This is a fast read, and one that involves more of your time than you would think. You don’t have to be an underachiver to enjoy it, but you do have to achieve a certain level of belief suspension. William, our trusty narrator, seems to think that he’s always going to place second to his twin brother Clive. All this is told through a diary where William has written his life story, or as much of a life story as a twenty something can write over a short life. From the very start William feels inferior to his brother, and chats up his twin’s accomplishments one after the other, while he sits around watching. There never is a moment in this book where William tells us about getting up to do something on his own, he lives in the shadow of his brother, and to be honest, I don’t know why…as his brother Clive is just a normal person, doing normal uneventful things. William is desperate to prove to the reader just how useless and plain as rain he really is. He takes 143 pages to tell you that he’s simply never going to achieve anything in his life.By the time William goes of to college, the witness aspect of this book, meaning you, is in full swing. William is manipulating you for his own pleasure, he tells you things about his own parents, how things went one way and not another when he was growing up, how they cut him off financially when he became a sticky skid mark on life. Clive swoops down at the last minute to help William climb out of a kind of Manson like family that bumps along for ten or fifteen pages and then disappears. William doesn’t go anywhere in this novel, there is no engine to this story, just William going from one thing to the next, getting fat, going to college, witnessing the mating ritual that takes place in that intellectual breeding ground, and feeling left out.
The funniest part about this book is that William isn’t shy about telling us he’s a loser. He’s too overwhelmed by life to actually attempt anything. From the moment he recognizes his brother, (a very clear and dynamic portrait of crib life) we know that he somehow feels detached from everything, and nothing matters. All of this is organic, this underachieving, and he’s not a product of society. Mr. Anastas has written the polar opposite of what life is like right now in your mid to late twenties. Instead of a highly sexualized wealthy portrait that is presented in Chad Kultgen’s The Lie, or a southern Californian rite of passage set in a high school where everyone gets what they want, we instead see a world where parents are normal, money isn’t an issue, and the main characters aren’t sitting around playing video games waiting for what they think they deserve, smoking pot, and holding their hands out while the rest of the world starts at the bottom and works it’s way up to actually achieving something. There are moments in life when you look around at what you have and think…it’s enough…but…now what? There are times in the day when you know for sure that this life will end and it won’t matter if you have the latest electronic toy, and you realize your just growing like a plant and that’s it. Mr. Anastas has his finger on that feeling, and this book is an accurate portrayal of what it’s like to feel nothing and be nothing.
-JR
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