There's a certain power in the coming-of-age novel, I think, that transcends the reader's age. These are the kind of books that stay with us even after we've progressed to more 'mature' offerings. I suppose that time in anyone's life is ripe for drama. It's a time so full of questions and doubts and excitement and conflict and self-examination that a great story can be formed from even the most mundane of lives.
I picked up Matthew Quick's novel Every Exquisite Thing in a charity shop this summer, bored on a family holiday to Dartmouth. With the dreary weather and no Wi-Fi, I'd ripped through the book I'd taken along (Pamela Des Barres' rock biography I'm With The Band) within a couple of days and had nothing else to read. Having not read Quick's 2008 breakthrough, Silver Linings Playbook, I had no preconceptions other than what I'd formed from the blurb.
Every Exquisite Thing - which gets its name from a line in Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray - is about a girl named Nanette, a popular athlete whose life changes forever when she becomes obsessed with an out-of-print cult novel called The Bubblegum Reaper. She befriends the author, who in turn introduces her to Alex, a brilliant but troubled young poet who shares her infatuation with the book. The Bubblegum Reaper inspires Nanette to unleash the rebel within, rejecting the path of popularity and college scholarships she'd been treading for a life of wild abandon.
Reading this book was a strange experience for me. I felt it was flawed, sometimes cliched and often over-simplistic, and yet I couldn't stop the pages from turning. I read it in cafes over vegetarian breakfasts, under street lamps by the river at night, on fifteen minute boat trips to Dartmouth Castle and in pubs with a pint of Guinness. I was as hypnotised by it as Nanette and Alex were with The Bubblegum Reaper; this is a must read for anyone who has ever felt a little out of place.
As I said, the book certainly has its faults. For one, the heroine has a tendency to look down on the popular girls and spout the notorious 'I'm not like other girls' line, which a quick browse of Goodreads tells me was a problem for some readers. It didn't bother me as much because it was honest - isn't that how almost all non-conformist teenagers think? Would it not be more grating without this basic truth? It might not be the most honourable way to behave, but no good character is complete without flaws. There can be an unfair pressure in YA literature for characters to be the perfect role model, to rarely make mistakes, and when they do they must always see the error of them. I don't find this either realistic or representative of young adults (or anyone), but hey ho.
The dialogue was also a bit hit-and-miss - several lines reeked of adult-writer-trying-too-hard-to-write-teenagers-syndrome. In spite of these problems, I'm so glad I read it. Every Exquisite Thing is a book that'll both break and warm your heart. It rings true for anyone who feels slightly like a misfit, or anyone who has fallen in love with a book, or anyone who has ever felt pressure to go down a certain path in their life. This book was written for these people.
Rating: 3.5/5
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