"The Ordinary Son" by Ron Carlson.

In "The Ordinary Son", Ron Carlson has created one of the blandest characters ever put on paper, and therein lies the story's peculiar power. Reed Landers is the son of a NASA scientist and a grassroots poet. In a family of geniuses, he is alone in his commonness. Nothing particularly meritorious underlies his conduct; his intelligence is average, his needs superficial. Reed's siblings blossom under a strict moral diet of work and unheralded 'sacrifice'. They …

…Reed, a non-entity, among super-humans who exist in an ethereal realm of abstractions forces the reader to draw her own realities on a clean grey slate remarkable only for its flawless mediocrity. Ron Carlson, faced with brilliance, presents instead the unlikeliest of heroes: an Everyman captured in the twilight of youth, unable to escape the genius that surrounds him and painfully aware that he watches with a mind that will never aspire, nor know defeat.