Bill Peters - new phrases emerge and old ones evolve, and we understand that for Nate language is the one element of his life he is willing to actively participate in, and therefore it stands against the grim prospects of his future and the city’s. They’re in a New York state of angst

Bill Peters, Maverick Jetpants in The City of Quality, Black Balloon Publishing, 2012.

After graduating from high school on the eve of the millennium, childhood pals Nate and Necro lead a small band of friends through angst-ridden late-night crawls in decaying Rochester, N.Y., where Peters grew up. This proves to be a particularly dangerous occupation, as someone is blowing up local buildings in what is being called in some papers a "race-war amalgamation." The group's routine is cut short when, while exploring a derelict building, an explosion injures one of their own. Soon, a pattern emerges in the blazes, and someone in the group is implicated, threatening to blow the tight group of friends apart. By turns funny and moving, this debut richly captures life in a decaying American city. - Publishers Weekly

Maverick is both funny and poignant, tragic and trite: its somewhat alien language mimics both the bewildering landscape of adulthood and the cultural wasteland of a declining Rochester [...] With all the elements of the best coming-of-age novels, Maverick offers a voice and a story that could connect with someone of just about any age, as long as they have the appreciation for nimble, far out and witty repartee. - ForeWord 
In his first novel, “Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality,” the Rochester native Bill Peters depicts his hometown as a city in decay, haunted by past glories and racked by vandalism. The narrator, Nate, is about to turn 21. He lives with his mother and her current squeeze, “Fake Dad No. 3.” Mostly, he drifts and looks for work in a somewhat desultory fashion. His ambition, such as it is, is to join his best friend, Necro (né Andrea: “Everyone in Rochester is Italians”), at Kodak, the firm that made Rochester famous. But it’s 1999, and the prospects are bleak for old-fashioned companies like Kodak and for Rust Belt cities like Rochester, whose nickname hasn’t been “City of Quality” since the 1960s.
.Meanwhile, Nate hangs out with his band of angst-ridden fellow misfits. Caught in the breach between high school and adulthood, they go on endless late-night “Rochester Classic Drivearounds,” subsisting on French fries and coffee at chain restaurants and confecting a dizzying lexicon of slang and in-jokes. Not much happens until the day Necro phones Nate and, in “his Section-8 Murman Riot voice,” summons the gang downtown, where buildings are apparently being torched by an arsonist. Nate is on the spot when an explosion takes down his buddy Wicked College John. Peters evokes the macabre scene with relish:

“The Rochester Public Broadcasting building has exploded, and when a wooden beam spits out off the storefront and hits Wicked College John’s face, his cheek ripples upward toward his eye. His head turns around almost all the way and then snaps back, shaking gel loose from his hair. His one dress shoe flies off, and when he falls to the pavement, he lands on his left forearm underneath his back. His head bounces once.”

Soon after the downtown fires, the little band’s leisurely routine disintegrates. Nate and Necro’s friendship threatens to do the same, especially after Nate discovers Necro’s bizarre doodles relating to the arson: “On a napkin, a building that looks like a courthouse exploding, with a silhouette of a kitten with bat wings hovering in front of it. On a flattened McDonald’s bag, a wizard, standing biblical and stiff, arm extended at a right angle, a stalactite of beard hanging from his chin. Behind the wizard, a castle is on fire.”

Necro’s sudden interest in a group of weapon collectors also arouses Nate’s suspicions. Is his best friend in fact a domestic terrorist, like that other upstate New Yorker, Timothy McVeigh? To find out, Nate goes on a quest that takes him into Rochester’s darkest corners, where he learns a great deal, especially about how weird normal life can be.

