LOW EXPECTATIONS, riffing on Dickens goes right for a change

LOW EXPECTATIONS
STUART EVERLY-WILSON
Text Publishing
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: I begin to record the history of it all, because if I don’t I will explode, leaving nothing to tell of me but a pile of ash. In this history I will try to leave nothing out, but I will also be careful not to incorporate any extraneous unnecessary shit. Like objectivity. Objectivity is for those who don’t have a point to make, or a side to take. There is only one side to this story and that’s mine.

1970s, Western Sydney. A boy and his mum living in a street where neighbours keep an eye on everyone else’s business. A detested bully. And a family secret, barely hidden.

Devon Destri flies under the radar. He doesn’t talk to anyone, calls himself hard of speaking, and doesn’t correct anyone’s assumptions of his low intelligence. If no one knows otherwise, no one will expect anything of him, and maybe he won’t need to expect anything of himself—that is, beyond running a highly lucrative porn-magazine racket. Only his fiercely loyal friend Big Tammy and Krenek the Hungarian refugee know that Great Expectations is his favourite book, or that he can read at all. But when Devon starts to piece together his mother’s secret, his intellect and charm are put to startling and devastating use.

Stuart Everly-Wilson’s Low Expectations is a heartbreaking and hilarious story of resilience, revenge and love that captures the complexity of vulnerability and bravado. Devon Destri, with his sharp wit and gift for one-liners, is a character you’ll never forget.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Anyone who's read anything I've written here in the past ten years knows that I admire one thing about Dickens: nothing. A chore to read at best, an excruciatingly twee sentimental boor at least, he's famous wherever English is spoken because he makes average people feel smart, and smart people feel godlike, for "getting" his stories and their layers. To me, that's like congratulating yourself for knowing tomatoes are fruits but having the sense not to put them in fruit salad.

Low Expectations stars a teen, one with multivalent social and physical challenges, whose favorite book is Great Expectations. So coming of age, Dickens veneration, and Australian setting. Not an immediate fit for my US-centric, anti-Chuckles the Dick self, then.

I got within an ace of giving it five stars just for being raucously its ownself.

You who belong to the Church of Chuckles know he's fond of the sesquipedalian sentence, the orotund ekphrasis, the hifalutin verbiage. Quite why Devon, our PoV character, loves him, then is Dickensianly (in the "stop-hitting-me-with-the-message" sense) clear. He's "hard of speaking," a beautiful little Dickensian (in the best sense of fulfilling a need for a phrase that no one knew was there except him) creation for someone who simply doesn't want to speak much. Better not to let anyone in on his secret: he is a smart, observant, sensitive guy stuck in a world that just has no place for that kind of time-wasting, but expects people to be hard, both -working and -hearted, to make it in their working-class world. Devon feels safe in his hidey-hole with the special needs kids, he refers to it as the "spaz Gulag" and now let's talk about lanuguage. Diametrically opposite to Dickens, Devon's narrative voice is choppy and frequently heavy on the "worty dirds," as a teacher of mine called them. He absolutely has no respect for anyone who isn't worthy in his eyes, including himself. For the 2020s US audience this can lead to pursed lips and furrowed brows. Either check your fifty-years-later, wildly different culture expectations of politeness at the door, or don't pick the book up...and I strongly encourage the former choice. The alchemy of the story is, like Devon's favorite story, in the way the entire experience of reading it subverts the thoughts and expectations you started out with so often that the wonder is you emerge with any expectations left.

This bitter draft of gall and wormwood comes about because our hard-of-speaking narrator learns a truly life-changing secret about the mother he disrespects and denigrates. As she's raised him by herself, I don't think you need a lot of brainpower to figure out what it's about. I will say that it didn't seem hugely surprising to me when it was revealed; I was by that time exasperated with Devon for not picking up on it before he did. What matters in this rough-tongued kid's world is keeping himself a small enough target to avoid more than the irreducible minimum of abuse and also attention. It makes him a more-than-ordinarily solipsistic adolescent. His eyes are sharp...his attention is not focused outside his self-defined sphere of defense. As he's breaking the law, he's wise to keep his thoughts from straying too far afield. Adult readers who're parents will, I'm sure, think the right thoughts about how the family-related things end up before they do.

