Learn from your mistakes

Nathan Penlington found a real mystery inside a Choose Your Own Adventure book, though he didn’t go about it the right way

If you came of age in the ’80s or ’ 90s, Choose Your Own Adventures were likely a ubiquitous part of your adolescence. They were gardens of forking paths where you, the reader, chose, for example, either to ignore the disturbing frequency on the earthquake meter and descend your underwater submarine, The Seeker, into the cave, or else to return to the surface to regroup. There were always multiple death scenes. You had the ability to retrace your steps should you come to an abrupt end. They were relatively short reads disguised as full YA novels. You made the choices — and choice, any marketing strategist will tell you, is good for you.

So you take an assignment on nostalgic impulse. The book turns out not really to be about choosing your own adventure, but the opposite: It’s the 400-page travelogue of a man negotiating the oscillating severity of an obsessive disorder. Discovering this, do you engage under the cloud of that initial disappointment? No. The review, like the book, is not about you. Who, then, is the boy in the book? What do we uncover in its pages?

Navigating a low point in his adulthood, Nathan Penlington buys all 106 books in the original series second-hand, hoping to recapture the old sense of adventure and possibility. As a teen, Nathan was bullied. He was shy and introverted, and often forced home from school for long stretches with a misdiagnosed illness. As an adult, within the pages of the CYOAs he finds a sub-story in the form of margin notes and four pages of a diary written by a 15-year-old boy named Terence Prendergast. Prendergast’s notes are the uncut poetry of adolescent awkwardness. They also verge on potentially harmful self-loathing. Samples include: “Practise Laugh” “Got smacked by Coulson 2x, Communion, Confession” and the particularly loaded “Karen, Drugs, Guns.” Penlington is moved, and identifies at once with the sad kid from Birmingham. He wants to find out who he is and what has happened to him in the intervening years.

Finding Terence and establishing contact takes a number of years. Revealing to Terence that he has his diary takes more time, as Nathan, in lieu of exposing his real intentions, poses as someone working on a book about CYOAs. Penlington’s intentions remain pliable: Sometimes it’s simply finding out whether Terence is OK. Sometimes it’s using the connection he feels to the bullied boy as a springboard back into the difficulties of his own childhood.

Working against the narrative drive of the book is a potent mix of Penlington’s social anxieties and his penchant for trying to wring unnecessary drama from scenes. Many scenarios — his first stakeout of the Prendergast family place or his journey

Penlington has a penchant for trying to wring unnecessary drama from scenes

to Prendergast (no relation) Caravan Park to clear his mind — felt tinged with artifice to the point where I was relieved to find that in many of these adventures Penlington was accompanied by three other men, a feature documentary already on their minds. (The accompanying “Choose Your Own Documentary” had a successful theatre run prior to the publication of this book, and a documentary film about Nathan’s search follows this year).

Being honest and forthright with the adult Terence, simply asking him to explain some things about this innocently uncovered diary, is the choice that ghosts the bottom of every page. The adult Terence is a likable, pub-loving, well-travelled and open-minded bloke. He wisely disappears during stretches where Penlington’s obsession creeps toward mania (a series of Penlington’s own diary during one of these stretches is particularly unnerving). Ominousness emerges from Penlington’s obsession, and it’s never entirely clear whether the tone is accidental or intentional. Penlington is mostly high-functioning, occasionally charming, and maintains — just barely — his relationship with his girlfriend Sarah throughout the book.

And yet when he does seem to pry himself from the narrowness of his focus, there is almost always a shadow clause locking the escape hatch and leaving both Penlington and readers trapped on the wheel. A conversation with his friend Fuschia is “an antidote to [his] obsessive despondency,” but also “gives him a way forward to a closer understanding of Terence.” He becomes inspired to keep a diary to sort through his issues, but also to feel closer to Terence. He faces his childhood demons and is ready to move forward, but first must send Terence “one more email to wrap everything up.”

Are these shadow clauses calculated moves by the writer, meant to hammer home the difficult nature of getting out from under an obsession? That’s the generous reading, and it is undermined by Penlington’s inability to heed the voices of warning from Sarah and others; it is undermined by the book’s fleeting encounters with other interesting and potential wellspring subjects, such as the diary collection at the Bishopgate Institute or his interview with CYOA creator Edward Packard; and it is undermined by the meandering and platitude-heavy prose.

Maybe I’m obsessing over a single view, and the happy and revealing end of the book necessitates the one-track mind and anxious delays en route. Still, it felt hard to breath through many of these pages. I felt this most acutely when Terence Prendergast finally got a few pages to speak about himself, and all of that fresh air came rushing into the book from someone else’s point of view. The CYOA series implores you to choose wisely. The

Boy in the Book would appear to be about how hard that is to do.