In "The Ordinary Son", Ron Carlson has created one of the blandest characters ever put on paper, and therein lies the story's peculiar power. Reed Landers is the son of a NASA scientist and a grassroots poet. In a family of geniuses, he is alone in his commonness. Nothing particularly meritorious underlies his conduct; his intelligence is average, his needs superficial. Reed's siblings blossom under a strict moral diet of work and unheralded 'sacrifice'. They …showed first 75 words of 302 total…

…showed last 75 words of 302 total…Reed, a non-entity, among super-humans who exist in an ethereal realm of abstractions forces the reader to draw her own realities on a clean grey slate remarkable only for its flawless mediocrity. Ron Carlson, faced with brilliance, presents instead the unlikeliest of heroes: an Everyman captured in the twilight of youth, unable to escape the genius that surrounds him and painfully aware that he watches with a mind that will never aspire, nor know defeat.