SOURCE: A review of Goodnight, Nebraska, in Publisher's Weekly, January 5, 1998, Vol. 245, No. 1, p. 58.

[The following review looks at the strengths and weaknesses of Goodnight, Nebraska, which is characterized as an "impressive but pawed first novel."]

The downward life trajectory of a youth from a blue-collar family who is unmoored by his father's death and the discovery of his mother's and sister's promiscuity is at the heart of this impressive but flawed first novel [Goodnight, Nebraska]. After an impulsive act of violence in the book's opening chapters (which contain the narrative's most assured writing), Utah high-school football star and budding mechanic Randall Hunsacker avoids reform school by agreeing to resettle in Goodnight, Nebraska, a tiny community that McNeal evokes with some fine insights into small-town life. There, after first alienating the townspeople and confirming his role of outsider, Randall becomes, in a stroke of bizarre good fortune, a minor...