Thomas, Rob. Rats Saw God

Rob Thomas is best known for the TV series Veronica Mars, a snappy, cynical, noir high school mystery--Nancy Drew done over in heroin chic. I do love it. I guess that TV writing pays better than novels.

This book's lacking in mysteries; instead, it's the story of a kid who smokes pot, doesn't get along with his astronaut father, and is very troubled about something that happened in Houston, trying to put his life back together by writing his life story down as part of a school assignment.

The snarky dialogue that forms one of the best things about VMars is echoed here:

"Can I interest you in Hank Williams's Greatest Hits, Improving Your Putting with Ben Crenshaw, or some tape with all the letters worn off?"

"Put that one in."...

"I don't know," Dub said[,] weighing the tapes in her hands. "My putting completely sucks."

And it's impossible not to love the antics of the high school club GOD--the Grace Order of Dadaists, who embrace dadaism in a school marked by conformity and stupid loyalty to sports and team spirit.

It's a great book until 3/4 of the way through. Alas, Thomas manages to muff the ending. We are expected to believe that Steve is successfully working through his pain, reconciling himself with his father, and pulling himself together in school--with almost no evidence. Almost nothing to make me believe it. At the end, when Steve comes to New and Important Revelations about his family life, I find myself wondering if he's just as wrong as he was before.

I find this happening with books that run past and present timelines in parallel; we are expected to believe that working through the story to the end is in itself cathartic and freeing, but so little attention is paid to the present timeline that I don't see the catharsis and the freedom. (Anyway, I'm a writer myself, sometimes, and that's enough for me to be sure that writing down your angst is not magically freeing).

It's a pity--in any case, the beginning and middle are well worth reading. There are too few books about dadaists, aren't there?