Why We Broke Up - Spoiler Review

[Sora]

SPOILERS FOR Why We Broke Up AHEAD







So I just finished Why We Broke Up. Or as Al would say Why Losing Your Virginity to A Jock Is Hard (In More Ways Than One!). At the beginning of the novel I was feeling the Lemony/Beatrice similarities: a three hundred and change page novel about the reasons why two people who clearly liked each other enough could not be together any longer. Those similarities of premise end quickly, and are more than likely a completely unintended coincidence.

This book is not fantastic. Unlike Handler's characters I am of an opinion about it, and that opinion is that the work is so-so. It has some brilliant moments of voice, which I will get into in a moment, where Handler genuinely channels the mind of a 16 year old girl. However, many a time Handler's whimsical vision of high school life in his often awkwardly anachronistic-now comes across as naive and forced. It is as if Handler is imagining high school as a word of tropes that you have to rub the edges off to make relatable as opposed to realizing that the tropes of jock/art student/jock-girlfriend are all unrealistic to begin with.

The story follows the brief (only 7 weeks) relationship between Min and Ed. Min is a cinephile who dreams of being a director and wanders through her weekends with best friend Al, seeing obscure foreign films and relating everything she experiences to the experiences of favorite characters and stars. Ed is a basketball player. Ed thinks everything outside of beer-basketball-beer-bonfire-basketball-sex is just gay, and finds reason to mention this all of the time. Through a series of mini-letters connected to objects within a storage box, Min explains why each object had a special (now spoiled) memory for her of their relationship, and why she can no longer hold on to them. I liked this method of story-telling, and once Maira Kaufman has drawn most of the objects (in the ARC there were only two or three of the objects drawn, the rest you had to imagine) the memories will feel very physical for the audience, which works well with Min's detailed descriptions of her relationship's physicality. And boy is there a lot of physicality. This book might also be retitled We Kissed and Made Up, Till You *ucked It All Up (Literally and Figuratively).

(FYI: There is a remarkable amount of profanity in this book. It wasn't jarring, and was remarkably authentic for the YA genre, but nonetheless, be aware if that sort of thing bothers you.)

Handler's description of the build-up to Min 'giving up her keys' (his words) seemed the most genuine aspect of this entire novel. There is a bit of fanfare about it, but for the most part it just happens, and awkwardly, with a lot of regret and a lot of satisfaction. It was probably the most authentic description of a first-time I have read since The Shoebox Project, which says something serious about the state of young adult literature today. Min doesn't walk away from sex thinking 'This was amazing!' while the band plays on. There is a mixture of emotions that build and rise for a long time afterwords, and considering what Ed does to Min later on, I can totally relate to her frustration in recalling the event after the break-up over whether to think of it as generally good or generally disappointing.

This fantastic defiance of YA's general mistreatment of virginity does not extend however, to many other aspects of high school life. No-one in Handler's world, has a cellphone, or txts, or emails, or uses the internet. There are a number of different international cinemas in a relatively small suburb (all the students of all the high schools in the area can apparently have one massive Halloween party on a football field), which Min and Al have infinite funds to visit every-weekend. Kids can go to to a Pure Evil themed party dressed as Republicans, but no-one gets in trouble for calling a kid 'fag' all day everyday. Again, I was amused by Handler's almost John Hughes like high school environment (Min and Molly Ringwald's character from Pretty in Pink would have gotten on swimmingly.) and all his made-up movie titles/plots, but when it comes to really channeling contemporary high school life I feel he comes up too short. And in the end, that really is what he had to succeed in to make this novel work. The storyline is simple: girl tells boy why cheating is wrong after saying 'I love you'; boy doesn't understand. It is the interpretation that makes all the difference, and the believability that makes you want to relate to the story. Anyone can guess the big reveal of Ed's infidelity well ahead of time, and when Handler made it so obvious I was certain that he was going to shock us with a big reveal. Alas, Al turned out to be in love with Min (I guess you can't have a best-guyfriend who isn't into you and also isn't gay.), and Ed had sex with his ex-girlfriend who was easier for him to understand. Everything was so tidy and Min was so defeated at the end that I ended up sighing and setting the book down after the final pages, a little defeated myself.

I know this sounds really negative, but I think that people should read the book for themselves regardless. The concept is intriguing, and the story is redeemed enough by moments like the virginity scenes to make it worth trying. Just don't have your expectations up that Handler is trying to revolutionize the teen genre like he did with the children's genre in ASOUE.

[Dante]

I just skimmed your review, Sora, to get the gist of it without reading any real spoilers, and it sounds like Handler was trying to break out of his usual absurdist mould, and only succeeding maybe half the time. If you think about it, everything he writes is usually, one way or another, not intended to actually be realistic; most of his adult novels are barmy and take place halfway into fantasy, for instance. From what we know of his long-in-the-works pirate novel, that'll be the same. And unless my half-reading of your review means I missed a bit where everything turns out to be taking place in fairyland, this isn't; this is meant to have realism. And the question is, does Handler do realism?

[Sora]

Apologies for the review being spoiler heavy - if you want I can post a much more general review later on.

As for the issue of realism, I totally agree that Handler's works generally fall into an almost fantastical world of their own with regards to setting and time. I was even willing to apply that belief to this book for much of the earlier half, especially when first presented with the magical realism of Min's 300 page letter being supposedly written over the course of a 20 minute car ride. However, Handler appears to have struggled with the balance of absurdism and realism in order to create relatability: Min eventually voices the audience's question herself, and logically explains that she took a detour to an extremely accomodating cafe to write the entirety of her letter before returning to the car to drop Ed's stuff off. Similarly, realism is then transformed back to absurdism in scenes like when Min and Ed contemplate walking across a cemetary at night, recognizing at first that the location is one where a lot of older men go to secretly make out (most suburban towns do have locations like this), only to later walk across the cemetary blissfully unaware of themselves, and even contemplate holding a party right in between the gravestones. I do believe that a balance of the two styles is possible and works at points in the novel, but often times it really has moments where it shakes you out of your reading.

[Christmas Chief]

Thanks for the review, Sora! The struggle for balance you described is the feel I also get from a lot of Handler's adult novels; I think his at times aloof-like style makes the realism effect difficult to pull off. On another note, some details from the book mentioned don't particularly strike me as YA; I guess I'll see how Handler handles them when reading the novel for myself.

Also, you say the book relies heavily on visuals--how exactly is that? Are the mini-letters illustrated, or just the objects?