Review: Meet Me in the Morning

Ryan Doyle has written a courageous debut novel, exposing exactly what it means to be bold in personal storytelling. The unflattering roles he assigns his characters are just part of this bravado.

Doyle’s protagonist, Colin McDonough, and supporting cast are unabashedly flawed. Colin drinks too much and then drinks some more. He smokes heavily and dabbles in shrooms and cocaine may have found its way up his nose. He’s painfully, hellishly, awfully awkward with college-aged women, recording phone messages and sliding satiric letters under their doors leaving them cold. This virgin can’t even get it on with the prostitute his friends send to his hotel room.

At his worst, Colin combines these sins: during a Lynyrd Skynrd show at Riverside Park he drinks too much and pukes on an affectionate girl’s shoes. Did that revolving ride, the one where the floor drops away and gravity sucks you to the walls, precipitate this?

I’ll leave Colin’s lackluster work performance for other critics. He puts in two, maybe three days a week at a crummy industrial plant, a sweatshop for the blind, outside Hartford. His excuse? A four-hour round-trip commute by bicycle and bus through miserable Hartford winters.

“It was twenty-six degrees when I unlocked my Trek at 6:13 a.m. After a bike-abetted Arctic wind smacked me in the face, it felt more like twenty-six below. My eyes watered. My face hurt. It was just getting light out. Black ice covered the roads. Snowbanks obscured the sidewalks.”

At work he presses tee-shirts with a machine that hisses at him when he clamps it down. “I did this 458,380 times. Then I did it again…Did I seriously have to get up tomorrow (6:15 a.m.!) and do it all over again? And the next day. And the next year? The next decade?”

Yes: this is life, straight out of David Foster Wallace.

Later he puts together pens stamped ‘Assembled by the Blind,’ because this recent college grad is legally blind, works a sub-minimum-wage job while banking $300 a month in social security, and feels stuck in a hell all his own.

This is Connecticut

Meet Me in the Morning is a quintessentially Connecticut novel, more quintessentially an Ellington novel, a real crab-apple and cowpie hometown. Collin wanders forlorn through the streets, a nobody from nowhere whose friends have all left, trapped in a post-UCONN limbo:

“Woodside Acres. It wasn’t an elderly rest home, but a neighborhood carved through the forest in the seventies…By the summer of ’97, Eden had gone silent besides our grandfather clock, the eerie fade in/fade out buzz of cicadas, and the lonely echo of basketballs dribbled by kids born when I was in seventh grade.”

For the English lit-major, it’s the Omphalos: the sacred stone in the Temple of Apollo, representing the center of the world—one’s navel in Greek.

“The sudden barrenness of the large cornfield shocked you every August no matter how many previous years you had seen it…If bare cornfields were Brookside’s whisper of fall, cake boxes were its scream. Fireman’s Fair organizers dropped them on every doorstep in town. And if you were new there or just couldn’t take a hint, they stapled a piece of paper which asked you to kindly pre-heat your oven immediately.”

Loved ones mock my Connecticut roots, what they call the flyover state between New York and New England. Doyle puts this in clear relief: “Even the Whalers had just left. They became the Carolina Hurricanes… Owner Peter Karmanos said, ‘We would have stayed if the state of Connecticut had subsidized us.’ Unloved, unsubsidized, cuckolded by a college basketball team, he ran into the arms of a town whose basketball team, the NC State Wolfpack, couldn’t even upstage in-state powerhouses Duke and North Carolina.”

The true origin of Colin’s misery might stem from an unhappy homelife, an absent father, a rough and then absent stepfather, one with a nasally voice. His friends have left; his brother has left; he watches the Red Sox lose on the tube in a home he shares with just his mother.

Is it a step in the right direction to take up lodging with friends in off-campus housing? “If you’re ever in Storrs and work in a sheltered workshop for the blind and don’t have a car and need to get to a Peter Pan bus from an A-framed house, just walk straight down North Eagleville Road past Dairy Mart (you will also need a time machine), Sgt Pepperoni’s, Wings Over Storrs, Huskies “Tavern,” Ted’s “Restaurant,” and Subway ““Sandwiches.””

Familiar names fill out further directions to the shirt press: Hilltop Drive, the Student Union, Gampel Pavilion, the Homer Babbidge Library…. “It’s a long day’s journey into the Insurance Capital of the World, New England’s Rising Star, Hartford.”

Solace in literature

Colin’s reading list includes Whitman, Joyce, Homer. He reflects on Leaves of Grass, then Henry James. “Let it produce joy. Finally, someone with a pen and a positive attitude! Then Tropic of Cancer—just to see what the censorship fuss was all about.”

This study of one struggling young man, festooned with meathead friends, party-animal antics, a python, and a workmate perv, is surprisingly relatable. Relatable to whom? The great number of young people struggling to launch, Gen X or not, seeking a companionable voice who’s down but not out. There is hope in the tale. “Maybe coffee was like adulthood: it tastes bitter and gross at first, but once you acquire the taste, it’s not so bad.”

Doyle presents us with a prize, a discovery, a deeply courageous and personal novel that refuses to shy from flaws. He’s laid the first stone in a path of great writing. Will his protagonist find love, or like a man on the Gravitron losing grip with the wall, will he simply fall away?

Dark Blues Books

April 16, 2026

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