A Map of Tulsa is a novel by Benjamin Lytal. It has been all the rage lately so hey I had to read it. It is about a guy Jim Praley and a girl Adrienne Booker. They both grew up in Tulsa but didn’t know each other until Praley comes back to town after a year of college.

They meet at a party and end up going to Cain’s Ballroom and eventually have a sort of relationship. Jim pursues her hard and she give him the old flamethrower and ice cold treatment which of course guys just love.

Adrienne Booker is an heiress who lives in the penthouse apartment of her family’s oil company office building. She doesn’t go to college she spends her time painting oil paintings and being a very cool and distant person. Jim buys her a gun and shoots a few windows out at her studio and like any good Okie girl she falls in love with Jim and they live together in the penthouse. Jim eventually goes back to college and they fall apart and then in the second part of the book Adrienne has a bad accident and Jim comes back to Tulsa.

So anyway, the book is about men and women, growing up or not growing up and the changes that occur with people and between people, loss, and how you just can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Generally I’m not much into literary novels and I’ll freely admit that probably means that I’m not very smart but, I need strong characters and for something to happen. In this book the dramatic events happen to the characters, not caused by them, but the aftermath has to be dealt with and analyzed by the characters so they come across as being fairly passive. Somehow it worked for me.

The city of Tulsa plays into it also as Lytal’s Tulsa is a town where everybody has a place and knows almost everybody else and nobody is anonymous. That’s about right. I’ve lived in big cities and small towns and Tulsa is the biggest small town that I’ve ever seen. I guarantee you that two randomTulsa residents who have lived in town longer than a couple years will discover within 15 minutes multiple mutual acquaintances. I’ve never seen anything like it. Somehow Lytal, a Tulsa native captured that sense of everybody being tied together in the book.

So anyways I’ll give the book four stars out of five.