Peters gives in occasionally to verbal excess and his plot is a tad predictable, but his eye for detail is remarkable and he’s got a knack for the vivid figure of speech: Necro yanks open the zipper on his hockey bag “like a samurai slashing open a stomach”; a speaker’s nose bumps a microphone, “setting off a deer whistle of feedback”; inside a grunge bar “it’s as dark and bacterial as inside someone’s boot.”
Writing like this hoists “Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality” above the level of most first novels and confirms — along with the ending’s faint echo of that greatest of coming-of-age narratives, “Huckleberry Finn” — that Bill Peters belongs in the ranks of serious literary artists. - Roger Boylan

According to Bill Peters, Rochester, NY in 1999 was an inglorious void of depression, a dangerous, crumbling ruin of a community filled with vacant strip malls, dollar movie theaters, and houses shuttered against the winds off of Lake Ontario. There’s desperation in the water by the empty warehouses, the lost manufacturing jobs, a leaking infrastructure the community has little energy to patch, slowly sinking a middle class too pessimistic about their futures to struggle against the tides of economic change. But hey, at least there are two Applebees’.
This is the backdrop for Peters’ complex, difficult, and completely engaging debut novel Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality. Nathan Gray, an unemployed recent high school grad and virgin, is our tour guide through the “city of quality.” Nate has dug his nails into and made camp in the limbo between school and career, between adolescence and the real world. It’s an existence without responsibilities, with no job or bills to pay, where he can wear his Bills sweatpants everyday and deny the long, gloomy future that awaits everyone in Rochester. He spends most of his time driving his mom’s car around the city, past the Applebees’, the Kodak factory, and the dive bars, hunting for his friends, his compatriots in arrested development, Toby, Necro, Lip Cheese, and Wicked College John. And with names like that, why hurry to grow up? Why not take the candy and get into vans with strangers?
With so few responsibilities and little else to do, Nate and his friends put most of their time and energy into the language of slang phrases, inside jokes, and putdowns that they have created for themselves. “Colonel Hellstache,” “Condor Wrap with Diamond Sauce,” “Kangaroo for a Kid,” and many, many others litter their conversations throughout. It’s a competitive back and forth between the friends to evolve old terms and introduce new ones into the lexicon of these layabouts, to build up “Holy Grail Points” that act as a surrogate for the lack of real accomplishment in their lives.
Peters proves himself adept at wordplay through the wildly inventive language of the characters. With Nate as our emotionally stunted narrator, readers have to start swimming immediately in the “Sadness Custard Montage” of his vocabulary. But the creative layers of his words become clearer throughout the novel as we see how new phrases emerge and old ones evolve, and we understand that for Nate language is the one element of his life he is willing to actively participate in, and therefore it stands against the grim prospects of his future and the city’s.
Peters set himself a difficult premise to develop in “Maverick Jetpants”—a story ultimately about an unmotivated character who converses in inside jokes, living in a decrepit town with decrepit friends. But driving the action, in contrast to the stasis of Nate and his friends, the plot revolves around a series of seemingly racially motivated bombings occurring across Rochester. The novel almost plays at being a mystery, with Nate’s growing fear that one of his friends is behind the attacks.But though the search for the bomber keeps the book from wallowing in its own “Sadness Custard Montage,” the bombings themselves loom less as a threat to the community than as a reminder of Rochester’s crumbling identity. And it is Nate’s inability to self-motivate, set amidst the literal destruction of his blue-collar city, that remains at the heart of the story—his ultimate sin is not trying to find something better for himself. By setting the story in 1999, Peters reminds us that the struggles of American manufacturing remain a source of worry thirteen years later (with the refrain sung louder each election cycle), and people throughout the industrial Midwest may see themselves in similar cities of quality, with varying degrees of success in rebuilding themselves in the modern world. For Peters, the only answer is to evolve, like the language of the characters, like good ol’ American ingenuity.
Creating in Nate a man unwilling to adapt with the changing economics of Rochester, who tells his temp agency he doesn’t want an office job with growth potential but a manual job in one of the shrinking factories or warehouses, Peters may also be weaving a metaphor for the world of literary fiction. We (I include myself in with this bunch, and probably anyone else still reading book reviews) inhabit a world of shrinking book sales, where the major publishers converge in dark laboratories cloning James Patterson and Stephen King. Small presses, with fewer hurdles towards creative invention than the large houses, seem more willing to explore technology and digital media as ways to lure in new readers, to create the small niche audiences (like fans of literary fiction) that can sustain them. Black Balloon, publisher of “Maverick Jetpants,” offers a free downloadable app and website that map out Nate’s exploits through the novel and offer definitions of some of the made-up phrases used in the book (though when I used the app a message popped up saying the sight was still in Beta testing). This may be a baby step into digital marketing for book publishers, but it is an attempt beyond a Facebook page or YouTube interview with the author, and for small presses pushing these kinds of ideas may become what anchors a new stability for independent presses. As Peters may see it, Nate, Rochester, and the publishing industry will either evolve or fade away. That’s the only way to win “Holy Grail Points.” - MacAdam Smith


