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Young
adult novels are, more often than not, coming-of-age stories.
This is not surprising since most young adults are going through
the awkward, difficult process of adolescence and therefore
need all the help they can get. Though Richard Uhlig's second
young adult novel presents itself as a coming-of-age story,
Boy Minus Girl feels less like a coming-of-age story
itself and more like a 250-page realization that coming-of-age
is a necessary evil.
The novel's
main character, Les Eckhardt, is your average, run-of-the-mill
14-year-old male—his primary concerns, in order of importance,
are women, sex, and sex with women—and so the novel follows
Les as he tries to navigate his horny, pubescent world. The
problem, though, is that Uhlig throws too many obstacles in
his path: Les has to deal with a womanizing uncle, the uncle's
pregnant stripper girlfriend, a crush on a lesbian, a needy
best friend, claustrophobic parents, an oversized bully, and
bigotry in all its myriad forms, including (but not limited
to) racism, sexism, homophobia, and AIDS-related prejudice.
All Les really wants to do is get laid.
Obviously,
this is quite a lot of conflict for a single novel to handle,
so many of the plot threads feel unpolished, incomplete, or
half-baked. To further complicate matters, the novel begins
relatively slowly, with rising action crawling at a snail's
pace over the first two-thirds of the book, while the last
third picks up speed before careening to a dead stop that
feels less like a climax with denouement and more like the
end of the backstory.
If Uhlig
trips slightly with the plot and pacing, he regains his balance
through most of the characters he creates. Les and his love
interest, Charity, are very well-developed, complicated, intricate
characters. They are fraught with troubles, and they handle
them believably, albeit illogically, at times. Charity, for
instance, falls in love with a classmate and, despite not
knowing if the classmate is gay, pursues her. And Les, when
he's finally pushed too far by the class bully, gets his revenge,
despite the rather obvious consequences.
Other
characters show a glimpse of deeper development, but they
never really get the chance to let their depth shine. A secret
revealed about Les's mother, for instance, suggests that she's
got a lot more to her—like broken hearts and lost love—than
the penny-pinching religious zealot she appears to be, but
Uhlig never lets that secret—and consequently Les's mother
herself—come to fruition. Of course, not all of Uhlig's
characters are redeeming: Many of the secondary characters
are stocked with clichés, such as the misogynist uncle who
drives a fancy sports car and cuckolds every Tom, Dick, and
Harry he meets; or the class bully, who talkth with a lithp
that'th tho dithtracting I had to skip most of his dialogue.
There
is one thing, however, nobody can deny Uhlig: He has no inhibitions
regarding sexuality. His frank, honest, unobstructed treatment
of sex—from Les's obligatory feelings of religious guilt
to the irresistible urge to masturbate while at school (and
its execution)—is refreshing, especially in a time when
discourse on sexuality, for young people and adults alike,
seems so silenced. Unfortunately, the novel hurts itself here,
too, bogging itself down with too many plots and its seeming
inability to finish what it starts. Les's religious guilt
over sexuality is never resolved, and some very disturbing
suggestions about alternative sexuality—that it may be
a sin, that it may be unnatural, that it may cause AIDS—are
diffused but never dissolved, and therefore the book presents
something of a conundrum: Is open, frank discussion about
a seldom-discussed topic still a good thing if it problematizes
the issue without any hint of a healthy resolution?
And the
resolution, of course, is the coming-of-age story that Boy
Minus Girl advertises but never delivers. We meet Les
as a frustrated, guilt-ridden teenager, and we leave him as
a frustrated, guilt-ridden teenager who now happens to have
befriended an ostracized, guilt-ridden lesbian. Boy Minus
Girl has a lot of potential, but the novel never really
owns it, and now that potential rests in a focused, streamlined
sequel. Hopefully, if Uhlig decides to continue with Les's
and Charity's stories, he will listen to the age-old adage
that the jack of all trades—in this case, every possible
problem a teenage boy can face—is the master of none.
(March,
2009)
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