A young adult story set in a high school in the USA about the first world problems of a privileged teenager. The narrator is Leonard Peacock; today is his eighteenth birthday. He plans to take a gun to school, shoot fellow student Asher Beal and then kill himself. But first he has to deliver a gift to each of four friends.
Obviously this is a great premise for a book. It was well-written and easy to read. But I found the necessary suspension of disbelief difficult to achieve. Leonard lives on his own because his fashion designer (and extraordinarily unmaternal) mother lives and works in New York and his one-hit wonder rock star father is in South America, on the run from the tax authorities. That's great for the plot but lousy for verisimilitude. Leonard has no financial problems, being able to spend $200 on a cab. Poor little rich kid? "I understand I am relatively privileged from a socio-economical viewpoint, but so was Hamlet" (Ch 15); OF COURSE he compares himself with Hamlet. One of his friends is a virtuoso violinist. He has a holocaust class at school. "There are no black people living in our town". As a result of these niggles, I never really felt any sense of empathy with the narrator and so I didn't really care about his problems.
I kept reading because I wanted to see how the story was resolved, clearly there were secrets about his relationship with Asher Beal which were key to Leonard's motivation. When they were revealed I wasn't surprised: I hadn't predicted the detail but the general outline of the issue was clear from early in the book.
There are repeated echoes of Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger but this is decidedly less edgy.
I enjoyed the extensive use of footnotes to provide a sometimes witty commentary upon the main narrative. I was less excited by the occasional use of unorthodox typography.
It is good pacing, with key turning points at the 50% and 75% mark.
Selected quotes:
- "The lies are so vivid, they're beginning to burn out my retinas." (Ch 19)
- "You're different. And I'm different too. Different is good. But different is hard." (Ch 19)
- "If god existed and he created the whole universe ... why would he need our help, let alone our praise?" (Ch 21)
- "I got the sense that she didn't really believe the things she was saying so much as she was clinging to those answers because she didn't have any other answers and maybe having the wrong answers was better than having no answers." (Ch 22)
- "It's crazy the pessimistic shit we're made to memorize in school and then carry around in our skulls for the rest of our lives." (fn 54; Ch 25)
- "These people we call Mom and Dad, they bring us into the world and then they don't follow through with what we need." (Ch 26)
- "It's a fend-for-yourself free-for-all in the end, and I'm jut not cut out for that sort of living." (Ch 26)
A canon 'gainst self-slaughter with an unlikeable protagonist in a unlikely environment.
June 2023; 273 pages
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