Without over-analyzing why, good readers know with laser certainty when they've met a character that will stay with them forever. Add to your list Darren Ryleston, the blond, red bandanna headband wearing sophomore at Knighton College in Illinois in 1999, who is half of the emotional center of Jonathan Strong's expansive, gently humorous and melancholy new novel, Consolation. The other half is his poetry professor Rich Morelli, contentedly partnered with Erik Vieira (usually absorbed in a Virago paperback) from who he hides his deep yet restrained love for Darren. With all the immediacy of youth, Darren doesn't pine idly but spends his time blogging shirtless or nearly naked on camera that he thinks Rich is hot, inviting him to dinner at his parents' house, and ultimately demanding a kiss, saying, "I don't care if I'm being inappropriate." Darren has always had crushes on older men, notably the "bigger and super masculine" handsome neighbor dad, Mitch Ittwix, to whom at fifteen he sent letter saying, among other things, "it would be awesome to go off somewhere with you sometime. Like maybe I could come along on one of your trips to Chicago and stay over in your hotel?" signing it Love, Darren. Mitch notes:
"There was a tentativeness to the penmanship of 'Love' that Mitch now recognized as a fifteen-year-old boy's reluctance to use the word, as if he'd wanted to back away from it slightly but not so far as not to say it."
The tenderness of that observation is everywhere throughout this novel. Darren's own enlightened parents have always encouraged him in all aspects of his life. His father has invented an island near the Antipodes called Oo for which he has imagined a people, devised a language, and molded a topography in a giant replica. Darren convinces a classmate to pretend to be an exchange student from Oo and come to his parents' house for dinner. The book follows several memorable characters, including a town nuisance Avery Clegg who welds scrap junk together, a guest lecturer the black poet Jennifer Johnson-King, and Darren's classmates Consuelo Young, Lakshmi Satyanarayanan, Craig Rolvag, Keir Phinney, and Briana Berenson, half of whom are involved in launching a production of Shakespeare's weaker effort, Henry the Sixth, Part One. Darren's proteges, Mitch's son called Ubby (from Robert) and daughter Souzha (Susan) make avant garde remixed music and collages -- both, you'll note, are forms of re-imagining. Careful readers will at some point notice that everyone in the novel is involved in forms of creation and the title comes from Rich offering "the consolation of art." For Rich the professor it may end there, but Strong the author expands the point beautifully. It is specifically after the effort of imagining, the attempt at creating, that people in their real lives find the courage to move forward in action. Another arresting achievement from a vexingly under-appreciated artist.
Order Consolation here and buy Strong's tremendous Drawn From Life
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