With the laundry list of CWs, why would I rate this book so highly? Because I'm Devon's age and, even though I grew up in Texas, the culture of cruelty wasn't a lot different there. Instead of someone telling a loudly pruriently foulmouthed and prejudiced tale of the modern day in order to shock and appall and titillate, this story recounts the way it was in that time and place, and does so with clarity and purpose. The world was what it was, but Devon is a work in progress, and by the end of the book the Devon we met is appreciably more adult in the postive ways than I ever expected him to be.

But for all that, peruse the CWs and make sure you're not going to pass out when they come to pass because they all do.

TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW...taking Shakespeare literally is good strategy

TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW: A Novel
GABRIELLE ZEVIN
Alfred A. Knopf
$28.00 hardcover, available now

TRADE PAPER EDITION ON 25 JUNE 2024 It will cost $19.00 and pre-orders are accepted now.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this exhilarating novel by the best-selling author of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn't heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won't protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: When you're old, like me, you don't expect to follow middle-aged peoples' passions because you raised them so you know there's just stuff not shared between generations. One of those things is gaming. I've watched people get really passionate about the games they're playing and, frankly, wanted to yawn in their face. I do not see the appeal. But, knowing this was going to be the spine of the story, I was ready for that and factored my indifference out of the story's appeal.

Sadie had often reflected that sex and video games had a great deal in common. There were certain objectives that needed to be met. There were certain rules that shouldn't be broken. There was a correct combination of movements—button mashes, joystick pivots, keystrokes, commands—that made the whole thing work or not work. There was a pleasure to knowing you had played the game correctly and a release that came when you reached the next level. To be good at sex was to be good at the game of sex.

What we're left with is the childhood friend, I think most of us have had one, whose idea of a good time marches well with our own and whose ability to connect with our quiet places makes them invaluable and necessary companions. This is not to say they're romantic-partner material, and in some odd way I think that romantic facet, if present, actually works against this sort of long-term companionship. The relationship that Sam and Sadie take with them through their lives is that companionably silent, creatively clicking connection. It's a wonderful thing to find and, mirabile dictu, Author Zevin makes the force of it real, present, and never overplays her hand with it. A tremendously admirable and no doubt difficult achievement.

Why was it so hard for him to say he loved her even when she said it to him? He knew he loved her. People who felt far less for each other said "love" all the time, and it didn't mean a thing. And maybe that was the point. He more than loved Sadie Green. There needed to be another word for it.

–and–

To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back—I know you won't hurt me, even though you can. It is the dog putting its mouth around your hand and never biting down. To play requires trust and love.

The hardest thing to admit to yourself is that you're the Bad Guy in someone else's fairy tale of life and love. Someone out there thinks of you with acute hurt and badly wounded feelings. Sam and Sadie are that to each other, as well as companionable besties. It's complicated, and it wouldn't do to spend time spoilering it, but suffice to say that the ability to betray, then to forgive yourself and seek forgiveness from the betrayed, is another very difficult thing to present in any believable way in fiction. Author Zevin does that, too.

"We work through our pain. That's what we do. We put the pain into the work, and the work becomes better. But you have to participate. You have to talk to me. You can't ignore me and our company and everything that came before."

It's a story about the depths of devotion to an idea, an ideal, and a cause in service of one's burning passion to make and be more than one is. It's a story about Love being, in the end, enough to make even failure less important. It's a story about Sam and Sadie making a life with each other: even though not spouses, they're necessary in each others' world because...well, because.

“I thought you were worried I was going to die," Sam said.

"No. You'll never die. And if you ever died, I'd just start the game again," Sadie said.

"Sam's dead. Put another quarter in the machine."

"Go back to the save point. Keep playing, and we'll win eventually.”

There it is, in that brief passage. That is what some connections offer, and what some of us luck into once or twice in a lifetime. It's precious beyond price and it's the heart of this loving story of the messy, cruel, angry thing we call life.

Why, then, have I given the read a mere four stars? Because I am, as noted above, old. It is not a story written for me, and so I am not as invested in it as I would be if I were 42 not 62. I expect that others will love the delicate and intricate love among all three main protagonists without the sense I had of being spoken around at the dinner table. It's a fate, like bed-wetting, that comes around again after being left behind in childhood. Hence the lack of a fifth, or fraction of a fifth, star. Still a story I'd encourage you to read. (With an agèd person caveat.)