Intentional or not, modern parenting prepares kids to reach lofty personal accomplishments in high school, ultimately propelling them towards success in college and beyond. Beyond, though, produces quite a bit of anxiety in most adolescents. A definite end point with looming unanswerable questions exists for every overly-structured childhood. Will I get into college? What kind of college? What’ll I do after college? Most teenagers go to school, do their homework and avoid thinking about these things because they’re unable to come up with plausible answers.
That’s not even addressing what happens when teenagers fall short of their imagined success. Motivation, skill, physical health, mental health, intelligence and competition are all variables that get in the way of lofty goals. Joe Mauer was a monster for his high school baseball team in Saint Paul, and I always wonder about the average high school athlete backing him up and sitting on the bench every season. What does he do with himself when he realizes his star potential will never be achieved?
Well, he might end up in one of DC Piersons two novels. Both of his narrators are suburban males with quite a bit of anxious uncertainty in their lives. Darren, the narrator in The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To, avoids most of the hard questions I’ve brought up by creating a fictional narrative full of cyborgs, zombies and mechwarriors, which is a great hobby but doesn’t supply much status or extrinsic rewards in high school. Tom, the narrator in Crap Kingdom, is having a little more success in his school’s theater department but is too distracted by his own thoughts to enjoy it.
Both characters fall short of their perceptions of success and Pierson’s strong characterization unfolds as their disappointment and existential avoidance mixes with awkward teenage development. Like most teenagers, they can’t see past their present situations because of their inability to realistically imagine the future. Somehow being on the run with a kid who doesn’t need sleep or traveling to a fantasy kingdom makes more sense than thinking about college.
I think this is why people have such a hard time relating to teenagers. I can imagine myself fairly accurately in 5 years: Awesome beard, living in my house, married to my wife and planning for a garden in the Spring. I’m aware all of those things could change (except for the beard, of course) but I’m also aware they may not. Ask a 17 year old to imagine himself at 22 and you’ll either get lots of generalities or else a blank stare while he wonders if a lightsaber or flight would help him more in a zombie apocalypse. Pierson understands this teenage distinction and writes it really well.
I enjoyed the story more in The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To, which is set in high school but written for adults. It gets a bit fanciful and dark in the third act, but both give Darren’s overall narration a sense of authenticity I appreciated fully after finishing the novel. Crap Kingdom is a YA novel set in high school that I enjoyed more in the beginning than the end, which probably speaks more to the YA nature of storytelling than anything Pierson could have done differently.
Both narrators do their best to ignore tough existential questions about the eventual death of their childhood but eventually realize the impossibility of infinite avoidance. They accept the limits of their abilities with varying levels of success. For Darren, it means he has to leave his fantasy world behind and live in the only one available to him. For Tom, it means he also has to leave his fantasy world behind and be more open to unexpected deviations in the future (like other fantasy worlds). Their acceptance of their existential situations gives them the freedom to go forward into adulthood.
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