I didn't know Sherman that well. He sat next to me in Algebra freshman year. We were in the far back corner, closer to the class behind us than the teacher, and for the first half of the year all of the material was a repeat for me (fuck you again high school and your insulting policies about mid-year transfers), so we talked more than we paid attention, and, like any healthy fourteen year old, I developed a crush of the kind only fourteen year old girls can have, which means that I was lost in what he represented to me rather than who he really was. Oh, Romeo, Romeo, where for art thou, Romeo. The story ends almost as well. Over the summer, he killed himself. He was found, hanging, in the woods behind the high school. Devastating for those who were closest to him; hard for the rest of the class; and, for me, something out of parents' worst nightmares and after school specials; one suicide spreads the thought of it faster than word of a party at Jessica's house while her parents are away. I had my own reasons, of course, something complex involving failing French and an unhappy home life and low self-esteem, or whatever mixture of dumb stuff kids are upset about now. I was lucky though, beyond lucky. I fell in with some of the best people I have ever met and these three fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds saved my life just by being my friends and listening to me, being there for me, supporting me, through all of the pain I was going through. I am still friends with two of them. I went to their weddings and I've held their children and although we've managed to live as far away from each other as possible and still be within the continental US, I know that if I needed to, I really could call up either one of them, even now, and talk through the worst that life might have for me.

The other thing I had was my diary. Writing about an experience eases it. I still believe that. Even if it feels like hell at the time, getting it out, written out, makes it more manageable. It is contained there on the page (or on the screen) and it doesn't seem quite so bad when you go back to read it later. I would have been lost without that diary.

So, this book is about the asshole friend who doesn't do anything, who is too oblivious and caught up in himself to even pay attention to who his friends are as people. They exist to create a clique, in which they can feel superior to others, and to talk about how stupid their classmates are, and to give each other someone to hang out with at the pub. Their shared experiences mean little except in-jokes and so they drift apart because they never really needed each other in the first place. And when a diary surfaces in this story, in a most central way, I can't tell that he even read more than a single passage from it.

I never want to be that kind of person. Reading this book is like reviewing an outline of how not to be a person. The petty selfishness, the blinding of the self from truth, the deliberate obtuseness of the protagonist was painful to read about. I don't think it was because of what the author intended for us, which I believe was so obvious that I wonder why the book was necessary at all; one sentence that read, "You complacent, self-righteous, petty fucks" might have sufficed. It was painful because I ached for his friend, a man barely on the pages. I wanted the book to change, to be something different, to spare me any more time with asshole, and give me the story of the people who mattered. I didn't get it. It's too short and, of course, not the point of this it's-time-to-win-the-Booker novel. This is true Englishness, right here; it's all the things that make the rest of us cringe when we think of picking up the Booker winner but the appeal of it to certain heads-only intellectuals looking for criticism of their own society without feeling any uncomfortable lumps under the particular chair in which they sit as they read. This is that book. Like Hotel du Lac or Heat and Dust or even (and this hurts me a little) my beloved Possession, this book pokes at history and culture and the constraints of English-like behavior that is both critical of it and kind to it. They are made to feel bad just enough but not too bad. Not so much that they might actually be uncomfortable; just enough to discuss the criticism, elegantly, at a dinner party.

It makes me angry. It makes me so angry that Julian Barnes could so easily imagine a character such as asshole (I've forgotten his name already) and that we must watch while he calmly tells us his story and we are forced to peek around the edges at what he is really doing, how the others react to him, why events happen as they do. All the while, the real story is there, we just aren't allowed into it. We have to sit with him and I think even begin to feel sorry for him (fat chance) as he slowly pieces it together for himself and us.

This is pretty brilliant, actually, but it isn't what I wanted. I'm not criticizing him for that, per se; I'm just noting that it was a difficult read for me. The things that are important to me in my life and would have wanted in a story such as this were discarded or, at best, covered up, and never explored. That didn't just frustrate me. That hurt. The callousness of the book itself is starkly similar to that of the main character's. Again, that's really quite clever when you think about it; I just didn't want to.