Body-swapping goes too far in sentimental romance
By Frank Bruni |
August 26, 2012, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
AS surely as a gardener plants flowers or a mason lays stone, a writer puts obstacles in the path of love. Your families hate each other. Your cultures clash. One of you is rich and one of you is poor, or one is a virgin and the other a whore. Maybe there's a prickly vampirism issue, maybe a pesky time-travel quirk. It's always something.
But has it ever been something as confounding as what the high school sweethearts Rhiannon and A. face in David Levithan's young adult novel "Every Day"? She's predictable and true, sticking close to home and staying put in the body she was born with. He's peripatetic and undependable, inasmuch as he pops up in a new town and a new flesh-and-blood vessel each morning. A. doesn't have a real existence: he's not a person, at least not in any conventional sense, but a spirit, switching without choice from one teenage host to the next and, for just 24 hours, replacing its soul and consciousness with his own. Levithan's novel asks: Can love possibly find a way around that?
A. meets Rhiannon after he wakes up in the body of Justin, her boyfriend. He ascertains that Justin doesn't adequately appreciate her - A. has access to the memories of whichever body he's borrowing - and that she deserves ardor on a much grander scale. One of this wantonly sentimental novel's flaws is its failure to describe her charms or A.'s interactions with her in a way that explains the strength of the pull they subsequently feel. What reads like a sufficiently pleasant day in each other's company becomes, for them, an unforgettable memory and an ineluctable call to be together.
He keeps waking up in new bodies and finding his way back to her: seemingly a logistical impossibility but for the convenient rules Levithan builds into his premise. I could buy that A. has his own body-independent e-mail account, with which he can stay in touch with her. I had a harder time accepting his fantastical condition has such finite geographic limits, and that every body he borrows lives within driving distance of her home.
Each time he visits her, he must convince her of the constant soul within the inconstant form, and she must thrill to it, even though he is skinny and then fat, Asian then black, male then female, and on and on. How much deeper than the skin does it really go? Exploring this question makes special sense in a story about teenagers, written for teenagers. The teenage years are when so many of us feel most self-consciously hostage to our imperfect shapes and peculiarities, raging against them and wondering if someone might possibly love us despite them.
"Every Day" is good when Levithan shows empathy, which is paired in the best parts of the book with a persuasive optimism about the odds for happiness and for true love. "The only way to keep going," he writes, "is to see every person as a possibility." For A. that's absolutely necessary. For the rest of us, it's still a fine idea.
But has it ever been something as confounding as what the high school sweethearts Rhiannon and A. face in David Levithan's young adult novel "Every Day"? She's predictable and true, sticking close to home and staying put in the body she was born with. He's peripatetic and undependable, inasmuch as he pops up in a new town and a new flesh-and-blood vessel each morning. A. doesn't have a real existence: he's not a person, at least not in any conventional sense, but a spirit, switching without choice from one teenage host to the next and, for just 24 hours, replacing its soul and consciousness with his own. Levithan's novel asks: Can love possibly find a way around that?
A. meets Rhiannon after he wakes up in the body of Justin, her boyfriend. He ascertains that Justin doesn't adequately appreciate her - A. has access to the memories of whichever body he's borrowing - and that she deserves ardor on a much grander scale. One of this wantonly sentimental novel's flaws is its failure to describe her charms or A.'s interactions with her in a way that explains the strength of the pull they subsequently feel. What reads like a sufficiently pleasant day in each other's company becomes, for them, an unforgettable memory and an ineluctable call to be together.
He keeps waking up in new bodies and finding his way back to her: seemingly a logistical impossibility but for the convenient rules Levithan builds into his premise. I could buy that A. has his own body-independent e-mail account, with which he can stay in touch with her. I had a harder time accepting his fantastical condition has such finite geographic limits, and that every body he borrows lives within driving distance of her home.
Each time he visits her, he must convince her of the constant soul within the inconstant form, and she must thrill to it, even though he is skinny and then fat, Asian then black, male then female, and on and on. How much deeper than the skin does it really go? Exploring this question makes special sense in a story about teenagers, written for teenagers. The teenage years are when so many of us feel most self-consciously hostage to our imperfect shapes and peculiarities, raging against them and wondering if someone might possibly love us despite them.
"Every Day" is good when Levithan shows empathy, which is paired in the best parts of the book with a persuasive optimism about the odds for happiness and for true love. "The only way to keep going," he writes, "is to see every person as a possibility." For A. that's absolutely necessary. For the rest of us, it's still a fine idea.
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