“I was sitting in your mom’s car in the parking lot of the Kaiser Permanente building and smoking a joint when I saw a bunch of crows over in the corner near the fence.”
No one reads better than a teenager. Adults read more deeply, more informedly, more discriminatingly (there was a stretch in high school during which every book I read — literally every one — became, for a time, the best book I’d ever read).
But for sheer intensity of absorption — the ability to give oneself over to a book almost carnally, without some margin of awareness pecking away at a to-do list or tediously testing and re-testing one’s own evaluation (I prefer his early work) — teens can’t be outdone. I have read and will read books that are vastly better than Stephen King’s It, but I’m not sure — banished from my childhood bedroom, unable to recreate that silent sense of doing something both illicit and enriching — that I’ll ever have a better reading experience.
The closest I’ve come, as an adult, may be Dan Chaon’s Ill Will. I read it in three days, feverishly flipping pages while the leftovers microwaved, while the bathtub filled. It’s a thriller, set largely in the unsurpassably bleak suburbs of Ohio, involving two obscurely related sets of murders, committed decades apart. It has numerous features that ordinarily trigger my readerly immune response: multiple narrators, typographic trickery, characters with repressed memories. But Chaon steers Ill Will deftly through our defenses, right into the bloodstream. How does he do it?
The plot, first of all, is alive and unpredictable in a way that thriller plots rarely are. The main tension, in most thrillers, has to do with how the characters will manage to do what you’re already fairly certain they’re going to do: how is Reacher going to beat up all four of these bad guys, how is Bosch going to uncover the crucial bit of evidence. In Ill Will your expectations are written on water. (Wait, is it possible that Rusty’s telling the truth? And could Kate be right about Dustin?)
Will Shortz once said that the essential skill, for a crossword puzzler, is the ability to do a kind of mental backbend: to tilt toward one sense of a word (spirits — ghosts? souls?) before vaulting back into another (spirits — alcohol!). Chaon’s plot is forever doing this: just when we think we have a handle on a memory, a character, a conversation, its valence, and our understanding of its meaning, flips.
But plots take a while to coalesce — Chaon must first ensnare us with the prose. Which is no simple thing in a book this outwardly loose: the pages are scattered with text messages, song lyrics, inarticulacies large and small. Here’s how one character describes the view from I-90: “White, snow-covered, et cetera, on either side. No scenery.” The linguistic art in Ill Will is almost entirely on the side of the garment that doesn’t show.
My favorite bits of invisible stitchery come in the pages narrated by Aaron, an eighteen year old heroin addict who has begun to suspect that his tender, embarrassing father, Dustin, may be harboring a terrible secret. Aaron’s mother, Dustin’s wife, has died of cancer, and now Dustin and Aaron are muddling uneasily along. Aaron is lying in bed, wishing to be left alone, and Dustin is — as parents of teenagers who want be left alone will — poking his head in.
“Did you get the oil changed in your mom’s car, he wants to know; he still refers to it as ‘your mom’s car’ even though you’ve been driving it for almost a year.”
This seems, at first, to be just a standard bit of madly irritable teenage noticing. Why does Dad have to call it your mom’s car? Why does Dad have to breathe like that?
But a few pages later Aaron is out with his friend Rabbit, doing drugs, and we get this:
“I was sitting in your mom’s car in the parking lot of the Kaiser Permanente building and smoking a joint when I saw a bunch of crows over in the corner near the fence.”
Without fanfare or explanation, Aaron has included us in an inside joke that will persist throughout the book: he will exclusively refer to his car as your mom’s car (“I slid your mom’s car into the garage… your mom’s car isn’t there anymore…”).
This has no great significance — not for the plot, not for Aaron — but it matters, as all inside jokes matter, because it creates intimacy. The sentence is quietly impressive as a piece of writing — there’s a George Saunders-esque frisson to the juxtaposition of lyrical corporate grimness (the Kaiser Permanente building) and nature at its most dismal and ominous (a bunch of crows). But as a piece of psychology, it’s masterful. We are smiling too subtly for the adults to notice, reveling in the ease of our understanding. We’ll probably blow off school tomorrow, the way we’ve blown off the entire semester. We can read all night.