The Impermanence of Love
Written: Oct 22 '06 (Updated Oct 23 '06)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: sympathetic and well-conceived protagonist; engaging writing; intelligent, sensitive, non-cliched treatment of Love
Cons: terrible cover art: cartoon-like and completely age-inappropriate
The Bottom Line: When 16-year-old Jimmy discovers that his mom has run away from home and that he's in love with his friend Zanny, his life unravels in strange and unexpected ways.
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| jc_hall's Full Review: Colin Neenan - Idiot: A Love Story With Drama, Bet... |
Jimmy is 16 going on 17, and in many ways typical of a gangly teenage boy. He’s uncommunicative, undemonstrative, fascinated by the opposite sex and the idea of sex yet does not want to know when his best friend hints at having had a sexual experience. He has enough on his plate—his mom appears to have walked out on the family for some unspecified reason, his father is in a do-nothing Zen mode, his bossy activist sister is back home to hold up the fort, and his fraternal twin brother Jake is, as usual, stoned to the gills.
And as if all this were not enough, his best friend Gene brings up the idea of auditioning for the school play ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. Trading lines with his long-time friend Zanny (Suzannah), Jimmy discovers that he’s in love with her. However, he has reason to believe that Zanny’s in love with his brother Jake.
When Gene’s girlfriend Mary falls in love with a boy she’s been chatting with on the internet for a year and dumps Gene, Jimmy gets the idea of wooing Zanny via e-mail. As eloquent online as he’s not in real life, Jimmy courts Zanny via the web and from behind a false persona. But when he learns that Zanny—the budding gossip columnist who’s always after the story that would make her famous—has printed out the words he’s poured from his heart, Jimmy must intercept and destroy the incriminating evidence before the world gets to read his innermost thoughts.
Who would have guessed that a passing photographer would take a picture of him high up a tree literally eating his words? And who would have guessed that Jimmy’s picture would get splashed all over the tabloids, and he and Zanny would end up on Oprah and Leno, with their own agent and a pending book tour?
But now Jimmy’s locked himself up in a hotel room, desperate to tell the true story, including all that his agent says should not be told, like what happened with his mom, and Jake, and his growing ambivalence towards Zanny.
Idiot! A love story with drama, betrayal and e-mail is a well-wrought tale of teenage angst told from the point of view of a teenage boy. We all know a Jimmy or two, but Colin Neenan has deftly got under the skin of one particular Jimmy to show us the vulnerable, angst-filled boy whose inner turmoil is so skilfully hidden by an aloof and apathetic exterior.
While Jimmy ties himself up in knots inside, tormenting himself about Zanny and Jake, he’s just as wretched worrying about his parents, wondering how they could possibly stop loving each other when they had loved one another so much in earlier years. In several deeply revealing passages, he agonizes over Zanny’s feelings towards him, not wanting her to merely accept him in a passionless way, and wondering if he could trust her to be who she appears to be. Is Zanny merely trying to capitalize on their new-found fame and fortune? Does she love him the way he loves her?
Idiot!’s strength is very much in the characterization of Jimmy, but perhaps even more so in its refusal to stoop to a cliched ‘romantic’ happy-ever-after ending. Jimmy may be your average taciturn teenage boy, but his emotional life is rich and full (if unacknowledged on the surface), and even though he’s disillusioned by the discovery that love, even passionate ‘true’ love, can be transient, he’s determined that he would only entertain a love that’s honest and unselfish and pure.
Plot-wise, there are instances of people somehow just knowing where someone else is, and the reader knows what's going on with Jimmy's dad long before he does. Also, the 16-year-olds all drive around in their own cars, while their parents' cars are all models like Saabs, Mercs, and even a Porsche, so perhaps that's not something that would sit too well with a regular teenager. Other than that, there's little not to like about Idiot!.
Colin Neenan’s other works include In Your Dreams and Live A Little. If Idiot! is anything to go by, he appears to have cornered the fiction market aimed at thinking male teenagers (a rarefied field indeed). I would definitely seek out his other titles and highly recommend Idiot! to all readers, especially teenagers, and taciturn boys in particular.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
jc_hall
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Member: JC Hall
Location: Toronto, Canada
Reviews written: 199
Trusted by: 54 members
About Me:
Going back to Vancouver for Christmas! Happy Holidays, everyone!!
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