Aaron and I had a vision a couple of years back when we first discussed writing a blog by the name of The Literate Man: to ferret out the best works of modern literary fiction from among the unknown masses, which we were (and are) certain are all too often overlooked by the commercial establishment. We continue to seek out works that not only entertain but challenge us as readers and break new creative ground in the process. Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality is precisely what we had in mind. We give it our highest recommendation.
A few disclaimers are necessary here: I grew up in Western New York, in farm country about 60 miles southwest of Rochester, the self-proclaimed "City of Quality," and the setting for Bill Peters' debut novel. And like Bill Peters, my appreciation for Western New York and my own formative years, has grown with age and perspective. We both seem to have great, vivid memories of the Golden Age of the Buffalo Bills, who made it to (and lost) four straight Super Bowls from 1991-1994. The entire region's preoccupation with that brief glimpse of respectability on the national sports page is reflected again and again in the pages of Maverick Jetpants, not in references to American football per se, but in the holdover Bills-themed clothing worn by Nate and his cohorts. It is one detail among many that depicts the slow, creeping desperation of daily life in a region in perpetual economic decline since the 1970's. And Bill Peters captures it with art and precision.
By way of overview, Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality is the entertaining portrait of Nathan Gray, an aimless but sympathetic young man, just a few unproductive years out of high school, as he and his small group of friends grasp about awkwardly (and, perhaps, violently) for what is to become the next stage of their lives. Nate seems particularly unsuited to make the jump into adulthood, as evidenced by his near obsession with his group's past collective experience and an irrational fear that his best friend, Necro, is poised to leave him behind. It is a novel that speaks to our common experience in coming of age and our common fears of being left behind by those closest to us.
The most impressive aspect of the novel, however, is Bill Peters' innovative use of dialogue. The characters speak to one another (and Nate occasionally speaks to the reader) in a lexicon largely unique to his small group of friends--a series of humorous names and labels affixed to their common history. It is a habit in which we all engage, but rarely notice, and beyond glimpses of the technique in Thomas Pynchon and the writings of David Foster Wallace, it is the first time that I have seen such a device become the centerpiece of a work of fiction. It makes for a seemingly disjointed (but extremely enjoyable) tale that is woven together by the reader's intuitive understanding of the relationships and events described. The novel becomes a post-adolescent version of Gravity's Rainbow, where Pirate Prentice is not a delusional American mercenary, but a retiring Generation X slacker, and post-World War II Europe becomes the post-industrial decline of the American rust belt.
Reportedly ten years in the making, Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality announces the arrival of a powerful and innovative young voice in American fiction. - Patrick (at The Literate Man)
They’re in a New York state of angst.

On the fringes of every society, excluded from the core group that makes the money and the rules, exist the outsiders. These are people who, whether by race or class or education, believe they’ll never belong to the mainstream, will never have the chance to prove themselves equal to the haves. And so they invent a Bizarro parallel universe, one in which the rules and mores and even the language of that other world don’t apply.

For Nate, Necro, Toby, and Lip Cheese, the economic wasteland of 1999 Rochester—the former Kodak City of Quality—serves as backdrop for their slacker antics. Nate tells the story of Classic Rochester Drivearounds in Necro’s Vomit Cruiser, as they go in search of a possible Tokyo Rocking Horse, or maybe the next Weapons of Mankind convention. But their sequestered world is threatened when someone starts bombing Rochester’s downtown, and suspicions cause the boys to question their lives, and each other. The twenty-somethings struggle to remain friends while maintaining a barrage of code phrases originally designed to separate them from the establishment, as well as offer a semblance of pride amid their apparently hopeless circumstances. Colonel Hellstache be damned. It’s a Sadness Custard Montage if there ever was one. Will they ever go back to Maverick Jetpantsing?
The language makes it a tough narrative to follow at times, but the challenge is well worth it. Peters and his editors at Black Balloon deserve Holy Grail Points for refusing to cave to popular pressures to explain every little thing to the reader, including the secret vernacular. (A few bonus points too, for what has to be the best book title in years.) This is Peters’s world—he grew up in Rochester—and entry is on his terms. The only way to really experience the desperation of these lives—especially Nate’s—is to live them, and Peters drops visitors in headfirst. Some may sink amid the language and irreverence. Those who swim, however, will emerge refreshed by one of the most inventive novels published this year. - Joe Ponepinto


