Anyway, I'm still trying to decide how I feel about this book, despite having had almost a week now to think over it and organize my thoughts for a review. At this point, I have decided that I most likely never will do such a thing, and so have gone ahead to throw my opinion out into the world.
Billy Kinsey is 17 and he knows the epitome of meaningless. He should, living in an insanely rich California neighborhood in a house far too huge for him and his parents who don't really love each other anymore. They've lived in the house ever since Billy's dad won the lottery, 13 years ago. When he was 11, Billy's twin sister Dorie died in the hospital. She had leukemia, but Billy's bone marrow donation never had time to save her. Now, Billy begins his senior year of high school with no plans for college. He's been an insomniac since Dorie died. He has a massive store of knowledge accumulated over years of research and following interests. He drums himself into numbness in his soundproofed basement drum room. He is completely nihilistic.
And then, on the first week of school, a new student shows up in his history class. The boy's name is Twom Twomey (pronounced like "tomb"). On one arm he has a barbed-wire tattoo. The other arm is covered in colorful flowers. His left hand is marked change. The right says chaos. Twom likes to go a little outlaw--following his own rules and not listening to the idiots. Twom sticks up for the downtrodden. He's kind to the fat, friendless girl who has a crush on him. He avenges the pushing-down of nerdy hacker Ephraim in the locker-room shower. Spending a night in jail is nothing to him. His lifestyle attracts jaded, miserable Billy--it's thoroughly different than anything he's ever known.
Just in time for the start of school, Gretchen Quinn, Dorie's best friend, comes back from Africa, where her doctor parents were researching cures for AIDS. She thinks that she and Billy were friends, too. She's a magnificent runner. She has a perfect family, with an older brother, two little sisters, a parents who love each other. They have conversations at the dinner table, something that, to Billy, might as well be an alien practice. She's about as different from Twom as you could get, and yet Billy finds himself equally attracted to her.
Ephraim, the nerdy hacker, has been avoided for years by Billy--and everyone. But, alongside the other changes of this school year, Ephraim somehow becomes part of Billy's friend circle (also a new thing for Billy). Same with Deliza, the daughter of a man who launders money for a Mexican cartel. Deliza is beautiful, popular, and has taken a fancy to Twom, which means that she ends up spending lots of time with Billy.
Soon, the four friends are onto a major housebreaking operation that becomes routine. They never take anything, just break into the houses of the rich and do their separate things. Billy always sleeps. Any nightmares in these strangers' houses are not his, and he can lay down peacefully without Dorie haunting his rest.
But the peace and mindlessness cannot last. Before they know what's happening, Billy, Twom, Ephraim, Deliza, and even Gretchen--who is only really involved with Billy--are spiralling down into a different kind of meaninglessness from the one they're used to, victims of their own tragic age.
But despite the overarching feeling of gloom, meaninglessness (here we go again), and nihilistic desperation, there were a few funny bits. I especially loved the chapter where Billy just described what dinner is like at all his friends' houses. Twom's grandmother wants to cook, but Twom, knowing that the result will not be edible, yells at her to give him money to buy pizza. Deliza's father yells at her in Spanish behind the dining room doors while her droopy mother presides over the maid-lined table. Gretchen's family has a healthy conversation. But Ephraim's dinner scene is truly the best. His mother and father are having an argument in the kitchen. They've been going for about forty minutes and show no signs of stopping. Twom's running bets on which one will win. They're arguing about whether or not the cumin is kosher, and things are smashing and crashing and breaking and the parents are yelling and shrieking and shouting. "'Do not touch my osso buco, Mira, I'm warning you, do not touch the osso buco!' Osso buco is Italian for 'bone with a hole.' It's a dish that people once had to eat in order not to starve to death, and because most gourmets never had to eat it, they now consider it a delicacy." (p. 146). There was just something about the yelling of "Do not touch my osso buco" that was utterly hilarious. Well, apparently I should stay away from your bone with a hole. Okay then.
And back to gloom and nihilistic desperation, the book did a great job of getting across the message that it was supposed to convey. Reading it, I saw how messed-up people's lives can get by being rich and superficial; by being misunderstood and an outcast; by not knowing enough about the other people around you; by going along wildly and trying to live even when it seems that you should never have been born.
I also really enjoyed Billy's sidebars to give us background information and relevant facts. Not only was it interesting, it did a lot for his character. Some of them were so perfectly placed and so eerie. Billy tells you about all of the unsettling things that might happen in the future, and all of the stupid, cruel, wasteful things that people do today. He describes acts of ignorance, unkindness, and silliness committed in the past. Disaster is the only thing that he believes in, and you can really see how he'd get that way, with his kind of past and present. All I wondered was how he could not realize that it was all the terrible things in his own life that made him like that.
This seems like a good point to go into what I did not like. Related to Billy's narration, the end drove me insane. Metcalfe started doing this thing somewhere in the first third of the book where Billy'd get in a stressful, suspenseful situation and start narrating different ways that the scenario could've gone. When he first started doing it, it worked, because Billy'd say something like, "Fortunately, this is not the way it happened" or something like that. But by the end, it was like we were supposed to be used to the way this unusual device worked, and should be able to figure out when something was real and when something was just another product of an overexcited mind. Sadly, I found that hard. It did contribute to the air of desperation and hopelessness, but I would've liked to have finished the book knowing what had actually happened at the climax.
Also, the stereotyping was absolutely painful. I interpreted it as just another part of the "look-at-the-messed-up-world" theme of the book, but still, I felt that there could've been a more artful way of doing it than having Billy categorize his fellow students into Chinese-speaking Asians who love studying, black sports-playing boys, cruel and moronic jocks, attractive Hispanics, etc.
And regarding Billy and Gretchen's relationship, there was way too much that would've been better left unwritten. Yeesh. The book isn't even really about them--not enough to warrant that kind of attention. There was a lot in there that no one really wants to know.
And yet again, typos. It happened in Sophie's World. It happened to a stupid degree in The Dragonbone Chair. I was really hoping to read a book without typos now, thank you very much, but the Book Monarch of My Selection decided that that was not to be. It wasn't too bad--just the occasional punctuation error or weirdness where the words didn't seem to be the ones that Metcalfe had meant to write. But he also didn't seem to know what a hyphenated adjective was and where to use one. Sometimes they'd appear, but mostly those hyphens lurked untyped, replaced by spaces. Seriously, an author should know how to use hyphenated adjectives. An editor should know even better. A person literate in English should know how to use them! I suppose it's just a tragic age for hyphenated adjectives. And they weren't even hard, some of them. Example: high-functioning. That is a hyphenated adjective! Was it hyphenated? No. It appeared twice, and neither time with a single hyphen to be found.
In short, I'm not sure whether or not I would recommend this book to anyone. The Tragic Age is rather disturbing. But disturbing is not bad. It's just...well, disturbing. I don't think that I would recommend it--not because I think it's bad, but because I'm just not sure if I could trust my judgment about to whom to recommend it. I feel like I'd get it horribly wrong. Maybe no one else should ever read this book, maybe everyone in the world should read it at some point. I couldn't say.