Debut Novel Hardly 'Huge'

It’s tough to be an almost 13-year-old boy. Even if one’s never been, still, one can imagine. But Eugene “Genie” Smalls, the protagonist of “Huge,” James W. Fuerst’s debut novel, has more than his fair share of adolescent angst with which to deal. “Huge” uses a fairly familiar archetype as its foundation—the bildungsroman—but the storyline quickly diverges from cliché to downright bizarre. The novel, narrated from the young Genie’s perspective, struggles to maintain a balance between reliability and believability, and, in satisfying the former, sometimes compromises the latter.

Genie is a precocious preteen with a high IQ and a whole host of anger issues. He was held back a year after he punched his fifth grade art teacher. He has no friends. In truth, it’s hard for him to communicate with people at all. When vandalism strikes the local retirement home, Genie’s grandmother hires him for his first paying detective case. The plot is the stuff of a children’s chapter book, but “Huge” is nothing of the sort.

For one, there’s something undeniably dark at work in Genie’s family dynamic. Genie’s older sister, Neecey, torments him by giving him more-than-occasional glimpses of her naked body. Genie’s overactive imagination thinks up increasingly disturbing sexual scenarios in which his sister might be engaging. In a fit of anger and nascent sexual frustration, Genie responds in his own turn, pulling down his shorts and flashing his sister.

Unfortunately, Fuerst too often resorts to explaining his own story. “Yeah, sometimes I had problems with self-control,” Genie observes as he pulls up his pants. It would seem to the reader that Fuerst elucidates this point sufficiently without the need for Genie’s own exposition. Anyway, would 12-year-old Genie, shorts still around his ankles, realistically be able to snap back into a state of such lucid observance and proceed to comment objectively on his anger issues? In addition to its over-telling, the passage points to a sort of incestuous tension that is hardly subtle. “Those big-ass balls of yours!” Neecey says, examining her younger brother’s naked body. She goes on to say, “You never know, you could have a decent little pecker when you get older.” Though there are many such disturbing scenes throughout the novel, they are often presented without any explication or means of interpretation—completely orphaned by the story at large.

“Huge” is, at its heart, the story of Genie’s quest to come to terms with his reality and the world around him. One of the keywords he’s picked up after a spate of therapy is “actualization.” Genie’s vague understanding of the term revolves around communication and connection with people in his life. But first he has to get a handle on his emotions. Genie’s only friend is a stuffed frog named Thrash given to him by one of his counselors, he recalls, “to help me actualize, because I was too alone and locked up inside myself.”

The discussion of child psychology is limited to that which Genie might be able to comprehend—not very much. However, the novel strives to provide a commentary on Genie’s psychological development over the course of his detective case. As a coming-of-age narrative, “Huge” leaves something to be desired.

Genie’s relatability is sometimes compromised by uncharacteristically astute observations about his town, his acquaintances, and his family members. While these observations deliver important information, it’s hard to believe that Genie, trapped in a personal fantasy world, would be capable of giving them.

Genie describes his home town as a place where, “No matter what you wanted, if it wasn’t at the mall, then you wouldn’t find it here… in a town that only existed so you could make a few purchases on your way to somewhere else.” Fuerst’s description of setting and time—suburban New Jersey in the 1980s—is vivid, funny, and authentic. The author, who spent his teenage years in the Garden State, depicts the monotony and claustrophobia of humid August days with such proficiency that it is easy to understand Genie’s excitement over the case of the retirement home graffiti, or his desire for his adventure to be complicated and far reaching.

Genie is an endearing—if enigmatic—character. His issues with anger, combined with his intelligence, lead to moments of clever, believable, and funny insight. Yet “Huge” struggles to render what Mark Haddon’s novel, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time” succeeded quite well at—the portrayal of an adolescent boy’s transition from a fantasy life into reality—and his struggle to come to terms with the world around him. Though at times both humorous and evocative, Fuerst’s debut lacks the consistency and clarity to shine forth as a paragon of the bildungsroman, and thus fails to stretch the potential of this well-explored genre into exciting territory.