Culture Watch Reviews

In This Issue:

Daniel Handler specializes in a light-semi-irreverent tone that manages also to be perceptive and truthful, even as it entertains, in Why We Broke Up, a story of teenage love gone awry. Robert Morgan has crafted a story of the life of Daniel Boone, Boone, A Biography, to rival the best fiction, while demonstrating the most diligent scholarship and devotion to primary sources any reader could ask for. 

Books

WHY WE BROKE UP

by Daniel Handler, © 2011; art © 2011 by Maira Kalman

Published by Little, Brown and Company; Hardcover; 354 pp

For those of us who don’t delve deep into the business of pseudonyms, let me note from the outset that Daniel Handler is the real name of the man who is known to a generation of children as Lemony Snicket. Handler is the author of novels for adults, but as Snicket, he has produced many kids’ books, for example: A Series of Unfortunate Events, and 13 Words. Although the subject matter found in either age group is usually appropriate for the intended audience, this reviewer doesn’t find much difference in Handler/Snicket’s style between the two genres: He specializes in a light, semi-irreverent tone that manages also to be perceptive and truthful, even as it entertains.

The subject matter this go ‘round is an all-too-familiar story of teenage love gone awry, and if you have ever been involved in a sorry high school romance, you will probably see that Handler pretty much hits the nail on its proverbial head.

Maira Kalman, whose books and artwork have long provided us with delight, has quietly stepped up to illustrate this all-too-familiar tale. This is not to say that her role is in any way secondary; her paintings are quirky and wonderful. (I promised myself I would write a Kalman review without using the word “quirky,” but there you have it: there’s no escape).

The story is narrated by a girl named Min, “short for Minerva, Roman goddess of wisdom … and … don’t even ask, no you couldn’t , only my grandmother could call me ‘Minnie’ because, she told me, and I imitated her voice, she loved me the best of anyone.”

Min is what the high school jocks and cheerleaders call the “arty” type, decidedly different from the in-group of teenagers in her school. She wants to be a movie director when she grows up, and pals around with a boy named Al, with whom she goes to the foreign films that produce a large part of her vernacular. Imaginative, creative, impulsive, Min has a small but lively group of friends.

At Al’s “Bitter Sixteen” birthday party, Min connects with Ed Slaterton, high school jock, a basketball star who is good at math as well as sports, and is handsome and popular. They quickly become a hot item.

The format of this book is a long letter that Min writes to Ed after she has discovered him cheating on her. She has kept many bits and pieces of their time together, souvenirs that she has put into a big box in her closet “under some shoes I never wear,” in an attempt at privacy. Now she goes through them, re-living each event and in her description connected to each object, she pretty much uncovers why she is breaking up with him despite having loved him with a desperate teenage potency. She intends to dump the box on his doorstep when she is through with her catalogue of their time together.

Handler’s recounting of their dating relationship is pretty much pitch-perfect, including the loss of Min’s virginity, which comes off as just one more step in their naturally evolving relationship, not portrayed as the devastating event that the books of my youth would have made it. That’s probably a healthy attitude in this day and age, but coming at it from a senior’s point of view, I found myself wondering if today’s kids are really that able to take the long view.