Gentle on his mind
Celebrated YA author explores teen sexuality while paying homage to Virginia Woolf.
If you didn’t know better, you could be forgiven for thinking the author’s name is the title of this gently unfolding day in the life of Adam, the gay second son of a Pentecostal pastor, set in small-town America. This is what happens when you’re a bestselling, multiple award-winning author.
The title itself, Release, is barely discernible on the graphically simple cover – an embossed sheen imprinted on the deep jade silhouette of a boy heading into a forest. Yet it encapsulates the theme that runs through the book’s pages as clearly as the path that cleaves twin profiles on the visually stunning dust jacket of Patrick Ness’s new novel.
The idea of letting go binds the interlaced stories of Adam – plus his bestie Angela, his former and current boyfriends, and his fundamentalist family – with the spirit of Katherine, a recently murdered teen druggie, the story of whose demise alternates with episodes from Adam’s (very busy) day.
Everything in this book is loaded with significance, from the first line, which sets up a resonance with Virginia Woolf’s Mrs
Dalloway – “Adam would have to get the flowers himself” – to chance sightings of goats and fires, and a baptismal font.
The alternative story is complicated by Katie’s possession by the queen of a parallel world – she has just one day to find release from this earthly spirit – and her protector, a faun who mops up after the royal one as she sears her way through the route taken by the girl and the meth head who dragged her not-yet-dead body, weighted down with bricks in her pockets (yes, Virginia!) into the town’s lake. Complicated? Maybe, but this is not a difficult book – though it richly repays rereading.
Release is exquisitely crafted, elegantly written and, at times, very funny. Ness sends up small-town life – much as he did in The Rest of Us Just Live Here – with witty asides about religion, law enforcement, the ubiquity of guns and the fumblings of teen sex – of which there is plenty, all gay and infinitely tender.
Even Adam’s lifelong friendship with Angela, the Korean-born adopted daughter of a Dutch mother, is under threat. Having sustained them both throughout the days of their fairly ordinary lives – “All the stuff that counted. All the stuff that made the cement that stuck them together” – they may just have to let that go too.
Time to reread Mrs
Dalloway.
Ness sends up small-town life with asides about religion, law enforcement, the ubiquity of guns and the fumblings of teen sex.