MFA Greensboro Alum Drew Perry Reviewed for His Debut Novel 'This Is Just Exactly Like You'

Local author Drew Perry and his debut novel This is just exactly like you
     by Taylor Madaffari
If you haven’t yet read Drew Perry—local Greensboro resident and English professor at Elon University—you should.  Perry recently published a remarkable debut novel, This is Just Exactly Like You, which was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction’s best first novel of the year.  It is wise and witty, a little tour de force on love and infidelity, parenting, suburbia, and the ways in which we are broken. 

Hapless but charming protagonist Jack Lang is bad at life.  He simply cannot get it together no matter how hard he tries.  "He goes ahead with projects without planning them all the way through first.  It makes [his wife] crazy.  He knows this, does it anyway.  Gets excited,” Perry writes.  When Jack finds himself raising his hand at the auctioning of the house directly across the street from his own, a house with a floor-plan identical to his current home, his already fed-up wife, Beth, leaves him—for his best friend Terry Canavan.  Jack finds himself with little besides his business, Patriot Mulch and Tree, in a small college town in North Carolina (a town that sounds a lot like Greensboro) and his severely autistic six-year-old son, Hendrick.  When Terry’s ex-girlfriend, Rena, shows up at Jack’s door and then promptly moves in with him, Jack is more bewildered and lost than ever.  But the one thing he almost always manages to get (mostly) right is his son. 

his is the story of a man attempting—however clumsily or brokenly—to fix his life; it is a story about baseball, karaoke, backyard sidewalk tricycle racetracks, and enormous fiberglass undersea creatures stolen from a defunct putt-putt.  Oh, and a dog named Yul Brynner.  At once funny and terribly bleak, with alive dialogue that perfectly captures real, honest to goodness Southern colloquialisms, this novel artfully depicts the wants and needs that reside within us all.  Amid the chaos and tangled romantic relationships, there is the center of gravity, the heart of the story—one brilliant and flawed little boy and his deeply felt, complex relationship with his father—a man who tries.

Read the full article here: http://www.examiner.com/books-in-greensboro/local-author-drew-perry-and-his-debut-novel-this-is-just-exactly-like-you-review

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org