Nick and Norah and the Infinite Heaviness of Being 18

I did not expect this book to stir up huge artistic and philosophical questions for me about children’s literature and what it is/should be/is capable of being, but uh… it did. Sorry – this may not be the best way to start off the discussion! Feel free to start another post/comment thread if it’s hard to talk about other aspects of the book under this umbrella.

Ok. Here is how I feel about Nick and Norah:

1) It’s extremely well-written. I found both the first-person narratives convincing, deft, surprising, funny, and (almost) never seeming as if they were trying too hard. Written by two different authors? You’d never notice.

2) It’s very, very well-observed. Again, both Norah and Nick come across as almost shockingly real human beings – in particular they are utterly believable as 18 year olds born in a specific time period, living in a specific place, obsessed with specific things. All of the music references are spot on (Green Day evokes being 7 years old, Toxic is “vintage Britney” -- hee) and the thought processes and emotional landscapes of all the characters are played out with skill and verve. The book captures precisely what it is like to be in your late teens and figuring out the endings of intense relationships for the first time.

3) It’s totally absorbing: the collapse of the whole novel into one night (or rather the expansion of one night into the space of a whole novel) works, in the sense that change (emotional change) is magnified, easy to observe. You do plunge right into the world of the characters and every small detail seems significant. It’s exactly that feeling you get when you are 18, that this is the night that is going to change your life. They’re engaged in what’s happening with every hair on their bodies, and I’m engaged too.

But…

4) Despite all that, I wasn’t entirely satisfied by the book. Or rather, I was satisfied in the sense that I thought it succeeded in the task of wholly and realistically creating a rich, full picture of one night in the lives of two interesting people. But to me, that’s the entirety of the novel’s achievement. It never tries to connect this night to anything larger, never reaches beyond the intensely personal, self-obsessed, superficially philosophical universe of these characters. While I was reading it I swirled deep into memories of what my life was like when I was that age, but I never felt that the book gave me anything I could carry away with me beyond a pleasant sense of nostalgia.

I guess what I’m saying is that I never felt challenged by it. I kept on thinking, “yeah, yeah, this is just what it’s like.” But never, “Wow! I never thought about it that way before,” or “Hmm. This makes me think of X,” or “This really brings up something fascinating about what happens when two people really connect – I’m excited about taking that idea and reading parts of my life, or the world, or another story, with it in mind.”

And I think for me that tends to be the difference between (a lot of) YA literature and the adult novels I love and that make my heart skip a beat – the YA books seem to be focused on faithful observations of teenage life, on making experiences come to life for their reader; the adult novels seem to expand beyond observation to comment on the lives they observe, and to ask questions about what they might mean.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m being stupid and there are many, many YA books that do that too that I’m not thinking of right now. But sometimes, man, I just want to read a picturebook here. They seem to me to be so much deeper than YA novels. ;-)

P.S. Just coming back to say I really did like the book -- it just made me wonder about some stuff.