Waking up in a teen afterlife
Boo, the remarkable debut novel from Montreal writer Neil Smith (whose short story collection Bang Crunch was nominated for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book), is a breathtaking balancing act, infusing a delicate, fablelike tone with a meticulous realism, incorporating both topical concerns — school shootings, adolescent development — and the timeless questions of man’s search for meaning.
It begins with the death of its protagonist. As he describes with a characteristic precision, 13-year-old Oliver Dalrymple — nicknamed Boo owing to his “deathly pale skin” — “died in front of my locker at Helen Keller Junior High on September 7, 1979.”
But for Boo, death is not the end. He wakes up in a very particular afterlife, populated solely by 13-year-old Americans.
The scientifically minded Boo begins to investigate and chronicle this afterlife known as Town, a world governed by strange occurrences (the regular appearance of random items from our world, for example, and the utter absence of others) and odd physical laws.
He can’t remember his own death, which he ascribes to a weakness in his heart, but Boo documents his afterlife with a cool, detached meticulousness, revelling in the friends he makes — a novelty for a boy who was always an outsider — and the mysteries around him.
The mysteries aren’t just of a logistical or scientific variety — Why isn’t there toothpaste? Why do the residents have to brush their teeth with baking soda? — but those small mysteries lead to larger concerns, questions Boo didn’t have in life.
What do people mean by “spirituality” anyhow? What is the relationship between God (whom Boo refers to as Zig) and the afterlife? What, for that matter, is the relationship between Zig and the living world?
The biggest mystery comes, though, with the arrival in Town of a classmate from Helen Keller, a classmate who was critically injured at the same time Boo died, dying only after weeks in a coma.
Johnny Henzel wasn’t friends with Boo during their lives, but he brings a shocking truth to the afterlife: “‘We didn’t die from a f---ing heart defect, Boo.’ His voice is hoarse and shaky. ‘We got shot by some crazy kid at school.’ ”
Boounfolds as a simultaneously delight- ful and thoughtful mélange of genres and tropes, part coming of age story, part fantasy, part murder mystery.
It wears its antecedents proudly — a teenager coming to terms with his own violent death from the afterlife can’t help but remind readers of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, while Boo’s narrative voice is strongly reminiscent of that of Christopher Boone, the mathematically-obsessed, possibly autistic narrator of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime — but it manages to feel fresh.
Much of this freshness is due to the delicate balance Smith establishes over the course of the novel between whimsy and darkness, which sustains and propels the narrative.
Boo is living in a world of wonders, a place where he is surrounded by peers who, like him, never age, a world that regrows itself when damaged. One cannot escape, however, a constant awareness that Boo isn’t really living at all; no one in Town is.
Time passes, but the residents do not change, frozen as they were at the moment of their deaths. As a result, the novel is multi-faceted and rich, moving through tones of joy and warmth, of loss and regret, never lingering too long on any single note.
It makes for an oddly stirring reading experience, and the novel’s climax draws all of the tones together in a passage that is devastating in its emotional weight. It’s a powerful novel, unsettling in the best of ways. Robert Wiersema’s novel Black Feathers is out in August.
Boo is living in a world of wonders, a place where he is surrounded by peers who, like him, never age