Project X
by Jim Shepard
Reads Like Teen Spirit
A review by Daniel Torday
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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