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I consider this the single weakest point of the book.

Fabry is a skilled writer. All the examples you shared, @daeus-lamb, show skill. In a vacuum, they are good, often great writing.
But they don’t work in Jesse Promise.

First, a comparative poetic device is a strong seasoning. It adds flair where it appears. It also draws attention to itself. This can be used to awesome effect in a novel using retrospective shading, as it is here, when it’s used in the appropriate context.

I did something very similar in the story I submitted for the last annual writing contest. My protagonist was narrating about the summer of his youth which changed his life, and doing so from a much older and wiser perspective. When he used a simile or metaphor, it was for the purpose of reminding the reader that the adolescent will one day be a man, that the story they see here and now is not the end.

Fabry uses it very similarly, but I feel he misses the mark. The shading he adds is like someone took the musings of a thirtieth-generation sorghum farmer, passed it through a Marlowe Field, and painted it with two thin coats of John Green. They aren’t the words of even the worldliest 24-year-old, in short.

The peculiar slant of this brooding, philosophical point of view has been a cliche for decades. Even King of the Hill made fun of it in 2004, and, if I remember right, How Not To Write a Novel has an entire chapter dedicated to the broader concept of faux-philosophical musings.
What this teaches me—continues to teach me with every subject we look at in this club—is different readers have wildly different perspectives. Judging by the Goodreads reviews and the fact this thing won an award, most readers enjoy the prose in the same way you do. Maybe it’s less cliche and more trope.

Maybe what I the reader need to learn is to suspend my disbelief a little more often.

@allertingthbs That point about kids reaching for the connection on the tip of the tongue is great. It really draws a contrast between the sort of “tip of the tongue” Jesse and Dickie have versus older-looking-back-Matt.