Reviewed by Jason Marcus-Freeman from uncorrected proof
Structurally, all a traditional Bildungsroman requires is the undertaking of a formative emotional journey—the author needs to move their protagonist from A to B, and that’s about it. The Catcher in the Rye, the urtext for the modern coming-of-age novel, barely has a plot at all. Ditto A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Huck Finn, and on and on. Even mainstream Hollywood, with its relentless three-act strictures, relaxes somewhat when telling these stories (e.g. Stand by Me). The coming of age story is allowed to be lumpy, often composed entirely of digressions and wandering asides.
Adam Lindsay Honsinger’s debut novel Gracelessland contains fairly standard ingredients for a modern Bildungsroman: angst-ridden teen protagonist; drunk, ne’er-do-well father; increasingly crazy mother. Set in 1978, Gracelessland begins wonderfully, with teenage protagonist Kepler Pressler breaking into the chimpanzee enclosure at the zoo, on a blinkered mission to “liberate” the imprisoned creatures. Honsinger pulls off a tricky tonal balancing act here, keeping the writing fleet—the ape enclosure “looks more like a kindergarten classroom than a forest in the wilds of Africa”—and immediately establishes Kepler as witty and iconoclastic. The chapter is admirably zany without ever tipping into quirk.
The novel quickly becomes much grimmer than its first chapter might suggest. Though the scene is elided, Kepler attempts suicide and ends up in a mental hospital. The sections of the novel set in the hospital work as a frame for the novel’s story proper, as Kepler recounts the events that lead up to the book’s opening chapter. Given a typewriter by his psychologist and prescribed three thousand words a week, Kepler begins a year in the past. Inheriting a house from a dead relative, Kepler’s family moves from the heart of downtown Toronto to the reviled (by Kepler, anyway) suburbs. Their lifelong dream of home-ownership realized, Kepler’s parents soon reveal themselves to be woefully under-equipped for the task, and the family quickly begins to fall apart.
The novel pivots on another elided incident, hinted at throughout the first half of the book, which becomes Gracelessland’s central focus. At the book’s midpoint, Kepler tells of awakening from a catatonic state with a six-week hole in his memory, a hole that includes the event that caused it. Honsinger sets up the reveal of this mystery as the book’s climax, which, as I’m reading, I expect will occur in the penultimate chapter, and the jogging of this memory will lead Kepler towards redemption.
The setup of this mystery gives Gracelessland a somewhat predictable shape, one different from most coming-of-age stories. In a traditional Bildungsroman, the protagonist wanders freely along their path. While each encounter or experience or scene can feel like a random event, each one accumulates emotional resonance; the events of the novel don’t necessarily need thematic or even logical consistency, only emotional consistency. By novel’s end, this accumulation leads to the character’s transformation, the completion of their formative journey from A to B.
In Gracelessland, Honsinger’s structural gambit is entirely different. By focusing the book around a central mystery, Honsinger requires the mystery’s ultimate revelation to land with a significant enough emotional wallop to convincingly accomplish Kepler’s formative transformation; this single reveal must do the work of a whole novel’s worth of accumulated events. Unfortunately, Gracelessland’s reveal is anti-climactic, and Kepler’s redemption feels unearned; Kepler begins and ends at A.
There is still much to like here, though. The opening half, with the family’s increasingly dilapidated house mirroring the state of the family itself, works well. Though the actions of Kepler’s parents range from neglectful to outright abusive, Honsinger manages to retain the first chapter’s spritely black humour, and the book, though grim, never becomes a slog.
Gracelessland works best when it allows its characters to wander. The story comes to its fullest, most vibrant life whenever Milly, Kepler’s foul-mouthed, punk rock girlfriend, is around. Milly breaks Kepler out of his own head, challenging his every assumption about life. Her fierce independence and refusal to live under the repressive rules of her traditionalist East Indian father provide Kepler an example of how to live, away from his parents’ self-destructive craziness. Milly is a thoroughly delightful creation: funny, confused and confident, vulnerable and brash. Though Milly is perhaps a stronger character than even Kepler, tellingly, she does little to drive the book’s plot.
When viewed in macro, the structure of Gracelessland is elegant, clean: bisected by a tragic mystery, whose solving at book’s end completes the protagonist’s emotional journey. However, this requires Honsinger’s characters to follow the demands of the book’s plot, rather than the other way around. A lumpier, perhaps less elegant, version of Gracelessland is easily envisioned, where Honsinger trusts the strengths of his characters and follows them wherever they lead. Maybe coming-of-age stories need to be lumpy; a life is a lumpy thing.
