Beyond Kidding

An exploration of the complex joys of parenting blends uneasily with sadsack bachelor hijinks in Clark’s underwhelming debut. At 29, science fiction–loving misanthrope Rob Buckland—Kidder to his friends—is a failure. After being fired from his childhood best friend’s sex shop, Rob manages to fake his way into a corporate job interview where he invents a son, Brodie, to explain away the gap in his résumé. He gets the job, but his lies pile up until Rob desperately claims that Brodie’s gone missing. Then the nonexistent Brodie is found alive and returned to Rob’s care by the police. But the stiff, eerily silent boy doesn’t act quite like a real child. As Rob unravels the mystery of who Brodie is and how he came to be, he slowly finds a better version of himself. Clark ably captures Rob’s shame and self-delusion, but slows to a crawl to skewer the tired targets of corporate politics, women’s looks, and lonely men. Rob’s struggles are straight out of a lad lit novel and will please fans of that genre, but the science-fictional elements are slight. The eerie mystery and unfocused theme aren’t enough to transfigure Rob’s limp resentment into either satire or epiphany. This misses the mark. [em](Apr.) [/em]