Michael Esposito is three years old when his father takes the family to see Death Wish at the local movie house. The collapsing city onscreen lodges in him as both nightmare and fascination, and he will spend the next two decades trying to locate this Hollywood vision in the real world.

Growing up on Long Island in the 1970s and 80s on the autism spectrum, Michael finds his first taste of belonging in children’s theatre and promptly lets the adulation ruin him. He neglects his studies, develops an obsessive pattern of fixation on unattainable girls, and begins a quiet, private relationship with alcohol. His parents (a construction worker and a cashier) stretch themselves to fund their son’s ambitions — driving him to auditions, buying him computers and musical instruments, sitting across kitchen tables reviewing financial aid forms for drama schools they don’t fully understand but believe in anyway. Running alongside Michael’s story is Gordo, a wealthier and more socially assured classmate whose effortless navigation of the worlds Michael strains to enter becomes its own source of injury. By the time Michael boards the train for Manhattan, he has already rehearsed every mistake he is about to make.

At drama school in the New York of 1989, Michael discovers that the bohemian world he imagined does exist. He is just on its periphery, watching through the window, working dead-end jobs to cover the rent on a room barely large enough to hold his record collection and his disappointments. He falls into the orbit of Molly, a mercurial classmate who alternately pulls him close and discards him, and who becomes the template for every bad decision that follows. He drinks more. He sees his psychiatrist. He starts a band. He writes songs for girls who don’t call back. He inserts himself into the dramas of people whose lives seem more fully inhabited than his own.

When school ends and its structure disappears, Michael drifts further. He waits tables, which it turns out he is genuinely good at. He cycles through obsessions and chaotic entanglements, chasing a version of the life he came to New York to find, while his addictions blossom under the tuteliage of damaged punk mentors. Eventually he's robbed of his records and music equiptment. After writing a play and meeting a sympathetic magazine editor, he finds, briefly, something that feels like the real thing, and watches it slip away with the particular passivity that has always been his defining trait.

Walkman Blues is a tragicomic künstlerroman set across a decade of American life, from the Reagan suburbs to downtown New York on the cusp of revitalization. It is a novel about cultural ambition and class anxiety, about the gap between the self a person imagines and the self that actually shows up, and about what it costs a working man to fund a dreamer’s education.