The Believable and the Bizarre, review of Dana Shapiro’s The Every Boy

 

The Every Boy, Dana Shapiro’s first novel, is ripe with quirk.  In grade school, Henry is prone to bruises.  He kisses the backs of girls’ necks, smells their mittens, and wears a “blackface and a noose” on Martin Luther King Day.  His mother raises weaver ants and his father tries a number of obsessive hobbies that don’t last, including the construction of an aquarium for jellyfish, though “They’re not fish! They’re Cnidarians!”  The
Every Boy is about fifteen-year-old Henry and his relationship with Jorden, his girl-pal and confidante since the eighth grade.  Jorden, with unpierced ears, is a fact-receptacle for psychological theory and obscure diseases. Henry spends most of his time with Jorden relaying his troubled thoughts so that she can diagnose him using her index of knowledge, his head often resting in her lap. Every Boy is a foray into many firsts: Henry’s first masturbation involving a stuffed animal, his nonsexual relationship with Jorden, his sexual one with Benna, and his eventual discovery that his dad is not the perfectly suave super-dad that he had always thought. And on that note, Shapiro’s novel is not good for much more than windowing into first experiences—it’s a good recommendation for someone in high school who needs to bolster a little interest in reading. 

Henry’s friendly relationship with Jorden gets botched when he attends a reunion with his grandmother who lives in Manhattan. There he meets Benna, an elusive and pretty girl with no right hand below the wrist. Benna feeds him a bite of her “hot dog with everything, hold the hot dog.” She lives in a hotel, they dress up in costume, and it’s apparent that Benna’s relationship with Henry is not the only one of its kind. Henry, of course, is infatuated with Benna in the way that only a lustful teen can be, and doesn’t realize this until its too late. Henry decides Manhattan despite his father’s wishes against it, and its coupled withanimpending sense of doom. But the reader already knows that Henry is dead: we read Henry’s ledger alongside his father, who is looking for clues about his son’s death, but the reader eventually finds out is liable to Henry’s fancy.  Shapiro doesn’t pull any tricks about Henry’s death. We ultimately understand what happened through the intermittent expository prose, rendering the journal a self-serving tool to get into the head of the already-dead Henry.

Because the eccentricities are piled on one after another, the reality of Henry’s character doesn’t live up to its potential.  We see glimpses of a real person despite Henry’s mitten-smelling when he revels in the company of senior citizens or becomes fascinated with physical and ethnic minorities, the “true” outsiders. He, like many other characters, is an amalgamation of Shapiro’s hyper-exaggerated fancy for the bizarre. The Every Boy, Dana Shapiro’s first novel, is beginner fiction. It may be a fresh change of pace and tone from canonical literature, and a gateway into contemporary fiction for young readers who are bored with generic assigned reading in school, but that’s as far as it goes. Perhaps the greatest thing to say about The Every Boy is that it takes a crack at erecting the bizarre, though at the cost of believability.

Dana Adam Shapiro is an American journalist, novelist, and filmmaker. He was a founder of Icon magazine, a senior editor at Spin magazine, and has written for The New York Times Magazine and other publications. His first film, the Academy Award nominated Murderball, was released in 2005. His first novel, The Every Boy, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2005. It is being produced as a film with Plan B Entertainment.

I met Shapiro at Susquehanna University. He came to visit and talk about Murderball. He was my beer pong partner, and we lost. I’m still a little bitter about it.