Book Review : Kevin Maloney - The Red-Headed Pilgrim (2023)
Adulthood is a scam. There’s never really a moment that comes where you download responsibility and an unchecked enthusiasm for home decor. You either become responsible or get in trouble because your parents stop bailing you out at some point. You either learn to love Ikea or not, but the alternative is not great. Watching your furniture rot in real time on nights and weekends gets old after a while. You’re the same person than you were as a kid, except your life is worse now.
The scam of adulthood is more or less what Kevin Maloney’s upcoming novel The Red-Headed Pilgrim is about. It’s also a lot about his life, but mostly from the point of view of the overgrown child we all become.
The Red-Headed Pilgrim is what you call an autofiction. It’s a fictionalized retelling of the author’s real life and Kevin Maloney’s adult life so far happened to have featured a lot of anxiety, drugs, a late blooming sexual life and a lot of spontaneous travel across America. Although it’s separated in five different parts, you could argue that it has essentially two: pre and post-parenthood, which is an event that usually splits people's lives in two. Am I right?
Autofiction and magic realism
Kevin Maloney makes a good argument that autofiction is an exercise in magic realism with The Red-Headed Pilgrim. What he does in this novel is not that different from what everyone does when they think over important moments of their lives and imagine how it could’ve gone different. You’re done it. I’ve done it. Kevin Maloney does it for 223 pages and it mostly feels like a comedic reassertion of the foundational events of his life.
The Red-Headed Pilgrim is in no way in the business of the symbolic or the metaphorical. It’s a good-natured novel that aims to unearth magic in the human experience. However sarcastic he might be about his journey on this planet, Kevin Maloney is claiming loud and proud his ownership of his best and worst memories. No matter how unpleasant they were to him, there’s a power to be gained in authorship. In making yourself the hero of your own story.
A good example of what I’m talking about is the scene where Maloney depicts a teenage suicide attempt that may or may not have happened and the poem that saved him from oblivion. That story could be 100% true for all I know, but it feels like something Wes Anderson could’ve come up with given slight tweaks in detail: the poem is very bad, young Kevin thinks very highly of it and it clashes with the perception of the worried school staff. By retelling (or inventing) a story like this, Maloney deconstructs one of his foundational moments without letting it define him.
He is the one calling the shots. He is the one telling his story.
The healing journey of the bumbling adult
The point of writing The Red-Headed Pilgrim is obvious. It’s an exercise of reconciliation with the fragmented nature of existence through the oneness of fiction. But what is the point of reading it? I’d argue that Kevin Maloney’s humility and sense of humor are inspiring, if not contagious. It’s empowering to loudly claim that you aren’t perfect. By making such a spectacle of his own imperfection in The Red-Headed Pilgrim, Kevin Maloney creates a safe space for you to also claim it.
Maloney’s novel feels like having drinks with this frantic, open-hearted and hilarious friend who shares any story that happens to him with a vigorous sense of humor. It feels good to be with him and it makes you want to open up to someone so wholeheartedly offers his vulnerability to you and whoever else might hear him. What it lacks perhaps in style or narrative ambition, it makes up with this very unique atmosphere that takes root in local folklore.
*
I liked The Red-Headed Pilgrim. It’s a very intimate and vulnerable novel that is told with such a heartfelt and self-deprecating way that you’ll end up relating to Kevin Maloney’s journey through adulthood. No doubt it’s born out of a confessional and therapeutic need, but this desire to be heard and understood (at least emotionally) transpired through the novel and makes the reader smile knowingly because he’s also been there. In this regard, The Red-Headed Pilgrim works beautifully.
The Red-Headed Pilgrim is coming out on January 24 2023. Pre-order it here.
