*A review of Thor Garcia’s The News Clown, first published in nthposition. This is a coming of age novel. Its protagonist Thor ascends to manhood not by battling Don Cossacks, Bashkirs and Kazakhs along the Russian steppes like Pyotr Andreyich Grinyov or by following the way of the picaro as does Augie March during the Great Contraction, but instead as a cub reporter, pursuing his dream of ascension to literary lionhood from one of society’s lower rungs, that of a news clown gathering actual events, the accounts of which are sold to the parasitic plagiarists known as the major media. Thor’s coming of age is not set against an adolescent nation establishing borders or growing through hard times to become