Written by Josh Kilmer Purcell
“Soon enough, Jayson would be on his way to Hollywood. He would escape all of this small town nothingness. The petty domestic dramas. His insufferable unpopularity. The strangers who would stare at his strange clothes and strange brother and strange mother in the A&P.”
This is a book that will be most appreciated by those people of my generation — anyone who remembers growing up in the pop culture universe between 1978 and 1985.
A world of Atari games, Betamax cameras & tapes, Three’s Company and Laverne & Shirley — a world where people would understand references to “the third Chrissy”. A world of Chevy Citations and Ford Mavericks. A world before child stars fell hard back to Earth. A world that didn’t yet have a name for AIDS. A world of drugs and sex, hid behind childlike innocence.
This is the world of Candy Everybody Wants. It’s actually a simple story of a boy’s coming out: sexually, artistically, and emotionally. It’s a story about his rag-tag family and friends, his escape from a small town to the big city (New York, naturally), and cold splashes of water that time and again offer sobriety to his occasionally self-centred dreams.
Nothing we haven’t seen before, but this time, definitely worth the read. For two simple reasons:
(1) The entire story is written as a hybrid sitcom. Our protagonist — Jayson (with a “y” for extra flair) relates all of his experiences and situations to what he has consumed from the television of the early 1980s: a time when TV was entering the final phase of the golden age of sitcoms…slowly giving way to prime-time mega-soaps such as Dallas and Dynasty. The trick is that real life constantly gets in the way, forcing Jayson to realize that the sitcom world and the real world are constantly at war. It does so with blistering amounts of humour, dazzling wit and wordplay, and scenes that alternate between joyful enthusiasm and staggering poignancy. In short, this is a book that revels in the (often brilliantly profane) language that results from the conflict between fantasy media & cold, hard reality.
(2) The pop culture of the time infuses everything. It’s a living, breathing time capsule that spoke to me so powerfully, it might as well have been a pristine VHS tape of random events from my own 1980s childhood. Brand names, TV characters, specific magazines, knowing parodies of famous actors of the time…my head was shaking from the memory assault. There are also ominous references to events yet to come…occasionally buried with insidious dexterity.
I honestly don’t know how anyone younger than 30 is going to react to this novel. I’m sure they will thoroughly enjoy it, but the layers of historical melancholy that permeate the action will speak (and DID speak) volumes to anyone of my generation. Part love letter, part requiem, all heart. Candy Everybody Wants was a book I burned through in 3 hours. Now that I’m finished, I want to go back and read it again.
It’s one way of reliving childhood memories of that time, short of watching my Dallas DVD’s. 