Enfield & Wizenty | 208 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1927855140
‘Gracelessland’ by Adam Lindsay Honsinger
Book Reviews
Structurally, all a traditional Bildungsroman requires is the undertaking of a formative emotional journey—the author needs to move their protagonist from A to B, and that’s about it. The Catcher in the Rye, the urtext for the modern coming-of-age novel, barely has a plot at all. Ditto A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Huck Finn, and on and on. Even mainstream Hollywood, with its relentless three-act strictures, relaxes somewhat when telling these stories (e.g. Stand by Me). The coming of age story is allowed to be lumpy, often composed entirely of digressions and wandering asides.
Adam Lindsay Honsinger’s debut novel Gracelessland contains fairly standard ingredients for a modern Bildungsroman: angst-ridden teen protagonist; drunk, ne’er-do-well father; increasingly crazy mother. Set in 1978, Gracelessland begins wonderfully, with teenage protagonist Kepler Pressler breaking into the chimpanzee enclosure at the zoo, on a blinkered mission to “liberate” the imprisoned creatures. Honsinger pulls off a tricky tonal balancing act here, keeping the writing fleet—the ape enclosure “looks more like a kindergarten classroom than a forest in the wilds of Africa”—and immediately establishes Kepler as witty and iconoclastic. The chapter is admirably zany without ever tipping into quirk.
The novel quickly becomes much grimmer than its first chapter might suggest. Though the scene is elided, Kepler attempts suicide and ends up in a mental hospital. The sections of the novel set in the hospital work as a frame for the novel’s story proper, as Kepler recounts the events that lead up to the book’s opening chapter. Given a typewriter by his psychologist and prescribed three thousand words a week, Kepler begins a year in the past. Inheriting a house from a dead relative, Kepler’s family moves from the heart of downtown Toronto to the reviled (by Kepler, anyway) suburbs. Their lifelong dream of home-ownership realized, Kepler’s parents soon reveal themselves to be woefully under-equipped for the task, and the family quickly begins to fall apart.
The novel pivots on another elided incident, hinted at throughout the first half of the book, which becomes Gracelessland’s central focus. At the book’s midpoint, Kepler tells of awakening from a catatonic state with a six-week hole in his memory, a hole that includes the event that caused it. Honsinger sets up the reveal of this mystery as the book’s climax, which, as I’m reading, I expect will occur in the penultimate chapter, and the jogging of this memory will lead Kepler towards redemption.
The setup of this mystery gives Gracelessland a somewhat predictable shape, one different from most coming-of-age stories. In a traditional Bildungsroman, the protagonist wanders freely along their path. While each encounter or experience or scene can feel like a random event, each one accumulates emotional resonance; the events of the novel don’t necessarily need thematic or even logical consistency, only emotional consistency. By novel’s end, this accumulation leads to the character’s transformation, the completion of their formative journey from A to B.
In Gracelessland, Honsinger’s structural gambit is entirely different. By focusing the book around a central mystery, Honsinger requires the mystery’s ultimate revelation to land with a significant enough emotional wallop to convincingly accomplish Kepler’s formative transformation; this single reveal must do the work of a whole novel’s worth of accumulated events. Unfortunately, Gracelessland’s reveal is anti-climactic, and Kepler’s redemption feels unearned; Kepler begins and ends at A.
There is still much to like here, though. The opening half, with the family’s increasingly dilapidated house mirroring the state of the family itself, works well. Though the actions of Kepler’s parents range from neglectful to outright abusive, Honsinger manages to retain the first chapter’s spritely black humour, and the book, though grim, never becomes a slog.
Gracelessland works best when it allows its characters to wander. The story comes to its fullest, most vibrant life whenever Milly, Kepler’s foul-mouthed, punk rock girlfriend, is around. Milly breaks Kepler out of his own head, challenging his every assumption about life. Her fierce independence and refusal to live under the repressive rules of her traditionalist East Indian father provide Kepler an example of how to live, away from his parents’ self-destructive craziness. Milly is a thoroughly delightful creation: funny, confused and confident, vulnerable and brash. Though Milly is perhaps a stronger character than even Kepler, tellingly, she does little to drive the book’s plot.
When viewed in macro, the structure of Gracelessland is elegant, clean: bisected by a tragic mystery, whose solving at book’s end completes the protagonist’s emotional journey. However, this requires Honsinger’s characters to follow the demands of the book’s plot, rather than the other way around. A lumpier, perhaps less elegant, version of Gracelessland is easily envisioned, where Honsinger trusts the strengths of his characters and follows them wherever they lead. Maybe coming-of-age stories need to be lumpy; a life is a lumpy thing.
Enfield & Wizenty | 208 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1927855140