You'll finish this book with the same look on your face you'd have if your parents told you they're trying to get pregnant with the neighbors. Though it's fiction, Andrew Smith's latest novel edges into a realm of outrageousness you have to pause and digest, before compulsively turning to the next chapter.
The story follows 16-year-old Austin, a teen boy with a handful of issues that are common enough:
- distant from parents
- bullied by idiots
- easily aroused--like, everything sets him off.
And some not-so-common issues:
- In love with his best friends, Shan (girl) and Robbie (boy).
- Obsessed with recording his own history and that of his ancestors
- Inadvertently unleashes army of man-eating insects that only want to eat and have sex with everything.
I can't help but see the humor in the latter. Smith's 7-foot-tall mantises are really just exaggerations of the teenager, a creature whose penchant for clearing out a food pantry is rivaled only by locusts, and whose sex drive is rivaled only by caged hamsters. Teenage years are a formative mess in which erections and metabolisms are at full-speed, and keeping up with those two championing gems is physical growth. Teenagers are what happen when you throw something reactive into a petri dish of unstable chemicals. In that light, Smith's monsters are the perfect metaphor. They hatch from the bodies of human hosts, start out small, grow feet over-night, and continue an existence of eating, fucking and sometimes, eating and fucking (if you know how to do this easily, let me know immediately). That right there's the over-arching metaphor to life in this book, and it works well. For all it's grotesque delight, however, that's the easy way of describing Grasshopper Jungle.
At its heart (yeah I said it) the book is about adolescence and the trifling honesty found even in young people who hardly know the world around them. Austin, our leading teen, connects his arousals, his memories, and his streaming consciousness. With a voracity that matches the mantis-soldiers' appetite, he records everything in a journal, weaving the present with heartbreaking stories of his ancestors--men and women who tried hard to live happily and were met with both joy and devastation. His compulsion to record life--to put paintings on his cave wall, as he puts it--makes history itself more appealing, and maybe even a little sexier than I remember it being in high school.
Austin is a complex boy whose intelligence is crafted with honesty and precision. He unabashedly reveals romantic feelings for two close friends of different genders, and as if under oath, informs us of whenever something makes him think about sex, which is damn near everything. Don't be deterred by that--what he has to say about what he sees is far from the gutter. Sex is not a consistently attractive event in this explosively weird narrative, giving the idea of sex a dynamic shape. This is especially so when Austin and Robbie are trapped in a mysterious room filled with jars of odd objects--the sort you find in a sci-fi horror show--and a pack of bullies breaks in, forcing our two heroes/best friends/potential lovers beneath the shelter of a desk.
As the two boys hide, the bully pack, lead by alpha ass-hat, Grant, observe a dismembered penis in a jar of liquid. Sex swiftly goes from teenage dream (hey, Katie Perry) to Frankensteinian freak-show. The shift is used as an opportunity for Austin to lament about the life of this boy, who not too long ago, kicked the crap out of him and Robbie for being "queer." In one line, Austin sums up every bully known to man:
"I desperately wished they'd stop talking about the penis in the jar, but Grant and his friends were like lonely parakeets in front of a mirror."
A lesser writer would not be able to capture the sad and repulsive nature of mean people so easy. If Smith can do anything, it's pack a lot of substance into a small amount of words. He doesn't leave much room for boredom, or for cheap tricks. Smart, funny, delightfully grotesque, and with an ending that will make you go What in holy hell just happened? I recommend it right away.
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