Parenthetical.net

Given recent events in my personal life, it seemed like books about breaking up (and getting back together) might be entertaining and even (dare I say) enlightening. I was not wrong. (I “spoil” High Fidelity, below, but to me it seems like the sort of book where what happens isn’t the important thing.)

An Abundance of Katherines, by John Green - Former child prodigy Colin Singleton has just graduated from high school and been dumped by his 19th girlfriend named Katherine, on the same day. He’s obsessed with getting her back, and with attaining his “Eureka!” moment, the flash of insight that will cause him to transition from Former Child Prodigy into Adult Genius. To cure his depression, his best (well, only) friend Hassan, a devout Muslim whose goal is to do nothing but sit on his ass and goof off for the rest of his life, drags him off on an aimless road trip. The not-so-dynamic duo end up in rural Tennessee, where they make friends with the locals and land a very odd summer job.

This is totally my new favorite book. First off, it’s hilarious. Reading Hassan and Colin’s repartee is exactly like listening in on two best friends who are sometimes too smart for their own good. (Hassan, for instance, teaches the socially awkward Colin about what is and is not a reasonable topic of conversation by announcing, “Not interesting!” every time Colin launches into a random tangent about, say, the mating habits of voles.)

The book feels like a window into real life, a difficult thing to achieve in both YA and adult lit. It has a Muslim main character, but it isn’t About Islam. The characters spend a lot of time in nursing homes, but it isn’t About the Treatment of the Elderly. Colin and Hassan are well-educated city boys living in the middle of nowhere, but it isn’t About Not Underestimating Rural Southerners. All these things come up, are treated realistically and with good humor, and pass on by, just as they mostly would in real life. The core of the book are the characters’ moments of emotional epiphany. There’s something refreshing, as a woman, about reading books about quirky teenage boys as they figure out how to be men — my male friends sure didn’t make much sense to me when I was in high school, but if I had been able to invisibly observe their relationships with each other, I imagine this is what they might have looked like.

Read-alikes: How I Paid for College, by Marc Acito. Rats Saw God, by Rob Thomas.

High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby - If you’ve ever seen the John Cusack movie version, you know what happens in the book; it’s the most literal movie adaptation I’ve ever seen. If you haven’t seen the movie (and you should; it’s fun), I’ll recap: Thirty-something Rob hasn’t figured out how to be a man at all. He’s a slacker-type who runs a failing record store because he can’t get up the ambition to do anything else. His live-in girlfriend, Laura the successful lawyer, just dumped him for the upstairs neighbor. His socially awkward co-”workers” at the record store are his only friends. Rob decides that his problems with Laura and life in general stem from the pain caused by his “top five most memorable split-ups,” so he (often with hilarious insensitivity) tracks all five exes down to try to understand his relationship patterns so he can move forward.

In the end, he and Laura both decide that they’re worth trying again — as Laura says, “I’m too tired not to be with you.” I loved this sentiment in the movie, and I loved it even more in the book because you see so much more of the characters’ inner lives. “What’s wrong with Laura,” Rob says, “is that I’ll never see her for the first or second or third time again.” But, as he realizes, that means she gets him. That feeling of security, of knowing you love someone and she loves you and you’re committed to each other, “frees you up for other things.” It’s a book about the transition between wanting your freedom and wanting to be an adult, and how late that happens for a lot of men (and a lot of women) now. It is, in that sense, the antithesis of YA — it’s about quarter- or third-life crisis-ing adults rather than teenagers, and as I am right at this generational tipping point myself, it was exactly the right time for me to read it. Perhaps it is for you as well?