Some Hell

December 11, 2017
Nathan’s dark debut novel weaves violent sexual fantasies and aggressively self-destructive behavior into a harrowing character study. Thirteen-year old Minnesotan Colin blames himself after his father commits suicide. He gains no comfort from his distant older sister, his volatile autistic brother, or his deeply depressed, newly chain-smoking mother as he reads his father’s convoluted journals in search of an explanation for his father’s death. At this vulnerable time, his best friend, Andy, coerces him into sex and then immediately ostracizes him, confirming Colin’s worst fears about his budding desires. As he continues to wallow and berate himself for not being normal, his young, charming science teacher offers his support. Their relationship quickly moves beyond appropriate but doesn’t fulfill Colin’s self-destructive fantasy of being kidnapped and murdered. Nathan flits across the next two years and intersperses the recovery of Colin’s mother Diane, who finally attends bereavement counseling only to develop a strong, possibly reciprocated crush on her therapist. Mother and son, both willfully ignoring their continued psychological fragility, embark on a long-planned cross-country vacation to California, building to the book’s unsettling conclusion. Though difficult subject matter pervades the work, some readers will find moments of beauty in the rawness of grief’s confusions and yearning.

Starred review from January 15, 2018
A gripping account of the intricately woven mind of a teenager.In small-town Minnesota, Colin is not much more than a troubled preteen with an older sister, Heather, who resents him (and everything else), an older brother, Paul, who has autism, parents who grow increasingly distant as time passes, friends he can't rely on, and a budding, unruly sexuality. When his father commits suicide, Colin is forced to pick up the pieces of his broken family while contemplating both his own death and homosexuality. "It was impossible for a boy to just grow into a new face, a new body and skin....In the world he imagined, boys stepped out of their old skin and that was the end." If only it were as easy as shedding an old skin for a new one. Simultaneously, Colin's mother, Diane, faces similar issues--though on an adult scale. She begins therapy sessions to deal with grief, picks up unhealthy habits, and gets significantly closer to Colin, neglecting her other two children. Colin and Diane quickly form a redoubtable duo--though much of their development happens when they are separated--that turns its back on societal expectations. For Diane, Colin is her peer--and vice versa. The result is intoxicating. Nathan has crafted an all-consuming novel in which topics like suicide, homosexuality, parenting, friendship, and psychology make up a precarious tableau in which readers can leave their own subjectivity behind and experience the world from Colin's singular viewpoint. "Nobody caught the names he called himself. Nobody saw him put his hands together and nobody knew what god he prayed to, what promises he made. Nobody saw him unfold his hands and look at his wrists where the blood flowed fragile and breathless and blue....Nobody knew was he was thinking."A magnetic first novel combining wit, sex, and apocalyptic reverie.

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Starred review from December 1, 2017
What fresh hell can this be? author Dorothy Parker once acidly asked. Fourteen-year-old Colin has the answer: his life. Blaming himself for his father's death, the boy is obsessed with self-hatred and the desire to be punished. Reading his late father's cryptic, enigmatic journals, he fittingly comes across a tantalizing entry called Things I've Learned in Hell. Unfortunately, his unhappy life teaches him its own bleak lessons: he fellates the boy he loves (yes, he's gay) and is then cruelly abandoned; his family crumbles; he begins a tentative relationship with a predatory teacher; and the soul-killing inventory goes on. Meanwhile, his mother is living her own hell: suicidal, she carries her late husband's gun and a cache of bullets in her purse; has an ill-advised affair; and falls in hopeless love with her therapist. Finally, fleeing the quotidian awfulness of their respective lives, mother and son travel to Los Angeles, where instead of healing, they find only the Apocalypse. If all this sounds melodramatic, in Nathan's skillful, beautifully written telling, it isn't. He selects his incidents artfully andin part by shifting the point of view between Colin and his motherdoes a masterful job of creating believable, multidimensional characters about whom the reader cares desperately. And if their ending is heartbreaking, it is artistically inevitable. Nathan's first novel is beautifully done and promises to linger in the reader's memory.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)