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It's. Nice. Outside.

Review

It's. Nice. Outside.

John Nichols has a lot on his plate. He’s divorced from his wife, Mary, after having an affair to which he guiltily confessed. He’s the father to three children: two overachieving daughters, Karen and Mindy, and his youngest, Ethan, a 19-year-old with special needs. Ethan’s official diagnosis was “Trisomy 9 Mosaicism syndrome which meant the ninth chromosome appears three times rather than twice in some cells of the body. (Later he would also be classified as mildly autistic.)” So although Ethan is 19 and can dunk a basketball like nobody’s business, he’ll never live alone. He’ll never move out and experience adulthood like Karen or Mindy. His speech is truncated into short bursts (as displayed in the title). Mary and John will be his caregivers for the rest of his life --- or theirs.

Add to that John’s own dashed hopes and dreams of being a freewheeling writer, traveling around the country, writing his own version of his favorite book, Blue Highways. Once you get a taste of what John’s day-to-day life looks like, his dreams make perfect sense: Blue Highways is a “memoir of a middle-aged man’s solitary and somewhat desperate trip through the back roads of America. Over the course of his journey, he stops in offbeat towns and meets offbeat people while searching for internal change after a failed marriage. (I) had read it a number of times, and it fueled a desire in me to do the same thing: to travel, to see, to listen, to write, to rebuild.”

"IT’S. NICE. OUTSIDE. stays with you long after you’ve closed the book, and the points and themes it explores make it a terrific choice for book clubs."

Since his ex-wife is dealing with Karen’s upcoming wedding, and her sister-in-law with cancer, a great deal of Ethan’s care has fallen on John: “I had Ethan a good part of every day, a brutal stretch of survive and advance. Consequently, I was frazzled, exhausted, and constantly teetering on the edge of the Black Despair.” So in a roundabout way, John felt like his brief indiscretion with a younger woman named Rita was his payback --- his reward for all the hardship and sorrow he had to endure: “The constant demands of Ethan had turned our home into a tense and sad battlefield, and my months with Rita were an escape…. I concluded later…was probably an attempt to even the score with life. Driving to our liaisons, I would rationalize/justify what I was doing: I had not asked for Ethan. This never-ending burden was getting to me, so I deserved some pleasure. And I was sticking it out at home, when other men surely would have cut and run.”

So when he and his ex-wife are preparing for Karen’s wedding in Charleston, South Carolina, John decides to drive there with Ethan from their home in suburban Chicago while Mary flies on ahead to help their daughter with the last-minute arrangements. It’s not only because he wants to try and maybe recreate the road trip in his favorite book, but also because air travel with Ethan can be dicey. He decides to pack up their van and head out, just him and Ethan and the open road. But the trip is more fraught than John anticipated, and when he reunites with his family, it morphs into a road trip of another kind, where they each have to figure out what the next step will be.

IT’S. NICE. OUTSIDE. is an engrossing read that surprises you on every page. You can’t help but put yourself in the protagonist’s place. But perhaps the most interesting aspect of the novel is in the characterization. Jim Kokoris doesn’t paint John as a martyr, or as a self-centered egotist, which he easily could have done. John is a nice but complicated father and (former) husband who genuinely wants what’s best for his family, even if it’s hard for him. He’s a man struggling with life choices and the trickle-down effects therein, trying to remain optimistic and not succumb to the negativity. As John explains, “When you had a child like Ethan, bitterness was a constant temptation. It was always there, scratching at your door, trying to lure you to dark places. Over the years, I had done my best to resist its call, but many, many times I succumbed and allowed myself a good wallow.”

No one’s a saint and no one’s sinner. These are real characters struggling with tough issues that most of us don’t have to deal with. The fact that Kokoris himself has a 19-year-old autistic son lends the narrative the honesty and gravitas it deserves. IT’S. NICE. OUTSIDE. stays with you long after you’ve closed the book, and the points and themes it explores make it a terrific choice for book clubs.

Reviewed by Bronwyn Miller on December 11, 2015

It's. Nice. Outside.
by Jim Kokoris

  • Publication Date: December 8, 2015
  • Genres: Fiction
  • Hardcover: 320 pages
  • Publisher: St. Martin's Press
  • ISBN-10: 1250036054
  • ISBN-13: 9781250036056