Grief is a funny thing. In New Adult, Timothy Janovsky uses time travel and mind reading glasses, among other items, to explore growing up, messing up, grief, regret, forgiveness, accountability and doing the hard work of life.
The tagline for the book is “Can we skip to the good part?” If you’re on social media you’ve probably heard the hook of AJR’s “The Good Part” as people show off their accomplishments, glow ups, etc. But in real life we can’t skip the hard work and time. Nolan desperately wants to get past the part where he’s a struggling comedian waiting tables at a comedy club. Janovsky does such a good job of showing Nolan’s complexities. Nolan has put in hard work to be a comedian, but he also has very specific ideas of what success looks like. When opportunity knocks, he drops everything to open the door, but he’s also impatient when he doesn’t get immediate results. He puts his relationships with the people he loves the most at a lower priority because he thinks there will be time in the future, when his career is solid.
When Nolan skips from the night when he had his biggest career break and also made everyone who loves him angry, to a successful stand up comedian about to reach a major career milestone, he learns why “skip to the good part” is a curse, not a gift. We are at any moment the product of hundreds of choices we’ve made. Nolan is a stranger in his own body and has become a person he doesn’t know, because he didn’t make all of those choices. He went to bed thinking he’d be able to repair the relationships he broke, but wakes up with those relationships completely gone from his life. He finds out that it wasn’t just that night that broke the relationships, but the way he behaved when he wasn’t forgiven fast enough.
I think there was something quite interesting to be said about how torturous reconciling our pasts can be when we’re trying hard to change our future.
This line that Janovsky gives to Drew, Nolan’s best friend and love interest, about a murder mystery book is truly the heart of New Adult. Everyone makes mistakes, acts out of self centered desires, hurts the people they love. People are imperfect beings. Where the real harm comes is responding badly when told we’ve caused harm. In the years that Nolan doesn’t remember, he responded by lashing out publicly and using his comedy platform to hurt the people he felt wronged by. What Nolan gets, that none of us get in real life, is an opportunity to see the results of his choices from the perspective of not having lived them.
I really enjoyed Janovsky’s debut, Never Been Kissed, and I can see his growth as a writer from that book to this. For everything going on, and there is a lot, New Adult is tighter and written with more controlled chaos. Nolan’s awareness of the inexorability of time and loss make the relationships he rebuilds sweeter and more poignant.
CW: parental abandonment in past, family fights, public humiliation referenced, memory loss, parent with Alzheimer’s, parent with depression.
I received this as an advance reader copy from Carina Press and NetGalley. My opinions are my own, freely and honestly given.