As I wrote in that piece, the novel is narrated by 17-year-old Jake Higgins, who has been sent to a juvenile detention center in Northern Virginia for armed robbery. I first discussed wanting to read Rathbone’s debut novel in my essay about teenage protagonists. This funny, sad and engaging novel scratched this particular reading itch. I longed for references to malls, and to boners, and to “intense cell phones” and to a pillow made of denim with an actual jeans pocket on the front, “like it thinks it’s Bruce Springsteen.” Enter: The Patterns of Paper Monsters by Emma Rathbone. One sentence near the end of the book made me especially happy: “His gaze, keener than his lancet, would descend straight through your soul, past your excuses and your reticence, and disarticulate your every lie.” That word– disarticulate I savored it for days.īut after these two books, I longed for a contemporary novel about contemporary life.
I loved the way, too, that Flaubert distilled character into a single paragraph, stringing together a distinct list of experiences, memories, habits, and desires in a such a way that I knew that person. I hadn’t read the novel since high school, and this time around I found myself reading aloud passages that were truly a feat of magic, summarizing with rigorous and well-chosen details whole weeks or months or years at a time. Then I took my sweet, sweet time gliding through Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, as translated by Lydia Davis. First, I slogged through T he French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles the contemporary, omniscient narrator of this Victorian-age narrative fascinated my nerd-brain, but failed to truly interest my reader-brain.
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