all about the real.

Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork

review for those with ADD: The book wears its fellows (if not its influences) right on its jacket sleeve: Told in the first person, it's narrated by a 17-year-old with an Asperger's-like syndrome. As it proclaims proudly in its summary on the left flap, it's Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime but a bit different. It's well-written with some pretty wonderful moments, but the uneven pace might put off some of the younger set who this novel seems to be aimed at.

still here? okay, good: I found this book while trying to see if I could find the sequel to Catcher in the Rye that J.D. Salinger stopped from being published. Powell's books said that they had it, but they didn't really have it.

One of their employees did have four books on her top 5 of 2009 list that I also enjoyed, and the fifth one was Marcelo, so it follows that I got this next. On Saturday, which was apparently St. Patrick's Day for those who wanted a whole day to drink in San Francisco, a guy and his girlfriend drunkenly asked if the book I was reading was good. I told them I had no idea, and that's how I felt even when I finished - I'm still unsure whether or not I liked it.

Plot: The titular character strikes a deal with his lawyer father: If he can be successfully helpful at his father's law firm over the summer, he will not have to go to public school in the fall. Instead he can stay at Paterson, a school meant for kids with disabilities less or more severe than Marcelo's - the school he had been at for for most of his life. At the law firm, he finds all those things the real world has to offer. Friends that aren't friends, understanding but aloof females, decisions that affect more than himself. And so, and so, and so.

More: My inability to decide whether or not I enjoyed it stems from a seeming disinterest to follow through on some of the details that fascinated me the most: The book opens with Marcelo describing this "internal music" that he has trouble describing, and isn't really music anyway, it's just the feeling you get from listening to music. But by the end of the book, he has stopped hearing it. He can no longer return to it, he can't call it up like he used to. This loss of this ability is referred to only twice that I can remember, and although it was from Marcelo's viewpoint, I do not know, still, how he feels about losing it.

In other words, after 100 pages of what feels like a character study, the Stork seems to think he needed a detective-like plot, and I feel a bit like he left some of Marcelo's more interesting quirks on the road to the conclusion. And really, that's what confuses me the most about the jacket sleeve referencing Curious Incident - that novel had both plot and character development at the same time, while Marcelo jumps back and forth between the two.

Should you read it? Probably. Especially if you've gotten this far down this review and you're still interested in what I think. It's 300 easy pages in a nice typeset (I really like when publishers tell you the font the book was set in. I do not understand why this isn't more common.) Marcelo's struggle to understand the world is touching, and his matter-of-fact narration manages endearing nearly 100 percent of the time.