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How I Learned to Hate in Ohio

A Novel

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
A brilliant, hilarious, and ultimately devastating debut novel about how racial discord grows in America
In late-1980s rural Ohio, bright but mostly friendless Barry Nadler begins his freshman year of high school with the goal of going unnoticed as much as possible. But his world is upended by the arrival of Gurbaksh, Gary for short, a Sikh teenager who moves to his small town and instantly befriends Barry and, in Gatsby-esque fashion, pulls him into a series of increasingly unlikely adventures. As their friendship deepens, Barryâs world begins to unravel, and his classmates and neighbors react to the presence of a family so different from theirs. Through darkly comic and bitingly intelligent asides and wry observations, Barry reveals how the seeds of xenophobia and racism find fertile soil in this insular community, and in an easy, graceless, unintentional slide, tragedy unfolds.
How I Learned to Hate in Ohio shines an uncomfortable light on the roots of white middle-American discontent and the beginnings of the current cultural war. It is at once bracingly funny, dark, and surprisingly moving, an undeniably resonant debut novel for our divided world.
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    • Kirkus

      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.

      COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      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.

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