If you're lucky, you're still just as close to your best friends from high school as you were when you graduated, and all of your clique's inside jokes are still exactly as funny as the moment you coined them during an aimless drive around town.
More likely, though: you're at least a little like Nathan Gray, the narrator of Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality (Black Balloon Publishing), the debut novel by University of Massachusetts alumnus and former Amherst resident Bill Peters.
Peters will read from the novel at Amherst Books at 7 p.m. Friday, on Sept. 28, when he'll be joined by author Nathan Larson (he'll read from his new book, The Nervous System), a film score composer whose credits include Boys Don't Cry.
Set in Peters' hometown of Rochester, New York, Maverick Jetpants follows Nate, his best friend Necro, and their band of post-high-school oddballs as the group struggles with growing up and growing apart. The latter is fueled by the suspicion and in-fighting that follows an explosion and a string of fires -- maybe the fault of the city's crumbling infrastructure, or, in the characters' hyperactive imaginations, maybe the work of a domestic terrorist.
As Nate and Necro drift apart, they're ultimately fighting less against each other and more against encroaching responsibilities and the inevitability of adulthood. But they're armed with little more than a rich arsenal of slang derived largely from past humiliations -- a private language that Peters described in an interview as "a maze of in-jokes honed from years of having only each other." The characters haunt the city seeking the next adventure that will serve up "Joke Royalty" ("ten to twenty jokes around which any friendship revolves," according to the book's online glossary), but what they're really looking for is a reason to hold on to the memories they share and the insular, small world they've created.
Courtesy Black Balloon PublishingThe core characters of Maverick Jetpants -- the kinds of guys for whom Buffalo Bills team sweatpants constitute formal wear, and whose diets consist mostly of french fries and coffee at chain restaurants -- are a sort of post-industrial everyman. At one point, it would have been a given that they'd graduate straight from high school to employment at Kodak; a guaranteed career and seat among Rochester's middle class. But in 1999, when the novel is set, the company is in decline and the employment prospects more dim. Even though Necro works at Kodak and Nate aspires to join him so the pair can rein as "Kodak Park Winjas", that path to economic stability is far from a given.
So, the young men find themselves waiting for something -- anything -- to entertain them. Mostly, they goof on each other's quirks and shortcomings. Sometimes, they go to underground, neo-Nazi sponsored auctions where a gray-market weapons trade is in full swing.
“I bet there are enough people out there -- men, basically, probably a few in Rochester -- who turn that pattern into a way of living when there's less infrastructure to allow them to create value," Peters said. "That can lead to all kinds of basic trouble -- laziness, then entitlement, then frustration, then all-out anger -- and Nate and Necro's private language reinforces all of those things.”
While the side of Rochester the characters explore amounts to a fairly bleak urban portrait -- a byproduct of the author's own adolescent fixation on the city's grittier elements, which he believes many of his peers growing up there shared -- Peters said Maverick Jetpants is in no way meant to be a eulogy for the city.
"Initially, I wrote about Rochester as an homage to childhood," he said. "I also wrote about Rochester because I'd never seen any other writer tackle it, and I thought maybe I could make readers care about or find humor in a city that never gets a lot of attention in the national news. I also wrote about Rochester as a reaction against what I saw as a glamorization of cities like New York or Los Angeles, which are often the reason for the brain-drain in smaller and mid-size cities, which Rochester essentially is."
Peters, a former employee of The Republican who now lives in Gainesville, Florida -- where he works for the New York Times News Service -- is in the midst of a national tour promoting the book's release. In addition to the Amherst stop, the tour will take him to both the west coast and Rochester.
In his hometown, he'll read to an audience familiar with the novel's landscape but largely unaware of his career as a fiction writer.
"I've done a remarkable job, over the years, of never showing any writing to anybody outside of a writing class or an agent or a journal editor," he said. - Greg Saulmon
Interview for Holy Grail Points: Bill Peters on Music and his Novel, Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXCYOXwrf1Q&feature=player_embedded