  https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/teenage-brothers-on-the-run-with-an-addict-father-1.3040808
  Word count: 1902

  Teenage brothers on the run with an addict father
  One of the Boys by Daniel Magariel review: an emotional tale

  Daniel Magariel: creates characters who are simultaneously heroic and credible. Photograph: Justine Magariel
  Daniel Magariel: creates characters who are simultaneously heroic and credible. Photograph: Justine Magariel
  Sarah Gilmartin

  Sat, Apr 22, 2017, 06:00
  First published:
  Sat, Apr 22, 2017, 06:00

  BUY NOW

  Book Title:
  One of the Boys
  ISBN-13:
  9781783783465
  Author:
  Daniel Magariel
  Publisher:
  Granta
  Guideline Price:
  £12.99
  For every Superdad in fiction, such as Atticus Finch or Bob Cratchit, there are fathers at the other end of the scale who hardly deserve the title. Michael Henchard in Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge sells his daughter when he’s drunk. Jack Torrance in The Shining tries to kill his son. Pap Finn is only interested in the unfortunate Huck when he can use him to beg for money to feed his alcoholism. David Melrose in Edward St Aubyn’s searing Never Mind series is a master of abuse, both physical and psychological, the type of man who knows that his cruelty to his wife and children works “only if he alternated it with displays of concern and elaborate apologies for his destructive nature”.
  The father in Daniel Magariel’s debut novel, One of the Boys, has a similar parenting style, teasing his two teenage sons with the promise of affection and adventure that swings viciously to violence and neglect. Magariel’s short novel, almost a novella, tells the story of two unnamed brothers who are uprooted from their Kansas home and moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, by their highly volatile father. One of the first things dear old Dad does after relocating is to get drunk in a bar and convince his sons that they should change their surname to Spanish. Alarm bells ring.
  Or rather, ring louder. We already know the pernicious lengths the youngest son was asked to go to by his father in his bid to secure custody. A dramatic opening scene in a basement sees the 11-year-old narrator punch himself in the face while his father and brother watch, urging him to make it look real for the authorities. Coupled with an allegation of sexual abuse, this causes the mother to lose custody. The three “boys” then hit the road. “The boys” is a recurring term used by the father to guilt-trip his sons throughout the novel. Any hint of conscience or rebellion from either of them and Dad wields his psychological power by saying: “I thought you were one of the boys.”
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  Val McDermid, August 2017, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Photograph Simone Padovani/Awakening/Getty ImagesCrime fiction from hillbilly noir to a cold war potboiler
  Manic optimism
  This power turns physical shortly after the manic optimism of their adventure gives way to the realities of the father’s drug addiction. A new refrain, the spine-chilling “be my eyes”, sets the tone in their shoddy apartment, where the paranoid father locks himself and his crack pipe away for weeks on end, only to emerge in various states of comedown.
  The candid simplicity of the young adult narrator’s voice brings pathos: “He’d thinned – his moustache too big for his face. His pants didn’t fit him any more. He had to hold them up by the waistband. The frays of his cuffs dragged across the carpet like uprooted plants.”
  The narrator and his brother adjust accordingly: “He was an electronic device running out of charge. We kept our distance.”
  As the older brother forgoes his schooling and a promising basketball career in order to support the family, the young narrator is left to fend for himself in a world that is scarily lacking a positive adult presence. Themes of addiction, masculinity, parental neglect and lost innocence are brought to life by Magariel, who studied at Columbia University and received his MFA from Syracuse University. Choice details not only bring the addict to life – “The capillaries in his eyes were exposed wires” – but also the wider landscape of the novel: “Out on the porch I watched the city swell before the sunset. Isolated rainstorms looked like pencil scratches in the distance.”
  Debut
  Not everything is seamless in this debut. There is a tendency to guide the reader, especially at the beginning. Too many leading attributors around the dialogue grate initially, though they peter out once the characters have been introduced and the novel finds its flow. A questionable epilogue adds little, either to plot or atmosphere, and the pace of the action is sometimes confusingly fast as the boys settle into their new lives in Albuquerque.
  It is a tempo that perhaps reflects the erratic behaviour of the father, who grows ever more odious as the novel progresses. Magariel’s portrayal of the mother is also commendable. There are no easy binaries when it comes to these parents. The narrator misses his mother, but he also hates her because she has failed to protect her sons from their father. Yet a chance of reunion at airport arrivals poignantly shows the thin line between love and hate: “I could hardly contain my fear, uncertainty, hope. My anticipation warped faces to look like my mother’s.”
  Magariel packs an impressive amount of emotion into his short book. Readers will root for the brothers, whose love for each other comes across on the page as simultaneously heroic and credible. The reality of their situation is stark: “She was gullible and weak, and she couldn’t protect us. But we had no other options. Our dad was an act with a single end.”
  Sat, Apr 22, 2017, 06:00
  First published:
  Sat, Apr 22, 2017, 06:00

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