The ordinary white boy

the long version

"Endearing, infuriating, and utterly irresistible, Lamar Kerry, Jr., is a 27-year-old Ordinary White Boy. He wears khaki pants, work boots, and flannel shirts, dances like Mick Jagger when he dances at all (only when drunk), and when in doubt, he reaches for a beer. His father sent him to college expecting him to become extraordinary, but Lamar returned home, a bright, cocky, overeducated, middle-class boy adrift in a depressed, comatose, working-class town. Now the town's only Hispanic is missing and feared dead, Lamar's mother is enfeebled by MS, and both his father and his girlfriend are tired of being disappointed in him. Can Lamar turn himself into a professor of "racial remediation" and save the soul of his town? Can he stop hiding out in his ordinariness and do what is right by his father, his mother, his girlfriend, and himself? Can this ordinary white boy finally become a man?"--BOOK JACKET.