Finished it. It was okay. It was fine, even. The endless 80s references actually became background noise after a bit, and I might have had an easier time because a lot of them went over my head. By contrast, I sputtered at a passage comparing whacking off to knocking a proton off a hydrogen atom, which makes no sense.
You know what it reads like? A really bad YA novel I was into as a kid for some reason called Dragonhome. It’s really written in service to the reader, almost as wish-fulfillment. The clunky dialogue is really there to make certain things happen a certain way. It reads like a personal fantasy. In a way, I totally understand the appeal. What if I could find romance and personal wealth just by doing what I already do and am good at? Like what if there was a multibillion dollar contest to see who was best at surfing YouTube videos and making snarky comments online? This is the essence of a fantasy where exceedingly pointless 80s trivia can make your dreams come true. In a way, I can’t even be mad about it as a premise, because clearly his knowledge of 80s trivia made Cline a lot of money.
I was vaguely aware that there were some hot-takes on the book, especially post gamergate, but I decided to wait until after I read the book to avoid having my opinion clouded by them. I don’t think they land as hard as the authors of the aforementioned hot-takes probably think they do. It’s a potboiler that took off. That’s really all there is to it. Cline’s writing is symptomatic of a lot of things but it’s not like he’s an architect of reactionary ideals.
I could talk about the ways the book doesn’t answer a lot of questions I have about its postapocalyptic world, but when I start asking those questions I end up in the same place: Why didn’t he write the book I wanted him to write? Which is not how I like to evaluate books. I will say that a portion of the book came across a much poorer version of The Space Merchants. But now that I got that off my chest, I’d like to focus on the book Cline tried to write: A book for adults, and he failed to do that.
It’s a YA novel. Not that I have a problem with YA novels, but that’s what it is. That’s its heart and soul. It reads like one and it feels like one. I think once I started evaluating it as one, the cookie-cutterness of its characters didn’t bother me as much. I could relate to the protagonist more easily when I realized that the reader is the protagonist. Bring your baggage with you and you’ll still fit right in.
It’s designed that way, right from the beginning with a plot device of great convenience: Dead parents. That’s your backstory if you want a young adolescent protagonist that a reader can project and compare their actions to. “No way my mom would let me miss that much school… but his parents are dead, so what would I do in this situation…?”
Similarly, we have our conveniently smitten love interest. (Who, let’s be clear, does not matter in this book beyond her function in that capacity.) It’s cringeworthy in parts, but other parts, like one chapter that features a chat conversation between her and the main character ring cringe-worthily true for a certain person (and let’s really not name names here coughReactionabecough) who may have had chat conversations that looked very similar as a teenager. (Although, I’d actually have met the girl in real life.) Cline really doesn’t know how to write women characters, just the shadows we tend to recognize as feminine.
All of that said, Cline keeps the stakes high and the tensions taught. All the guns our Tolstoy warns about go off, and he managed to fool me into forgetting about many of them until they went off. Parts of it read very sincerely as loving odes to things remembered, and some of it actually comes across as sweet. I strongly suspected there was a hidden code in the book, and I wasn’t disappointed. I like it that Cline did that. It’s disappointing when books about characters solving puzzles or riddles don’t themselves contain one. At least that’s how I’ve often felt.
Cline delivered a book that I felt good about finishing, but one I’m going to set aside and never read again. Maybe if it came to me at the exact right time in my life, I’d have fallen in love with it, as many have. Then I’d probably read it over and over again and not realize it’s problems until I was much older. Instead, I’m curious to know just how awful Dragonhome really was, after all these years.
