Ben Hourigan

First, in the interests of openness, I have to say that I went to school with Ben, keep in touch with him, and think he's a very interesting and fundamentally good human being. It also means my reaction to his semi-autobiographical series will be different from most other people's. For this reason I refrain from a star rating.

Other reviews suggest that Ben's most impressive feat is creating the character of Lily, and the realism of the narrator: this is what it feels like to be a teenager. I think that's pretty much accurate, although I see Lily more as a broken husk than a model to be emulated.

But I'm more interested in the narrative voice here. In most novels of this type (first person narrative coming of age novels) the narrator has more or less all the answers. The archetype here is Augustine's 'Confessions,' in which old Augie rips into young Augie at every possible moment; it's a staple of religious conversion narratives in general (see: Thomas Merton). My favorite version is probably Waugh's 'Brideshead Revisited,' although the narrator there is a bit less moralizing than in Augustine or Merton.

NMD is particularly interesting in that the narrator appears to be only very slightly more wise than the character. Certainly he has more reflective distance and can recognize some of the more foolish or obnoxious characteristics of young Josh. But old Josh is so far from perfect that it's probably better to see him as closer to young Josh than to the redeemed, saved or totally matured narrators of the other books I've named. Here a broken young man is described with sympathy and acute judgement by an only slightly less broken man. The effect of this is to make the character and narrator both more sympathetic, more real and more depressing.

As for content, the first novel in the series investigated what it's like to be what I think of as slightly gifted (Josh is not a Mozart, Einstein or Lebron James; he's just smarter than average). It turns out to be a vicious circle of praise and disgust: the young man who is constantly told that he's 'different' from others but *not* better will inevitably interpret his difference as betterness; the adults who value intellect but try to tell him that he's not 'better' will interpret the 'difference' as betterness, too, while also expecting the intellectually advanced young man to show more emotional maturity than can reasonably be expected of him; which failure of empathy will lead the young man to interpret himself as even better than he'd originally believed and so on.

Here Ben thinks through the consequences of such a childhood in more detail, and the results are not pleasant. If you come to believe in your own innate superiority, the only other person who can satisfy you will be either a) yet more convinced of their own superiority than you (i.e., the aforementioned Lily, who represents, to some extent, a kind of artistic genius that the narrator wishes to be; cultural studies professors; self-conceived political radicals) or b) literally perfect. Josh chases both of these options, while ignoring (willingly or not) others who could give him the love and support he needs. These latter people are always much better than (young) Josh believes they are; the people of group (a) are always much worse than they believe.

I'm no fan of first person narrative in general; they make me claustrophobic. So I was interested at the sudden switch to third person in the story of Imogen; it was a bit jarring, but also a very welcome breath of fresh air. Similarly, I don't much care for sex in literature. But Ben's books are very good at evoking an almost indefinable emotion, they're extremely readable, and their structure is interesting enough to keep the pages turning. Now if only he'd hurry up with volume 3...

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