Project X

Reads Like Teen Spirit

It's terribly inconsistent, the lag between a major historical event and the moment when the fiction it inevitably inspires begins to surface. Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead appeared just three years after the end of World War II; Don DeLillo's Libra was published almost 25 years after his protagonist, Lee Harvey Oswald, shot Kennedy; more recently, Gabe Hudson's Dear Mr. President became the first significant piece of Gulf-war fiction, 11 years later.

Well, now we know that it took somewhere closer to the Mailer model for Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's disturbing Colorado shootings to usher in the advent of Columbine fiction. It's been five years since the event, and the first to appear was D. B. C. Pierre's smear of a novel, Vernon God Little, which reads as if it were written by an Australian adult trying to sound like an Australian teenager trying to write like a Texas teenager. But, maddeningly, it won the Booker Prize, despite its narrator's carelessly constructed voice. (Vernon says ain't and fucken a lot but also gets in a motorcoach.)

Now there is Jim Shepard's Project X, which shares some strange affinities with Pierre's book. Both take as their antihero a secondary figure in a school shooting. Each has a significant scene in which its teenage narrator defends his heterosexual honor by answering how many holes a girl has. Weird. But Project X, even for its distracting stabs at capturing the specifics of teenage thought (everyone "goes" instead of "says" things), is a feat of verisimilitude, with an inspired evocation of the caprices of adolescence, deftly tracing the fine line between idle pent-up angst and the kind that puts a gun in the hand of an eighth grader who might use it.

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