A fizzy, warmhearted debut that turns the mundane routines of new adult loneliness into something genuinely luminous
Victor Navarro is twenty-two years old, works remotely as a web developer, and has not, by his own admission, done much with either of those facts.
He shares a cramped apartment at a quaint Tustin live-work complex with his best friend and reluctant roommate Brandon “Brand” Wunderkundt—an aspiring cam model whose romantic disasters arrive with regularity.
Jesse Gordon’s That McKenzie Girl follows Victor across a handful of pivotal weeks as he stumbles into the orbit of Arin McKenzie, a whip-smart, panda-toting girl who materializes in the alleyway outside his building one evening with no cell phone and an inexhaustible supply of deadpan charm. The book’s governing concern is deceptively simple: can a deeply homebound person actually connect with the world outside his apartment walls?
The book opens with Brand weeping on the wrong cushion of their Sacred Sofa Treaty sofa, setting the tone for a novel that is precisely as absurd and as sincere as that image suggests. Victor’s birthday unfolds as a series of social misadventures including a live-stream cameo that ends in vomit and a moonlit car ride into nowhere. Each episode illuminates how thoroughly Victor has insulated himself from the unpredictability of other people.
When Arin appears, carrying a rescue panda named Ben and offering a running commentary on everything from the golden age of secondhand CDs to the verb gap in digital videography, Victor recognizes her immediately as someone he should know but cannot place. She moves into his apartment for a night, stays for weeks, and becomes a counterweight to the escalating chaos brought on by Brand’s newest live-stream partner.
The book’s greatest achievement is Victor’s voice, which earns its laughs without sacrificing intelligence or emotional honesty. His tangential thinking is a formal device as much as a character trait—a way of staging the gap between what Victor knows he should do and what he actually manages. The observation that “we don’t know each other—we know of each other” lands as something more than deadpan social commentary. It is the novel’s thesis, delivered so casually that the reader might miss it.
The complex’s supporting cast—the inscrutable Kirk Picardo, the relentlessly blunt Fannie, the affable Clay Moreland—each arrives with a secret Victor wasn’t expecting, and these reveals appear with a light touch that keeps the novel nimble. Brand, for his part, is the best kind of comedic foil: a genuinely good person whose worldview is just narrow enough to produce friction but never cruel enough to curdle the friendship.
The novel’s most ambitious gambit involves Arin’s actual identity. Some readers will find the mysterious framing exhilarating; others may feel it undercuts a story that had been doing fine work entirely within the mundane. The book seems less interested in explaining this framing logic than in using it to ask what it means when the person who finally sees you might not be what they seem.
That McKenzie Girl is, at its core, a novel about the specific exhaustion of waiting for your life to begin and about the small, unspectacular moments when it quietly does. The book captures Southern California’s geography with obvious affection, and the humor is genuinely funny rather than merely decorated with jokes. Readers who have ever sat in a coffee shop nursing a latte and telling themselves that the next person to walk in could be the one for them will adore Victor’s misadventures.
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