A Map of Tulsa
The first days of summer: Jim Praley is home from college, ready to unlock Tulsa’s secrets. He drives the highways in his parents’ car. Finally he makes himself stop and walk into a bar. He’s invited to a party. And there he meets Adrienne Booker, a girl who rules Tulsa, in her way. A high-school dropout and promising artist with a penthouse apartment, she takes a special interest in Jim. Through her eyes, he will rediscover his hometown: its wasted sprawl, the beauty of its late nights and, at the city’s centre, the unsleeping light of its skyscrapers.
Five years later, Jim comes home again, to face the truth about that summer.
A novel in two parts, A Map of Tulsa is love story and elegy, a meditation on mobility and its consequences, a book about the distances inside America.
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- A Map of Tulsa is Benjamin Lytal’s first novel.
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Reviews
Patrick Langley
Times Literary Supplement
'A Map of Tulsa is infused with the poignancy that comes of being too naïve and narcissistic to value what you already have … A Map of Tulsa has a drifting, and somewhat aimless quality in keeping with the rudderless desires of youth. Lytal’s strongest gifts lie in the offbeat, lyrical way he conjures up the emptiness of Tulsa…’
Hector Tobar
Los Angeles Times
‘Tender and engaging. . . . . A memorable coming-of-age tale about hometown ambivalence and finding a place in the world. . . . The tension between the cosmopolitan and provincial, the sensuous and the chaste, is a big reason why A Map of Tulsa is so memorable. . . . [Lytal’s] great achievement in A Map of Tulsa is to bring his hometown to life as a place where all sorts of American ghosts can be found living amid the seemingly generic landscape of a midsized, middle-American city.’
The New Yorker
‘This lyrical slow burn of a book is . . . a meditation on place, destiny, and fate.’
New York Times
‘Mr. Lytal, a Tulsa native, gets the push and pull of home just right.’
Tom Bissell
Harper’s Magazine
‘A Map of Tulsa deserves comparison with the very best novels of its kind, from James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime to Scott Spencer’s Endless Love. It’s also one of the most insightful books about the comforts (and traps) of small-city parochialism I’ve ever read.’
Christian Lorentzen
Bookforum
‘A romance of the West, an Oklahoma of glass skyscrapers, oil fortunes, and dive bars. Lytal’s first novel is a love story and a tragedy and a stunning work of lyricism.’
