“Charlie-Man” by Thomas Cullen

Thomas Cullen’s debut novel Charlie-Man (Brandylane 2025) is a slow-burn of a coming-of-age story—a paced, environmental read that takes us into the world of an elite preparatory boys’ school in Richmond, Virginia, in the mid-1990s.

We meet protagonist Charlie Stewart, a rising high school senior, as he is about to jump off a dam into the high waters of the James River with his best friend Beau. Soon we learn about the currents leading up to this moment, including the recent death of Charlie’s father, and Charlie’s mother’s subsequent descent into alcoholism.

Beau is handsome, popular, jocular—a contrast to Charlie’s temperate manner and sympathetic approach. We watch the boys tackle the hurdles of late high school together—football season, college applications, and romances with girls from the local sister-Catholic school—in divergent ways, matching their contrasting characters.

Initially, Charlie seems to admire Beau’s bravado, and the societal toughness, honor, and rigidity it represents. It is Beau who calls him Charlie-Man, the epithet of the book’s title, a name Charlie seems to both own and resent, as he stands on the cusp of manhood yet seeks to express and develop his characteristic moderation and vulnerability.

Charlie’s admiration for Beau is always tempered by his skepticism, his internal equilibrium and quest for decency. Throughout the year he wrestles with this acceptance of, and admiration for aggressive “manhood.” Early in the novel, Charlie quietly absorbs a series of violent hazing rituals as a junior counselor at a summer camp; later we see him push himself to meet expectations on the football field, where the boys’ coach barks and belittles and shows little concern for his charges’ bone-breaks and brain-rattling impacts.

We watch Charlie grow and gain self-confidence: mid-novel Charlie chides Beau for his womanizing behavior, surprising even himself. In a memorable scene, the boys are tasked to distribute toys for a holiday toy drive, a school tradition. In Beau’s truck they amble to the recipient family’s home. Beau is eager for the visit to be brief, so the boys can get back to a holiday party at the stodgy, wealthy Old Dominion Club, where Beau’s next sexual conquest awaits—but Charlie encourages him to linger, playing football with the family’s young son. Beau is begrudging, but softens. This is Charlie doing Charlie: spreading goodness in a quiet, steady, non-aggressive, exemplary way.

Charlie also seeks honesty, authenticity, and specificity, where prestige and tradition may have hidden these. While sitting in his school chapel, listening to the school reverend’s repetitive droning, Charlie gazes at a stained-glass window and wonders at the “too-pristine” depiction of Jesus’s feet, Mary Magdalene at the washing. “Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the scriptures knew that Jesus had walked hundreds of miles during his ministry in uncomfortable leather sandals. If the artist was being true to that history, his feet should have appeared more like the nasty feet I regularly encountered in the fieldhouse locker room,” Charlie notes.

As the school year progresses, Charlie’s emotional state approaches dam-break. When the inevitable breakdown occurs, spurred by a trifecta of personal tragedies, Charlie meets it with humility, acceptance, self-awareness, and openness to change. With the help of a mentor whose reflective, respectful manner mimics Charlie’s, our protagonist accepts medication—selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, novel in the mid-1990s—and a diagnosis of anxiety and depression, labels he accepts and a treatment he embraces. As he recovers, Charlie reads his journal entries from a previous breakdown. Again displaying a self-awareness lacking in much of his social circle, Charlie realizes he has been through hell once already, and survived. His own words are the turn, the beginning of his recovery.

Cullen is comfortable and skilled in the language of sports: we are offered play-by-plays in vivid detail, first on the football field and later, the track. He is also adept in describing the thick, wild natural environment of Richmond, and the fly-fishing waters that surround. His dialogue is smooth and convincing, and he has crafted a bevy of rounded, compassionate supporting characters with their own compelling arcs.

Standouts among these include Charlie’s mother, Sammie, who despite her alcoholism provides Charlie with a compassionate ear and more open, honest conversation than many mothers offer their adolescent children. Charlie’s older sister Catherine, a medical student, is a maternal stand-in when Sammie is not available; it is often Catherine who calls in help for Charlie in his darkest moments. Among the helpers are Toby Reeves, who coaches Charlie in track with kind and uplifting methods that contrast those of football coach Earl Baxter; and John Preston, an English professor who sees in Charlie a “confident, incisive thinker and able writer.” Preston helps his charge on a quest toward specificity and authenticity, steering him away from the prestigious, expected path of the University of Virginia, toward Sewanee, a smaller liberal arts college better suited to the needs of the budding English major.

Thomas Cullen

Charlie-Man is a strong debut novel from established essayist, federal judge, and former U.S. attorney Thomas Cullen. It is a rich picture of a moment in the American South, and a worthy chapter in the canon of American growing-up novels.