Book Review: 100 Sideways Miles by Andrew Smith

     100 Sideways Miles revels in all the stock characters and plot elements of the contemporary young adult novel the way politicians are sure to promise better schools and more jobs.   In this election season, it gets to the point where you'd love to hear a candidate admit that his policies will have little effect on the economy, and that market forces are beyond the control of any one person or set of regulations.  Similarly, I'd love to read a young adult novel that isn't The Fault In Our Stars Yet Again.
      We have it all here: the main character who is perfectly ordinary, because we know, in our hearts, that we are perfect only in our ordinariness.  However, we wish to be pitied, so the main character has some tragedy hampering his soul.  That helps us feel misunderstood in our ordinariness (they just don't know how extraordinary I am).  All you need then is a situation which thrusts the young person toward the fulfillment of his wishes.  Oh, and he should get the girl and have an awesome best bud, because we'd like those things, too.
     I could be describing anything from Star Wars to Harry Potter to The Hunger Games to TFIOS to this little YA outfit.  At least two of those have redeeming qualities - J. K. Rowling, in particular, thrives on squeezing herself into a genre (witness her recent forays into pulp detective procedurals) and bursting out like that Mentos and Diet Coke thing.
     So our mini-hero here is named Finn, and he is plain.  He distinguishes himself in no way and is passionate about nothing.  But, his mother was killed by a horse that fell off a train from a bridge and landed on their boat (really), an accident which also left him emotionally damaged and epileptic.  He obsesses over the distance earth travels in space in its evolutions around the sun, and the relation of that distance to time as experienced on earth, which comes off as a heavy-handed and tiresome metaphor for, eh, um, something, I think.  But all the parts of this pendulous clockwork are in place.  Godlike best friend - check.  Gets the girl.  Loses the girl.  Does something heroic.  Gets the girl back.  Check, check, check, and check.
     100 Sideways Miles has some deeper elements which drove me to finish all 273 pages of its otherwise vapid drivel.  The main character, Finn (not Huckleberry, by the way), has a dad who wrote an classic sci-fi novel loosely based on Finn's heterochromatic eyes and spinal scars, and Finn forever feels trapped in his father's book.  That's a fascinating theme - the idea of a son feeling confined by his father's creation (which is, in a way, himself) - but the author is too busy dropping f-bombs, getting his characters drunk and explosively vomiting, and detailing their adolescent sexual misadventures (one of which is utterly ridiculous and even offensive - a German exchange student who lives to provide the godlike best friend with one-way gratification on a daily basis), much too busy with this mush to develop the one interesting thread in the book.
     Then again, this book is merely indicative of what is wrong with YA fiction nowadays, and perhaps even of what is wrong with some (yes, some, only some) young adults: the distinctly modern self-centeredness that resembles living as if one were on a reality show.  Some defects of adolescence are ingrained in our DNA, such as the foolhardy sense of invulnerability, but today's young adults - and the stories crafted for their demographic - reveal not only a staggering navel-gazing that permeates the culture, but also an awareness of this narcissism, which is shrugged off.  Why bother caring about anything but your own desires?  I suppose that's a question for us all.