Issues with issues

Golden Boy By Abigail Tarttelin Atria Books 352 pp; $24.99

Abigail Tarttelin’s second novel, Golden Boy, appears to be intended for adult readers, though it may be better suited to a much younger audience. Tarttelin’s main interest seems to be the exploration of social issues; teen bullying, intersexual identities, rape and abortion are handled with a moralizing proficiency, and the novel would make for a decent introduction to different perspectives on each of what are exceedingly unambiguous themes of the book. At its worst, the book reads like it was reverse-engineered from some kind of progressive high school teacher’s essay assignment.

The titular boy, Max Walker, is the intersex child of a prominent political family in a small, wealthy burg outside of Oxford, England. Max was born with two sets of chromosomes, both XX and XY, making him somewhat of a medical anomaly. The term intersex applies to a wide range of individuals who have biological characteristics, be they anatomical or chromosonal, that are not described by the conventional male/ female dichotomy. There is a long history of violence perpetrated on bodies that fall outside of socially prescribed norms, and Golden Boy touches very briefly on the changing attitudes that physicians and psychologists are adopting in response to a more humane understanding of the human race’s biological diversity. Each chapter of the novel is written from the first-person perspective of someone close to the Walker family: Max, his mother or father, his younger brother, Daniel, his girlfriend, Sylvie, and his new, open-minded physician, Archie, who seems to have been included principally as a means of conveying to the reader the biological and medical knowledge required to understand something concrete about the condition of being intersex.

According to the Intersex Society of North America, one or two out of every 1,500 babies born on this continent present ambiguous sexual anatomy, and it is unknown precisely how many people in the world are chromosomally intersex. It is a failure of contemporary literature that the number of published stories is not representative of the population at large, and so it’s even more difficult to face the disappointments of Golden Boy. Unlike Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel

Middlesex (2002), or Kathleen Winter’s Annabel (2010), Tarttelin’s efforts in Golden Boy make no use of the wonder of language or literary forms to invest in the inherent ambiguity of her subject. The device of switching back and forth from different characters’ perspectives grows tedious less than midway through and is employed to inconsistent effect. Some of the chapters are relayed in the present tense; others feel overtly expository when relayed describing past; some are like faux diary entries (Sylvie’s tangential ruminations on how to develop her skills as a spoken word artist, for example), while the very first one is very specifically done in the form of a gradeschool essay by nine-year-old Daniel. I found myself longing for more coherence to the way Tarttelin chose to write the story of this family. The chapters are arranged chronologically, and

The book reads like it was reverse-engineered from a progressive high school teacher’s essay assignment

though the story traces the after-effects of a traumatic event (Max is raped by a family friend about 10 pages in), I can’t help but wonder if the novel would have been better if the violence wasn’t ushered in so rapidly — the shocking opening to the story that initially seemed so unbearably brutal wears thin once the story moves on from it. It becomes merely a sensationalistic hook to the novel, rather than the catalyst for a rewarding exploration of one boy’s singular vulnerabilities.

Aside from Max, the characters are mostly flat. Max’s mother, especially, suffers from being depicted as a near-parody of working motherhood; her only concerns are about what other people think of her, of the family (“…we store all the wine at the back door. I don’t want people to think we’re heavy drinkers...” she narrates, shortly before informing us she has two uniforms, one for her high-powered lawyering, one for PTA meetings). When the father character arrives at centre stage late in the book, the insight that perhaps this particular family would have all benefitted from a still-atypical arrangement of having Mom in the position of primary breadwinner and Dad as primary caretaker feels boring and inevitable — the reader will likely have already bought into the idea that atypicality is a-OK. Golden Boy is weighed down by its adherence to responsibly describing capital-I-issues. Though the novel seems to be presented as some kind of Very Special Episode, Golden Boy itself is, as a work of literary fiction, completely unremarkable.