“Milwaukee was a great place to be depressed,” writes David Milofsky in his latest bildungsroman “A Friend of Kissinger,” which chronicles a year in the life of 13-year-old Danny Meyer.

The story begins when Danny is forced to downshift with his family from their university lifestyle in Madison to urban Milwaukee to cope with his father’s degenerating health.

Milofsky, who spent his childhood in the two cities and graduated from UW-Madison in 1971, portrays Milwaukee as gray, gloomy and rundown compared to “paradisal” Madison.

To help him cope with this transitional year, Danny is accompanied by a collage of colorful secondary characters. Among the most fascinating are Daisy, the Meyers’ housekeeper, and Abe Goodstein, Milwaukee’s resident Godfather, who takes Danny under his wing.

Milofsky’s placement of Daisy as Danny’s first sexual partner holds great potential as a humorous and heartbreaking rite of passage, but falls short because of its monotone, self-conscious portrayal.

“Daisy, the object of my desire, was a prostitute, and this made me sad because I doubted that anyone did that kind of thing because they wanted to,” Danny says.

It is this kind of dull, pompous narration that will make Milfosky painfully boring for those college students used to the tongue-in-cheek humor of authors like Nick Hornby or David Sedaris.

Danny’s patronizing attitude gets in the way of the novel’s potential. We all know someone like Danny Meyers, and chances are, none of us like him. Danny is the type of person to whom amazing things happen in spite of his apparent lack of personality, talent or agency.

There is no doubt that most authors find it impossible to separate their works from themselves. But it is quite obvious that Milofsky envisions his 13-year-old self in line with Danny, and it is quite obvious he was a loser. And while some authors can make their own pathos funny, Milofsky’s failure to reach self-awareness makes the work annoying to read.

“I dimly understood that despite our shabby housekeeping and my father’s illness, other people were in awe of my mother and father, simply because they had been distinguished in another life,” Danny says. It is self-aggrandizing remarks such as this that make it clear Danny is riding on the coattails of his parents’ academic success instead of seeking to become his own man.

One of Milofsky’s most troublesome flaws in writing comes in the form of Danny’s many contradictions. At one point Danny is startled to hear an adult swear, but only a few pages later he is locked in a carnal embrace with his father’s nurse. It is as though Danny is a virginal saint whose innocence has been unwillingly taken from him by a big, mean prostitute. Instead of owning up to his flaws, Danny is too shortsighted to embrace the world around him.

This problem fails to resolve itself by the end of the book’s elementary summation of what Danny has learned throughout the year: “It was only 75 miles from Madison to Milwaukee, but the psychic distance was much further than that. Standing holding my mother’s hand that day, I felt stronger than before. I was no longer a boy, if not quite a man.” Authors should avoid contrived statements like these at all costs.

The potentially entertaining anecdotes and fascinating cast of characters make for an enjoyable read, but a pretentious narrator and sparse prose holds the novel back from being a truly great coming-of-age work.

Grade: C