“To read it was to enter a room I’d known my whole life, been defined by without ever having seen the walls or understanding a thing about how it was built and why I was trapped there. Or maybe the poem made a room in me?” —Julie Buntin, Famous Men
Wilhelmina Miles, the earnestly precocious young heroine at the center of Julie Buntin's sweeping sophomore novel, FAMOUS MEN, wants to be a writer more than anything else. As a young teen, she locates her North Star, a poet named Nathaniel Fellow. Fellow, raised in her own small town in Michigan, is now a famous writer living in New York City. Infatuated by his poetry and persona, she launches herself to NYC and becomes Nathaniel's assistant in an attempt to secure a spot for herself in the literary world. The set-up is a familiar one: the naive ingénue with a Daddy complex places herself in the hands of the established older mentor with a less-than-stellar reputation. Readers can intuit where this will lead. What Buntin does with this set-up is interesting. Does Will's need for security outweigh her self-worth? Can we root for a character who will go to such great lengths for proximity to fame? Inspired by the early stages of the #MeToo movement, Famous Men is lucid and smart, a complex coming-of-age novel about complicity and power that reckons with and elucidates the current moment.