Teenagers from Mars! A Review of Peter Bognanni's "The House of Tomorrow."

I've been on this kick lately about books about teenage protagonists. I'm not sure why. Maybe I'm just getting old and I'm trying to salvage some shred of my adolescence. Maybe I'm just a few steps away from getting my ear pierced and buying a Corvette.

Or maybe it's because it dawned on me recently that the best books I've ever read have featured teenage protagonists and I've been trying to recapture the magic of those reads. I mean, look: say what you want, but Holden Caulfield is one of the best damn narrators in the history of the written language.

This was what led me to Peter Bognanni's The House of Tomorrow; it appealled to the pissy sixteen-year-old in me. That's probably also because it is in about pissy sixteen-year-olds.

At first, the premise sounds like the stuff of hokey Disney movies: our 16-year-old protagonist Sebastian Pendergast is cast out of the lonely geodesic dome in which he was raised in near-seclusion by his eccentric grandmother and is taken in by the comically dysfunctional Whitcombs–Janice, Meredith, and Jared. Jared, also 16, is the recent recipient of a heart transplant and is determined to find out just how much his weakened body can handle. He and Sebastian develop a peculiar friendship and end up forming a punk band in hopes of playing at the family's church's talent show.

To be sure, this is fairly well-tread territory. Sebastian's relationship with Jared is reminiscient of Chief Broom's relationship with Randall McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: both of the latter are guileless, shy, quiet, drawn to the opposing characters for their recklessness, their never-ending quest(s) to buck the system. In Jared's case, the system is his mother Janice, who smothers him with her concern for his health, and his sister Meredith and her not-so-secret nightlife.

And yet, well-tread or no, the story still feels fresh and honest. Bognanni sketches his characters almost exclusively through action and dialogue. The most successful of them is Jared, who is portrayed in large part through his interactions with Sebastian:

"Jared," I said. "Why do you have to talk to me like this?"

"I think we should start a band," he said.

"What?"

As usual, he had slipped the most important words into a tiny space.

"Okay," he said, "okay. I know I'm taking a giant fucking risk here. I'm going to have to teach you everything, and you're obviously going to do it all wrong. But I'm not looking for a Sid Vicious, you know. I just need somebody to do what I say. Not somebody with a real personality. I get to have the ideas. Don't argue."

I tried to wade through his babble, but it was that first question that lingered.

"I don't know how to be in a band," I said.

"You don't know anything. You probably can't pee by yourself. But I'm going to mold you. That's the whole idea. I'm the front man. You'll play bass."

Tying all of the narrative threads together is Jared's love of and Sebastian's discovery of the Misfits. A lot of authors have difficulty invoking real-life elements like bands or movies into their work without descending into some masturbatory celebration of their own hipness (I know this because I do it). But what makes it work in the case of this book is the characters' complete musical naivety. Jared isn't so much an afficionado of the genre as he is an angsty teen who's gotten his hands on a couple noteworthy albums and, as a consequence, has determined that it is his destiny to front a punk band. Nevermind the fact that neither boy knows how to play an instrument (Bognanni's depictions of their songwriting sessions are superb in this regard), or that they don't have a drummer, or that neither of them has ever performed in his life. All Jared wants is to stand on a stage with his guitar and howl into a microphone and be loved for it. And if you've ever been a sixteen-year-old dude from a white suburb, chances are you've had this exact dream.

The House of Tomorrow is compelling because those elements that, theoretically at least, should be the most enticing–Sebastian's geodesic dome house, his grandmother's fixation with a long-dead scientist/philosopher–actually take a backseat to the characters. And to me, this has always been the sign of a good story. We're oddly fascinated by the Whitcombs, by what lies beneath their wholesome, god-fearing veneer, and by how it contributes to Sebastian's transformation from an introverted egghead to a booze-swilling punk rocker.