"If anything, Granta set me back even further," says Earley from his Nashville home. "I felt more pressure. I would sit down to write a sentence, and I would think, 'That’s not a sentence from one of the top twenty young writers in America.'"
Still, this book about a boy in North Carolina, where Earley grew up and where his fiction is set, compelled him to write. He sent the first twenty-five pages of the novel manuscript to the editors at Granta, and they published it. Earley plodded on with the book, and as he wrote, he broke out of his depression.
"I realized that I wasn’t going to be any place any worse than where I had been," he says. "And I tried not to take everything too seriously."
He sent the novel, called Jim the Boy, to Little, Brown, and they liked it. Earley liked it too, but he was worried; he thought the book might be perceived as too traditional, not hip or ironic. "I was pretty convinced that I had written a novel that was going to be trounced by the critics," he says.
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"Tony Earley has a wonderful gift for deep observation, exact and wise and often funny."
• New York Times Book Review
" …when I find a good book, I get up (literally) and dance around the living room. Tony Earley's Jim the Boy made me dance. …For a brief time, this modest little masterpiece of a book may make you feel like flying."
• Mary Ann Gwinn, Seattle Times
". . . .dazzling first novel about boyhood . . . . deceptively quiet, beautifully wrought, evocation of childhood."
• Newsweek
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