Thanksgiving is just around the corner, and this turkey-binge of a holiday brings both good and bad news. The good news is that there is one week free from classes. And for some, the bad news is that week is reserved strictly for family.

Everyone loves their nearest and dearest — to an extent. But every family has that one cousin who’s just a few fries short of a Happy Meal or the uncle everyone would lock in the attic if they weren’t afraid of getting bitten.

Like it or not, we are all cursed with at least one black sheep. And eventually, there’s nothing left to do but get used to it or find a way to deal with it.

For Justin Cobb, the central character in “Thumbsucker” and member of the all-American dysfunctional family, the answer to his family life is literally at his fingertips.

In his anticipated second novel, Walter Kirn puts a unique spin on teenage angst.

For every problem life throws at him, Justin turns to the childhood habit of sucking his thumb. Whether it’s experiencing the birds and the bees for the first time or spying on his Don Johnson-obsessed mother, Justin can always find comfort in his thumb.

And for Justin, it’s a justified habit.

It’s the rest of the world that has a problem with it.

Kirn sums it up in the book’s first paragraph. He writes, “It was the one thing I’d always done. Even breathing did not go back to the womb. Being part of a circle of shoulder, arm, hand, mouth, connected me to myself. This circle is what they tried to break the summer I turned 14.”

And each person in Justin’s life tries their best to break him of his “baby” habit. His father, Mike, fails twice — once with the foul-tasting Suk-No-Mor, and again with the writing of his initials each day on Justin’s thumb.

Oddly enough, the person who finally gets Justin’s hand out of his mouth is Perry Lyman, Justin’s dentist.

Through the good doctor’s hypnosis, Justin is no longer addicted to his offending appendage, but the side effects are fierce.

Suddenly, his thumb doesn’t taste good to him anymore and even food doesn’t excite him. In the end, Justin learns that his thumb was the lesser of many other evils.

As Justin is followed through his teenage years, he turns to any other oral fixation he can get his hands on. He tries smoking, drinking, talking incessantly and illegal and legal drugs, but nothing appeases him.

It takes Justin’s family half the book to get to the core of the problem. When they realize that Justin is suffering from attention deficit disorder, another oral fixation called Ritalin takes over his life. Pill popping puts Justin at ease almost as much as the drug itself, and he’s hooked on another vice.

A release comes in the form of the Mormon religion. Justin isn’t sure that Mormanism is the religion that he wants to stay with.

The overwhelming moral of this story is, once you’ve found a way to deal with that weird cousin or senile uncle, you’d better stick with it.

HHHH

Ratings based on a HHHHH scale.

Kelsey Foutch is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Waterloo.