The Boy

“Ms. Santoro has crafted a book just as fascinating [as Junot Diaz’s This Is How You Lose Her], twice as stark, and simply unforgettable.”

Anna is in free fall.

Four years after her bitter divorce, she and her eight-year-old daughter, Eva, are living across the country from her ex-spouse. Feeling lonely in her chosen home and bored by motherhood and being nice—a new state of existence for Anna—she finds herself missing her former life of drugs, alcohol, and travel.

In her mid-forties, she meets her neighbor’s 20-year-old son and soon finds herself in the midst of an obsessive, reckless affair with the younger man. She slips back into old patterns of behavior, and the result is sobering.

It takes a special kind of writer to pursue the development of a character like Anna. Utterly unlikable at the beginning, her character spirals downward as the novel progresses until it becomes almost painful to watch her degeneration.

Lara Santoro had to realize that her character was nearly as despicable as Humbert Humbert in Lolita, yet she forges ahead in this starkly brilliant book, letting the character be who she is without apology and without the usual redemption scenes.

It has to be difficult to resist making a protagonist likeable in some manner, but Ms. Santoro resists that siren call in favor of crafting a harsh, strong, very realistic narrative. When one character describes her as a” notoriously volatile serial alcoholic” it’s easy to nod along vigorously.

By divesting her story of empathy or sympathy with the main character, Ms. Santoro sets herself the arguably more arduous task of creating a worldscape in which the reader’s suspension of disbelief is accomplished via the author’s writing skill. This Ms. Santoro has in spades—and that is especially clear when noting that the book is less than 200 pages. Given that limit, it should not be a surprise that descriptions are sharp and clear; the talent lies in her ability to make them evocative at the same time: “. . . empty spaces strikingly void of expectation, placid parentheses in which his need for words simply disappeared,” for example.

The author’s dialogue is also very real. Consider this exchange when Eva is on her mandatory visit to her father in Britain:

“I know,” Eva sighed, “Daddy’s irresponsible.”
“Crazy irresponsible.”
“It’s what he says about you.”
“Like I said, don’t listen to a word your father says.”

Not only does it tell volumes about the relationships involved, but it also has the ring of a real post-divorce conversation. Dialogue between the adult characters is brilliant, if scathing at times.

Thought Anna is clearly the primary character, no player is minor in this gem of a book. Her ex-husband, her lover (Jack), his father, her au pair—no one is given short shrift. The author presents them all as rounded characters, no better nor worse than any other human being.

Even Eva comes out well, and that is a delight. Many writers of adult novels tend to make juvenile characters more juvenile than their age or upbringing would dictate; Ms. Santoro does not do this with Eva. She acts believably as an eight-year-old child who possesses her background would.

The advantages of description, dialogue, and characterization are nothing without a strong story. The Boy certainly qualifies in this aspect. Though it is not especially enjoyable to watch a seemingly irredeemable character trash her own life, Ms. Santoro makes it impossible to look away.

Junot Diaz created a character, Yunior, that was nearly as unlikable in this year’s brilliant This Is How You Lose Her, but he allowed himself the luxury of end-of-book redemption. Without that element, Ms. Santoro has crafted a book just as fascinating, twice as stark, and simply unforgettable.