Book Review: 13 Reasons Why by Jay Asher
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A longer title for this book could have been “13 Reasons Why My Life Sucks and It’s Completely Your Fault and Not My Fault At All Even Though I Do Nothing to Help Myself”. I don’t doubt that the reasons for suicide are intensely personal and rarely understood by anyone other than the person committing the act but when you’re writing a book about it, the reason needs to be better than a literary equivalent of “wah, wah, wah”.
Yes, I clearly did not enjoy this book but I understand why it made great source material for a TV show and I also understand that the TV show fixed a lot of the problems. Thank God.
Two weeks after Hannah Baker’s death by suicide, Clay Jensen receives a box full of audio tapes. The package doesn’t say where it came from and when he pops the first tape into a tape deck in his father’s garage (because that’s the only tape player in the house – who has a tape player these days?), he’s shocked to hear Hannah’s voice telling him she’s going to outline the reasons why she killed herself and that he’s one of them.
Clay is shocked. He is sure he always treated Hannah with respect. What was it that he did that meant he ended up on these tapes on a list with twelve other people? So he listens to find out. He finds out that he isn’t the first person to listen to these tapes. Each person on the tapes has received them and then passed them on to the next person. If they don’t, someone has a second set and will release them to the public. If they do, only the thirteen people will know what’s on them.
Clay listens to Hannah discuss her first kiss, her betrayal by her partner in her first kiss as he spreads rumours about getting past first base, being included on a degrading list awarding her “Best Ass”, a scrag fight with someone she thought was her friend, a peeping tom, multiple sexual assaults, a fatal car accident and a guidance counsellor trying to offer her advice even though she refuses to tell him what she needs advice about.
The whole book takes place in less than 24 hours because Clay wanders around town and binge listens to the tapes on a Walkman he steals from a friend, afraid that his parents would overhear if he kept listening on the tape deck at home. He visits places where many of the incidents Hannah describes take place and cries and stops for a milkshake and moves on and cries and doesn’t go home until he’s finished listening.
As I got closer to the end, I was sure there must be some big twisty ending coming because the book was all build up. But there wasn’t. Yes, Hannah’s life sucked (like a lot of teenagers’ lives suck) but she asks exactly no one for help. When others need help from her, she turns her back on them. And just before she kills herself, she seems to allow an attack to take place to justify that she’s doing the right thing in choosing suicide. By the time we get to see the complete picture of why she thinks killing herself is the only option left, it seems entirely realistic but not much of a gut punch – and it really needed to a gut punch to end on since we’ve known from the very first moment that the story ends with Hannah’s death.
The characters are all very two-dimensional. Clay is described as perfect. He doesn’t go to parties because he studies all weekend to prepare for tests that always seem to happen on Mondays. He is subject to rumours, just like Hannah is, but all of them are about how perfect and good he is. The other girls are catty and jealous. The other boys are either sex obsessed, sex pests or outright rapists. And Hannah, who has the most scope to be a beautifully layered and intricate character, manages to miss the mark and come off primarily as whiny.
The narrative structure is difficult to keep track of at times. Hannah’s tape-recorded dialogue is in italics and Clay’s prose isn’t but it’s all first person and they swap from paragraph to paragraph so a lot of the time I had to stop and ask myself, “Wait, was that Clay or was it Hannah?” As a result, there’s no flow. Instead, it’s staccato and jumpy and not in a way that contributes to the story.
At the end of the book, there’s a question and answer session with the author and he admits that the book all started with the idea of someone listening to a story on tape, before he even knew what the story was. You can tell. He was so obsessed with delivering the story in this format that he overlooked the fact that it means the entire story is told instead of being shown. “Show, don’t tell!” It’s the most basic tenet of fiction writing and he fails completely. Asher might have gotten away with it if the prose had been better but it’s terribly melodramatic and lacking in complexity.
In a few words: not worth the hype.
2 stars
*First published on Goodreads 18 April 2020
