Inspired by a short-lived obsession with cryptocurrency, the Pittsburgh author crafts a story about a queer math prodigy from a struggling steel town, as he navigates the shifting terrain of masculinity, ambition, and belonging across Pennsylvania and beyond.
Patrick McGinty has always been drawn to roads. Raised in Pittsburgh’s South Hills with grandparents in Grove City, he spent countless hours traveling I-79, soaking in the landscapes of Butler and Mercer counties.
Now a professor of writing at Slippery Rock University, McGinty has translated that familiarity into fiction. His new novel, Town College City Road (University of Wisconsin Press), follows Kurt Boozel, a queer math prodigy from a struggling steel town, as he navigates the shifting terrain of masculinity, ambition, and belonging across Pennsylvania and beyond.
The book unfolds in four parts — town, college, city, and road — charting Kurt’s uneasy passage from a bullied Rust Belt teenager to a fraternity outsider to a crypto-curious Wall Street professional. Along the way, McGinty examines how place influences identity and how the promises of new technologies can become intertwined with personal mythologies of escape and reinvention.
“It’s the kind of book I always wanted to write,” McGinty tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “I gravitate toward novels that feel like Venn diagrams, multiple circles overlapping. But in my 20s, when I tried writing those, I just gave readers concussions. So, with this one, I forced myself to be strict with structure. First, the small town coming-of-age. Then the college novel. Then finance. Then a road novel. That gave me room to be big in scope without losing the thread.”
Although Kurt’s journey stretches from small-town locker rooms to New York City boardrooms, its roots are firmly planted in Western Pennsylvania. McGinty grew up with family stories of union halls and night shifts, and he spent years returning to Grove City, where his grandmother worked as a nurse and his grandfather as a steelworker.
“Writing this book while living in Portland, I was relying on memory and those family stories,” McGinty says. “Then, moving back to Pittsburgh, teaching at Slippery Rock, I saw the region with fresh eyes, through my students, through the drives I was making. I definitely feel like I know [I-79] very well.”
That deep knowledge of place, McGinty argues, comes with a kind of insecurity unique to the Rust Belt. “Our towns are so susceptible to the fantasies the tech sector peddles: revitalization, renaissance, that kind of language. It’s dangerous. And I’m guilty of it too. Crypto, for me, was part of that temptation: ‘Maybe this will be my way out, my new home.’ That’s a very Rust Belt impulse I wanted to capture in Kurt”.
McGinty’s first novel, Test Drive (2020), examined the driverless car industry and how it reshaped Pittsburgh’s identity. Town College City Road builds on that interest in the collision of technology, economics, and community. Set largely during the Obama years and the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the book situates Kurt at the edge of multiple upheavals: the Occupy Wall Street movement, the emergence of Bitcoin, and the shifting definitions of success in a precarious world.
McGinty admits he was once “crypto-curious.” During the pandemic, he found himself listening to crypto podcasts, reading obsessively, and even asking whether digital currencies might be the lifeline for Rust Belt towns. But as his research deepened, skepticism grew. “There’s a false promise there,” he says. “The idea that you can take money out of the political process isn’t apolitical at all. It’s deeply political. Still, I didn’t want to put my thumb on the scale. I wanted the book to show what it felt like in real time to be seduced by that possibility.”
At the center of all this is Kurt, a character who resists easy labels. In a blurb praising Town College City Road, Alex Myers, author of Revolutionary, describes Kurt as “neither a hero nor quite an underdog,” a protagonist defined as much by contradiction as by clarity.
McGinty says that complexity reflects his own life. “I’ve been different people at different times. Political awareness came late for me. Becoming a father changed me. Being part of my faculty union changed me. I wanted Kurt to feel like that, too, someone whose work ethic and ambition are constant, but whose understanding of what those mean shifts over time.”
One way McGinty captured that was through what he calls echo scenes. “I’d write Kurt in a fistfight as a teenager, then echo that with a confrontation in college, then echo it again in a boxing gym. Same character, same impulses, but with new layers of empathy, confidence, or recklessness. That’s where you see growth, or lack of it”.
Fittingly, the novel ends on the road. For McGinty, it’s more than a plot device; it’s a love letter to the act of driving itself.
“I think driving is the perfect narrative speed,” he says. “On a walk, you see too much. In a room, too little. But in a car, you get a thought, a sight, a sound, and then you move on. That rhythm just works for me. I love Pennsylvania highways. I love stopping in little towns, fishing, getting to know new places. Ending the book on the road felt like a treat I’d been saving.”
For McGinty, writing Town College City Road was as much about tracing Kurt’s path as it was about reflecting on his own. Whether recalling childhood drives up I-79, listening to students wrestle with identity at Slippery Rock, or navigating Pittsburgh’s ever-shifting relationship with technology, he sees echoes of himself in his character’s search for belonging.
“I wanted to write a book that felt big, but also personal,” he says. “Kurt is always moving, between towns, between identities, between ideas of what success looks like. That’s the story of a lot of us in Western Pennsylvania. We’re trying to figure out where we fit, and whether home is something we return to, or something we have to rebuild.”
Book Launch: Patrick McGinty of Town College City Road
with Candace Opper and Sarah Marshall
7-8 p.m. Fri., Sept. 26. White Whale Bookstore.
4754 Liberty Ave., Bloomfield. Free.
Registration required. Livestream available.
whitewhalebookstore.com/events
This article appears in Sept. 24-30 2025.
