For some of us,
including me, Alex Woods is us. Of course, the beauty of a novel is that it
becomes hyper-reality, but within those sometimes absurd situations, lies a veracity
that makes us love this quirky kid in this delightfully funny novel about a
British boy growing up in Glastonbury. We meet our narrator Alex as a seventeen
year-old when he’s stopped at Dover customs with 113 grams of marijuana and an
urn full of ashes on the passenger seat.
It is here, as he
explains to the police, the story that began years earlier. One a lot of people
knew about, but one that no knew would end this way. When Alex was ten, he was
hit with a meteor. Well the house took the brunt of the force, but Alex was
injured in the head. After miraculously surviving that, it isn’t soon after
that he has his first epileptic seizure, which forces him to stay home, not got
to school for two years, and forced to pass time at his mother’s tarot shop. But
the advantage for him is that it enables him read up on everything dealing with
astrophysics or neurology. Of course he was considered different before the
meteor, and by the time he finally gets back to school at thirteen, he become
what every unusually smart kid seems destined to be, a outsider. Or as he puts
it: “A pariah is someone who's excluded from mainstream society. And if you
know that at twelve years of age, you're probably an inhabitant of Pariah
Town." While escaping a trio of bullies, Alex stumbles into the garden of
Mr. Peterson, an older ex-pat American. It soon after their relationship grows
as Mr. Peterson introduces young Alex to the works of Kurt Vonnegut. This
eventually leads Alex to create an obscure book club called "THE SECULAR
CHURCH OF KURT VONNEGUT". But it’s during this time that Mr. Peterson is
diagnosed with a terminal illness, and after seeing his wife waste away from pancreatic
cancer, Isaac Peterson wants to die with dignity. But he’s realized that to do
this, to choose when and where he is leave this mortal coil, eventually means
Alex and him must come up a plan that could get a teenager in loads of trouble.
The
Universe Versus Alex Woods is Gavin Extence’s debut novel, and is
filled with some wonderful humor, dry as a martini, something that only the
British seem really capable of doing successfully. The framing structure of
using the works of Kurt Vonnegut is rather a brilliant idea, as seems to encourage
the reader (and me) to explore that author’s canon (when Alex meets Mr.
Peterson for the first time, it’s shortly after the author passed. Isaacs’s dog
is named Kurt, as well). And the use of
first person narrative –a device I find at times difficult- actually works
here, as it makes the book a more compelling and accessible read. It is often
laugh out loud funny (especially the interactions with his mother and older
teen friend Ellie), which helps, especially as the last half of the book deals
with a person’s right to die. Extence handles these parts in a very empathic
way, and though Alex Woods is young in chronological years, he seems to carry
an old soul, one that is quirky, but seems to clearly understand his path. This
could be called a life affirming book, even with the moral question of
euthanasia, but I rather not hobble that around the books shoulders. It’s an
enjoyable read, and while it has a message, the author clearly wants his
readers to make their own judgments when it comes to euthanasia, just as Alex
Woods does here.
No comments:
Post a Comment