52 Books in 52 Weeks, it's called. The challenge is simple: read a book every week for a year.
41. The Every boy.
Amy Sedaris and Tom Perotta both call it “quirky” on the dust jacket. Why didn’t that give me pause? Probably because Perotta also contends that Shapiro is truly ‘Salingeresque’ among a passel of posers. Please. This is an amusing read, but far from the profound exploration of teenage longing-for-experience-and-belonging it aims to be. Henry Every (the titular ‘Every boy,’ and see what he did there? see the cleverness?) strikes off on his own after his parents’ divorce and has a Chelsea Hotel experience with a one-handed bohemian temptress, before realizing the right girl was back home the whole time. After his accidental death/martyrdom (by setting his father’s pet jellyfish free, he was metaphorically setting his father free from his obsessive guilt over driving him and his mother away, see?), his father and mother learn to love each other again. Neither seems to miss him much, which is just one of the character-motivation problems with this novel. Plenty of pathos — no less than four teen suicides, not counting the death of the title character — but the payoff is Chuck-E-Cheese-cheap.
