RELATABLE READING

Love between the generations and the trials of teenhood, seen through the eyes of an unusual protagonist, are highlighted in 100 Remarkable Feats of Xander Maze: the new novel by CLAYTON ZANE COMBER.

Travelling to Europe with my 90-year-old Nanna for six weeks wasn’t easy. Neither was the fact that my partner Hannah and I thought, “let’s just have an adventure”, and didn’t even book where we were intending on travelling. To be honest, I wouldn’t recommend doing it this way. But that 2014 trip did give us the adventure of a lifetime.

When I first began writing 100 Remarkable Feats of Xander Maze, now over five years ago, the first thing I wanted to commemorate was the special love between a grandparent and grandchild. Growing up with two migrant parents who worked full-time, my Nanna played a huge role in raising my brother and me: cooking our breakfast, picking us up from school, making our family dinners. I don’t really remember my other grandparents, so it was my Nanna who did all the work herself. And believe me, my brother and I wouldn’t have been easy to deal with. Nanna has always been #1 on my list of Most Special People. The next thing I knew was that the protagonist of my story was going to be someone on the outside of the high school social scene.

Someone who was a little more vulnerable and sensitive to the immense of pressures of high school.

A teenager whose main life influences are his Nanna and a single mother who wants to shelter him at all costs.

In place of Netflix, Xander has Star Wars VHS tapes, and in place of Spotify, he has Linda Ronstadt and Elvis Presley CDs.

His main hobby is list-making. And he knows a lot about a lot that no-one cares about, like the ninety-six bags of excrement left on the moon, and Vesna Vulovic, the flight attendant who survived a 33,000-feet free fall.

Xander’s struggles with social anxiety become more prevalent when his Nanna is diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer and tells him that writing and attempting a list of 100 Remarkable Feats will cure her; then his list is shared online so everyone in his high school and within his community knows what he’s trying to do.

A list that is initially met with bullying from boys in his year, but also attracts a group of other characters with different intentions.

As a list-maker myself, usually of irrelevant topics such as Top #5 Movies from the 1990s (#1: Ten Things I Hate About You), or Top #5 Linda Ronstadt Songs (#1: When Will I Be Loved), I understood Xander’s motivation in attempting to make people interested in something trivial. Xander also writes lists to people he admires, which is something I did/do myself – remembering when I was a child and wrote a letter to Hayley Lewis after she won gold at the Commonwealth Games, and she wrote me back a handwritten letter, which I stuck on my wall for many years and made its way into the novel. The final and probably most important thing I wanted to write a book about was the inability to accept the unacceptable.

Two years ago, I lost my father to cancer. A remarkable man who was not only my friend, but my best friend. Dealing with the grief of losing him, I found myself in a state of self-denial, holding on to any misguided hope because there was no way I could accept the alternative.

Due to Xander’s unique way of seeing and experiencing the world, I know people might question his ability to believe in such a thing. While Xander might be in self-denial, this is ultimately a book about wishful thinking and allowing grief to become part of us without overtaking us.

Xander wrote a list; I wrote a book.

Sometimes I think adults get so caught up in their busy lives that they forget it’s hard to be a teenager.

I know I do. And that’s why I wrote this book from a young adult perspective – because we can all relate to Xander’s story in some way.

And because it’s worth remembering that a lot of grandparents out there are more connected to the younger generation than they might imagine — despite thinking Tik Tok is something to do with a clock.

Clayton Zane Comber is a writer and bookseller from the South Coast of NSW. His new novel, 100 Remarkable Feats of Xander Maze, published by HarperCollins Australia, is out now.

Our Book of the Month is We Were Not Men by Campbell Mattinson.

Head to Booktopia and enter the code CAMPBELL at checkout to receive 30 per cent off the RRP of $32.99.

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