November 15, 2020
It's 1985 in fictional Rutherford, Ohio, and high school freshman Barry Nadler is miserable. The teenager has been the target of bullies for years, and he misses his mother, a project analyst for a hotel chain who's almost always on the road. His father is a feckless adjunct professor at the local college whom Barry seems to pity more than anything. He's saddled with the homophobic nickname "Yo-Yo Fag," which even one of his teachers has started calling him. But after befriending a fellow student named Gurbaksh "Gary" Singh, a Sikh who's originally from Canada, Barry's life begins to change. When he loses his temper in the school counselor's office, he develops a reputation among the students as being a live wire, and his friendship with the "socially alchemical" Gary makes him "popular-adjacent." He even develops a crush on a Manic Pixie Dream Girl named Ottilie. But the good news, such as it is, doesn't last long--after he walks in on his mom sleeping with Gary's dad, he becomes estranged from his only friend and starts hanging out with a group of rough-hewn, working-class White people with retrograde politics. His parents' marriage falls apart, and he discovers that Gary and Ottilie have been dating. The plot only gets more melodramatic and unbelievable from there, as a series of tragedies continues to befall pretty much everyone in the book. The novel culminates with a horrible but predictable act of violence and ends vaguely and unhappily. This is a message novel--that message being "hating people is bad"--and MacLean veers as hard as one possibly can against subtlety, with cartoonish villains and mostly clumsy dialogue. Some passages show promise, but this novel ultimately falls flat. Good intentions can't save this unsubtle novel.
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November 30, 2020
MacLean’s laborious debut novel (after the memoir The Answer to the Riddle Is Me) explores the insidious effects of racism, homophobia, and toxic masculinity via the coming-of-age tale of a bullied high school freshman. It’s 1985 in an Ohio college and factory town, and lonely protagonist Barry Nadler, nicknamed “Yo-yo Fag” for refusing to share his yo-yo, has just started his freshman year. Just as Barry is resigned to another year of harassment, the new kid in school, a Sikh boy named Gurbaksh Singh, befriends him. Soon, Barry is drawn into the orbit of Gurbaksh, who stands up to the bullies who taunt him with racist slurs and beat him up. But when Gary discovers his mother and Gurbaksh’s father are having an affair, his social and familial worlds begin to crumble. Rife with collapsing marriages and lost friendships, the novel is intent on exposing how quotidian situations can lead to outbursts of destructive racial violence. Unfortunately, MacLean’s occasionally sharp prose does little to ameliorate disjointed pacing and wooden turns of phrase (“Hate is safe. Hate is urgent. Hate is unkind”). In the end, the novel is glaringly message-driven, without much else to show for itself. Agent: Stephanie Rostan, Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency.