I love to hate you? (Or, wrapping your head around a Jasper)

This is not a review. I don’t write reviews, because there are just too many variables to take into account, certainly in a five star rating system. So please take this for what it is: inane ramblings, prompted by a book I read and loved (For Real by Alexis Hall).

The question I keep asking myself after having read this book is: why can’t I love people when I love characters?

The character I can’t let go of is Jasper, an academic. I’m tempted to leave it there, but he’s actually a specific type of academic, and we’re not all like that: aloof and intense, condescending and vulnerable, can’t take his own medicine (that may be my own speculation). I have met this exact person in real life, and I have hated them. But I don’t hate Jasper, I love him. In a twisted, love/hate kind of way, granted, but still. There’s nothing romantic about the real life version, and yet I’m drawn to this character “like soapy water down a drain pipe” (to quote an adaptation of Goldoni’s Venetian Twins for no good reason other than that’s what Jasper would have done). I have no idea why I love him, which is, I suppose, the reason why it’s still bugging me two days after I finished the book.

Of course, I have Theories.

1) He’s so well written that what I actually love is that someone can see these things and put them on paper without having a fit.

2) The joy of recognition: my tendency for nostalgia is so strong that even the negative stuff takes on some kind of romantic cast.

3) As my husband and I like to say, people are best on film (or as the case may be, in books). Human beings are fascinating, but that doesn’t mean that we want to interact with them personally.

If these theories were scrutinized by a Jasper, they would probably be found to overlap unforgivably and to leave out recent developments in psychology, sociology, and linguistics*. But I’m not sending it to Jasper, I’m posting it on my own damn blog. I reserve the right to be inconsistent and anecdotal on my own turf, at least.

But I guess it does all boil down to this: encountering an exact reflection of your own experience in a book can be exhilarating. And maybe in some way, the reflection redeems the people? They are seen and understood, categorized and explained, and somehow I can accept if not them, then the idea of them.

Now, this is all very well and I could just smile at the whole thing, were it not that tomorrow I have to meet people who are exactly like Jasper: self-absorbed, condescending assholes whose only function is to slaughter my work. (Not all of them are assholes, of course, but just like in fiction, the nice ones aren’t interesting enough to mention.) Anyway, with Jasper and my affection for him as a kind of shield against these people, shouldn’t I be able to smile indulgently and remind myself that it’s just their own insecurities that make them act the way they do? That it’s just the toxic culture of academia that fosters this kind of person?

Heh. No. I can rationalize until the Devil himself comes to replace me, but I’ll still gnash my teeth and get a headache tomorrow. Because the worst part of it is, there’s a fourth theory.

4) I wish I was him.

* Yep, that comma was intentional.

To A Poet, by Karin Boye