Emma Rathbone, The Patterns of Paper Monsters.
Reagan Arthur Books/Little, Brown and Co., 2010. Paperback, 206 pp, $13.99.
Hannah Pittard, The Fates Will Find Their Way.
Ecco/HarperCollins, 2011. Hardcover, 256 pp, $22.99.
Anyone who thinks young writers aren’t taking interesting risks hasn’t read Emma Rathbone’s The Patterns of Paper Monsters or Hannah Pittard’s The Fates Will Find Their Way. The debut novels from these young female writers are inventive forays into the minds of young men whose lives are hemmed in by the tragedy of adolescence. And while they tell rather different stories, the novels are similar in the way they toy with narrative, resisting traditional storytelling means in favor of challenging forms that are ultimately more revelatory.
In The Patterns of Paper Monsters, Jacob Higgins tells the story of his stint in a Northern Virginia juvenile detention center through journal entries. Though this structure could become limiting—how talented a writer are we supposed to believe Jacob is at the tender age of seventeen?—Rathbone uses it as the key to unlocking a difficult main character. Jacob is the kind of teenage boy we might expect to encounter in a juvenile detention center: from a bad home, overrun with hormones, prone to fits of foul language, and full of rage. Not ten pages in, Jacob has stabbed a teacher in the hand with a pen and is forced into forty-eight hours of lockdown, after which he meets with a therapist whom he berates with muttered obscenities. Jacob seems to hate everyone, and for that reason the reader resists liking him.
Slowly and cleverly, Rathbone reveals Jacob’s buried humanity as she confidently navigates his specific voice. Where he is angry he is also wickedly funny, throwing off one-liners in descriptions of cafeteria food (“another embarrassed-looking corn dog”) or the effects of a female teacher’s glare (“your boner basically turns inside out and goes up inside you and you actually become a girl”). And when he is at his lowest, he confesses basic desires in a surprising, tender way. Sentenced to cleaning the windows for his crime of pen-stabbing, Jacob thinks, “It’s cold and you’re hungry because you didn’t really eat anything all day and you wonder if anyone else in the world has ever felt this specific variety of unhappiness.” Jacob’s quick confession of unhappiness, and then of loneliness embedded in that unhappiness, is both unexpected and earned through the journal entry format. He’s funny and honest when he deflects with anger, and touching when he reflects with desperation.
Jacob’s awareness of his anger is sporadic but also binds the reader to him. He muses on his hatred of his mother’s drunk, abusive boyfriend, menacingly nicknamed “Refrigerator Man,” writing, “My anger is wide and nuanced. It is gaping and ancient … more glinty than five hundred suburban pools at midday.” But perhaps the pulsing core of Rathbone’s novel is Jacob’s nascent romance with a girl inmate, Andrea. When Jacob devolves into ecstatic reflections of her in his journal, his honesty and self-awareness elicits the most basic sympathies in the reader. After talking with her, Jacob remembers:
And the way she would look up and blink and then look down all soft and then softly look back up; and the way when she was talking her face would melt and then harden with each new hinge in conversation, and how her words are webbed with a southern accent. And it’s like I can’t stop thinking about these specific things, even now, even as I write this during free time and the lights are about to go off—I can feel it. I can feel the subtle inhalation before the thudding half-light. And I’m noticing that but I’m also thinking about Andrea because it’s like my brain is stained with her.
Rathbone resists the schmaltzy ending her story could have after the introduction of this romance. What happens with Jacob and Andrea is both surprising and satisfying, and Jacob’s lessons and progression are less about redemption and forgiveness than they are about recognizing the intangibility of his fear of loneliness. After all, Jacob writes in his journal, “No one will ever know anything because it’s impossible to ever know everything.” What’s important about this sentiment is that for Jacob it is not a complaint, but rather a reconciliation with the limitations of his small life.
Where Rathbone’s story of adolescence was focused and local, Hannah Pittard’s resounding chorus of men and boys visits and re-visits the disappearance of Nora, widening the scope at whiplash speed. The narrative construction in The Fates Will Find Their Way, told in the collective “we” voice, can be even more limiting, but Pittard uses it expertly. Sixteen-year-old Nora Lindell goes missing one Halloween, but it is the set of boys peripherally involved in her teenage life who command the story. Pittard plays with time as the narrative contracts and expands, and the narrators grow from awkward, sex-obsessed boys to suburban, mildly unhappy men in the space of sentences, only to return to their teenage selves a paragraph later.
Like Jacob, these boys are not entirely sympathetic. Much of their obsession with Nora and the father and sister she has left behind has to do with a narcissistic impulse to explain away the mysterious. A few chapters spin out the fantasy of what might have happened to Nora, her escape and second life in the Southwest. But the rug is quickly pulled from under those fantasies, as the narrators return again to other conclusions:
Nora Lindell was gone. And, with Trey Stephens in jail, he was gone, too, in a way. By this time, we’d already lost Minka Dinnerman and Mr. Lindell, as well (a car crash and cancer, respectively). It seemed, some days, that life was nothing more than a tally of the people who’d left us behind.
Through such confessions of abandonment, the boys demonstrate the collective wound of early tragedy. Their lust and curiosity, neither ever requited, speak to the inscrutability not only of this mystery, but of women. Nora’s sister, Sissy, also plays an effective role in the novel, almost as ghostly and intangible as her disappeared sister.
There is a passage near the end of the novel in which the narrators reflect on their cultivated suburban pools and lives, a passage that is worth the price of the book alone. Here, Pittard shows off beautifully, describing a summer that is all summers in the lives of these boys, where their tanned and wine-drunk happiness exists as delicately as the fantasy of Nora’s escape lives in their collective imagination. And that, really, is what the novel is about: the stories that become memory and then myth, and the brief assents to the inability to really know anything. Near the end the narrators confess, “Except that’s not what happened. That’s only what we wanted to happen. Why did we want it to end that way? Simple: because it’s all we could imagine.” That, too, is what Fatesis about: the gift of imagination in the wake of tragedy and loneliness.
So is Patterns, in a way, where Jacob hurts because he is trapped in his own fears. The narrators in Fates hurt because they are trapped in the myriad mysteries of youth. Both kinds of pain speak to the loss of innocence and the too-swift entrance into adulthood. It is to the credit of both Pittard and Rathbone that they’ve chosen to convey the pain of being young in non-traditional narrative ways, tapping into the non-linear aspects of adolescent confusion. The novels are purposefully constructed, bold and tender, touching and hardscrabble. They are all those things simultaneously and intelligently. In new ways and distinct voices, they find the exceptional tragedy in the rent lives of these difficult young men.
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