Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
My rating: 3/5 cats
i really thought this was going to be a slam-dunk of a book. all those prestigious awards and recognitions, a gay coming-of-age story that got the coveted dana stamp of approval, that cover….
and it is not a bad book, not by a long shot; i definitely enjoyed reading it. it just doesn’t transcend its YA status like so many YA books do. this is an excellent book for its audience, but for me, it doesn’t have that crossover appeal that so many recent YA titles have had.
it gets points for featuring an untraditional LGBT protagonist; a young mexican-american boy with few social attachments, dealing with his distant war-haunted father, his much older, clucking sisters, the (figurative) ghost of his brother, about whom no one has spoken since he was incarcerated, and his own inability to make emotional connections, or even feel much of anything except a simmering, inarticulate rage. his mother is very loving and supportive, but ari lacks a true male role model figure, since his father is shuttered in a cage of his memories of vietnam and drifts through ari’s life without being any kind of real presence. ari has always felt apart, particularly from the world of boys and their interests.
I’d never really been very close to other people. I was pretty much a loner. I’d played basketball and baseball and done the Cub Scout thing, tried the Boy Scout thing – but I always kept my distance from the other boys. I never felt like I was a part of their world.
his is not a case of being a bookish, indoor kid who doesn’t relate to the rough and tumble world of “normal” boys; he likes to fight and drink and he wants a truck and a dog – he has just never felt comfortable in the company of boys.
until he meets dante.
dante is definitely one of the indoor boys. he is sensitive, he reads poetry and draws, he is emotional and frequently cries, and asks probing and highly personal questions with his deeply inquisitive mind. he is also mexican-american, but has only a tenuous relationship to his cultural heritage, and this discomfort affects him deeply, even though he is very self-assured in other aspects of his character.
for some reason, the two boys find something in each other that just clicks, and they become inseparable over the course of a summer. the novel traces their relationship and their various insecurities and their growing attachment to each other from ari’s perspective, as he struggles with his identity and his inability to recognize what it is that he wants out of life.
and that is gripe number one.
View Spoiler »my second gripe is the writing style, particularly the dialogue. there are people who have a knack for dialogue and people who do not, and people who have a facility for writing stilted stylized dialog that doesn’t “ring true” but is still effective, like david mamet. but here, the dialogue didn’t feel natural and these characters never came alive for me. there was a lot of repetition in their speech, and a lot of those snappy, witty moments you find in YA contemporary fiction, but it never felt relaxed. to use this portion of a david foster wallace interview i just read:
That’s why people use terms like flow or effortless to describe writing that they regard as really superb. They’re not saying effortless in terms of it didn’t seem like the writer spent any work. It simply requires no effort to read it – the same way listening to an incredible storyteller talk out loud requires no effort to pay attention. Whereas when you’re bored, you’re conscious of how much effort is required to pay attention.
and i wasn’t bored – i am not saying that, but i think the same rule applies to things that are so overly manipulated that they don’t feel the way people really speak or interact. i mean, it’s a novel – we all know it is a construct, but sometimes even a construct can feel… effortless.
for example, i just don’t buy this kind of emo-poetic musing coming from a kid who pushes down all his emotions and is battling all his violent urges:
Even though summers were mostly made of sun and heat, summers for me were about the storms that came and went. And left me feeling alone.
Did all boys feel alone?
The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain.
but enough of my griping – there are some really touching moments in here, although for me, the most resonant ones came from ari’s relationship with his parents rather than his relationship with dante.
good stuff, just not the lingering heartbreaking tenderness i was anticipating.
