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"From his preface, quoting Frank Zappa, to his conclusion, deriding
a Doctor of English Literature and his flippant remark that the lummox
is a traditional male, [Magnuson] brilliantly shows the ridiculousness
of judging books by their covers. You realize that you have tried to
appear invisible in the face of many a lummox over the years, and in
doing so...you may have lost many a great friend. You may also have
missed out on many a great time...You also notice that you have not
put this book down since you looked at the cover, and you cannot conceive
of how you could have better spent the last few hours. You have laughed
out loud. You have been surprised, even shocked a few times...You have
enjoyed yourself."
--Dan Wickett of Dan Wickett’s Book Reviews
"Proletarian novelist Magnuson (The Fire Gospels, 1998,
etc.) provides a memoir of his younger days around Menomonee Falls and
Eau Claire, Wisconsin. A child of the ‘60s, Magnuson (Creative
Writing/Southern Illinois Univ.) writes his autobiographical sketches
in the third person and in the vernacular with scant attention to grammatical
niceties. The result is graphic, edgy, and (to use a favorite locution)
pretty much kickass. In his musically precocious youth, the author for
a while pursued a grungy life in the music room of an abandoned elementary
school. There, he kept a set of drums, drank copious amounts of beer,
and contemplated the allure of nubile high-school cheerleaders. Occasionally,
although he ran to pudge, young Mike even hooked up with a lubricious
teenager. The next section shows our near-troglodyte tubby hero as a
counselor in a juvenile group home, working with seriously troubled
boys. Thence to life with some fierce feminists, lewd women, and several
seriously troubled grownups. Clearly, this is not your TV-sitcom, family-style
lummox. Yeah, he’s still big (‘about 250 in the winter and
230 in the summer’), but within this boorish, bearish, boozing
lout, this sweaty, tavern-haunting factory hand, is a perceptive, serious,
and intelligent lummox caught in the guise of an oaf. Deep down, Magnuson
admits, he’s a pussycat. He has a true appreciation of Bach, Wagner,
and Coltrane, Proust, Faulkner, and Dostoyevsky. As one of his juvenile
charges told him, ‘you know all kinda shit you never get to tell
any about.’ Now the big guy gets to tell a bit of it, and it makes
for kick-back, totally cool reading. A wild, unseemly, entertaining
elegy that will appeal not just to lummox readers, related in street
language that doesn’t hide the talent."
--Kirkus Reviews
"This quirky, charming memoir of a young guy trying to find himself
and figure out his place in the world during the Reagan years is both
enlightening and entertaining, without ever resorting to the sentimental
or the sensational. Magnuson (The Right Man for the Job), who
teaches creative writing at Southern Illinois University, has taken
the bold step of writing his memoir from a third-person point of view
and presents readers with a completely convincing (and unflattering)
portrait of himself as a crude, vulgar, confused and mostly unlikable
heterosexual guy, ‘guided in life by his dick.’ His father
was a school superintendent, his mother taught him about classical music,
and his intelligence was high. Even so, Magnuson left home and lived
illegally in a closed school building, played the drums, drifted between
jobs, drank far too much, and coasted in consecutive sexual relationships
because it was easy. Magnuson paints a credible characterization of
male aimlessness and convinces readers that Mike is sincere even in
the height of his obnoxiousness--he truly thinks that farting loudly
will impress his pick-up from the night before. At times Magnuson is
so determined to prove Mike’s lummoxness that one may have trouble
imagining that this is the man who grew up to write this memoir. There
are moments of unusual insight--Mike spent a summer living in a lesbian
collective, which taught him much about relating to women--and ultimately
Magnuson brings readers beneath the gross, frightened face of his younger
self to show a depth and vulnerability that is both touching and vibrant."
--Publishers Weekly
And the official Publishers Weekly forecast: "If Magnuson
is as captivating in person as he is print, the marketing campaign (which
includes national broadcast interviews, a national radio campaign, and
author appearances in the Midwest) will help his book get off its fat
a** and into buyers’ hands."
"[Magnuson is] a fucking riot. This is one of the funniest books
since A Confederacy of Dunces. I shit you not."
--Bob Clark, Maintenance Department, Mankato Citizens Telephone Company
“What makes it so fun to read is the thought that this stuff actually happened. Lummox: The Evolution of a Man will open every man’s eye to the ‘lummox’ inside him and show every man who knows he is a ‘lummox’ that he can still have the heart and mind of an artist.”
--Joshua Ellis, The Galaxy
“[Magnuson’s] life story is hilariously funny and, in its own way, touching. Pick this book up and you won’t put it down.”
--William R. Wineke, Wisconsin State Journal
“[Magnuson’s] telling-it-like-it-is approach to writing is vividly reminiscent of New York city writer and musician Jim Carroll, who explores the city streets with as much depth as Magnuson’s Wisconsin tales…his compassion is revealed on nearly every page.”
--Brenda Erickson, Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter
“Magnuson describes his experience with loads of comedic value and with an unapologetic tone…This book will leave the reader cheering for this heartwarming guy who transforms himself from a kid without a clue to a man who finds his niche in life. At first it’s hard to sympathize with Magnuson, but by the end, it’s hard not to feel like his best friend and want to buy him a round or two.”
--Dan Julian, The State News
“I would call it a guy’s book. It’s a little too crude for my taste in fact, as I read through it, I was thinking ‘this could jump start the women’s movement.’”
--Jean Peerenboom, Green Bay Press-Gazette
“Lummox: The Evolution of a Man…is about as pointless as Cher getting another facelift.”
--Travis Lee, The Daily Barometer
“[Magnuson] gives a voice to a segment of the population that has been frowned upon and forgotten by literature…typical guys who think it’s still amusing to laugh at bodily functions, the guys who spit off of bridges into the waters that run deep beneath them. What you get with Lummox is a healthy dose of honesty that should be respected in this time of P.C. overindulgence. In these pages you will find a brand of honesty that will make you uncomfortable, pissed off, laugh out loud and change the way you look at the large, boorish men of the world.”
--William Alonso, The Daily Egyptian
“Ross figures this is pretty much the point of the book: If doesn’t matter if a dude’s a big jerk on the outside, because he’s probably cool on the inside. This might just be an excuse for men to act like misogynistic idiots, but it does make it harder for guys like Ross to write off guys like Mike.”
--Ross Cuff, The Daily Californian
“Fuck Catcher in the Rye. Lummox oughta be slapped into the mitts of any young big feller, cause that’s the way it’s gonna be—here’s the coming-of-age story for big freaks.
No shit—I read it in one shot.”
--Elwood Reid, author of Midnight Sun, If I Don’t Six, and What Salmon Know
“A wonderful coming-of-age story that is at once ingratiating, gross, tender, tendentious and funny as hell. Call it ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Slob.’ Magnuson embraces his lummoxhood and runs with it, and it turns out that was exactly the right thing to do. He makes us want to celebrate it, too, in all its unfettered, aimless, stinky, sloppy, glory.”
--Carole Goldberg, Hartford Courant
“Funny, honest, confessional and aggressively impolite, Lummox is an unusual memoir of an unusual man’s struggle with his perception by others and his reconciliation with his own self-image. Magnuson…delivers an impertinent opus, an iconoclastic journey through a life of college classes, crash pads, factory jobs, lonely nights and happy hours.”
--Gregory Harris, Bookpage
“Amusing.”
--Esquire
“Mike Magnuson’s books are wildly, colorfully, lovingly ‘Wiscahnsin.’”
--Ann Christenson, Milwaukee Magazine
"The year is 1970, and Mike Magnuson, a second-grader in Menomonee
Falls, Wisconsin, has just dynamited his classroom’s test-taking
silence with an "earsplitting eruption of gas" that gets him
banished to the principal’s office with a note, which little Mike
reads along the way. "This boy," it declares," is a disruptive
lummox." Lummox (HarperCollins; $25), a foul-mouthed, smelly-socked
belly laugh of a memoir, is novelist Magnuson’s (The Right Man
for the Job) rejoinder to that note. Subtitled "The Evolution
of a Man," the book tracks Magnuson’s rise from a farting
tyke with "a beer gut that isn’t one yet but looks like one"
to...well, to a farting man with a beer gut that’s bona fide. But
tucked into this book is a fearless and sometimes wise treatise on what
it means to be male, and if Lummox makes you uncomfortable, dissapproving,
and delighted (and maybe disgusted) all at once, it’s because you
faintly recognize someone here: you, you big lummox."
--Men’s Journal
"Mike Magnuson is a big lummox. What is a lummox? He’s the
big guy with the spare tire and a foul mouth, dirt under his finger
nails and stubble on his face. Usually, he spills some beer on his flannel
shirt midway through the third or fourth pitcher while watching the
Packers at a neighborhood tavern. Sounds like someone (almost every
guy?) you know in Wisconsin? You betcha. Now, Wisconsin native Mike
Magnuson has answered the riddle of the lummox in his hilarious, strangely
touching new book Lummox: The Evolution of Man (HarperCollins,
$24.95). In this whimsical, rough-edged memoir, Magnuson chronicles
the strange relationship between the intellectual and the physical that
has dominated his life. Magnuson, born a giant, lunky male, recalls
his twenties in Lummox, a time in his life when he bounced from
bad job to worse job, not sure of what to do next, often letting his
temper, his drunkenness or his occasional bouts of stupidity get him
in trouble as he drifted across Wisconsin, living in abandoned schools
and in basement apartments. But this Lummox has another side as well:
In between lunchpails and last calls, Magnuson has moments of clarity,
moments when he's genuinely moved by beauty and art, moments in which
he decides he wants more out of his life than beer-soaked evenings that
end in fistfights. After a weekend in prison, Magnuson sets off on a
book-reading binge, enrolls in college, and gains a little more control
over his foul mouth and fists. Written with a surprising amount of hard-earned
wisdom and tenderness, Lummox is nothing short of a manifesto
for the Wisconsin man."
--Madison Magazine
From the book jacket:
Part farce, part treatise on what it means to be a man in America today,
Lummox: The Evolution of a Man is the outrageous true-life tale
of a twentysomething man stumbling through the Reagan years, trying
to figure out what it means to be a "man’s man" during
the period when feminists are gaining greater control over America’s
institutions.
The lummox is Mike Magnuson, your friendly neighborhood big guy with
a foul mouth, a spare tire around his midsection, and a tender heart,
and these are his years working in factories, hanging out in taverns,
befriending reprobates, going to college, having trouble with the law,
and living with crazy jazz musicians and with lesbian separatists. When
a mysterious phantom enters his life, he sets himself on a quest to
discover the true meaning of lummoxness, and what he learns along the
way is both shocking and hilarious.
This is a book that will leave you laughing out loud in recognition
and cheering for lummoxes everywhere.
LUMMOX ESSENTIALS
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