Can’t we just have regular kids in books? Can’t today’s sensitive bearded American novelists deliver realistic kid characters? Why the exceptional child cliché? Why can’t kids in books just be idiots like real kids?

If the best fiction seeks to explore and even explain the complexities of life by approximating those complexities, why should we let all our sensitive bearded novelists write such cut-and-paste, kid-Frankenstein characters as the tiresomely named Henry Every?

You know Henry. He’s every kid in every book about kids since Salinger’s young adult novel warped a generation of writers. Henry is really smart. He’s odd and compulsive. He keeps a very detailed diary. And he is so painfully sensitive that adolescence kills him—literally—on page one. Kids!

Ask your friends if they’d want to relive their adolescence and they’ll probably look at you agape. That’s because adolescence, in the parlance of kids, totally sucks it. Most people would tell you the awkwardness was unbearable. So why relive it through Henry? Why be reminded of just how universally miserable an experience childhood can be?

Writing this sort of lovable oddball kid character seems like a copout. The real challenge to writing children is writing children that actually act like children—kids that are both compelling protagonists and morons. So maybe it’s unsurprising that the most moving passages of the book don’t concern Henry at all.

Guilt-ridden since his wife abandoned him—a fact Henry seems oddly unaffected by, despite the author’s attempts to convince us otherwise—Henry’s father, Harlan, finds the redemption Henry can’t when he belatedly rediscovers his love for wife Hannah. Their relationship paints them as desperate, complex adults and characters we can identify with. In comparison, Henry’s relationships with others come off as cheap, adolescent fakery.

Likewise, Henry’s grandmother Lulu maintains an interesting symbiotic relationship with a “hearty” (Shapiro’s word) Cuban, witchcraft-practicing housekeeper named Papi. Despite the fact that Shapiro can’t help but give his characters ridiculous names, he does manage to construct a meaningful approximation of the momentous cluster-fuck car crash of human relationships—just not between his central protagonists.

Other than the aforementioned strong characters, there isn’t a whole lot here to excite. The only thing that drives the plot forward is the fact that we want to find out how Henry dies, but it’s a pretty big letdown once we do. There aren’t many surprises here, and even less insight. What do we learn? That being a kid is tough? Who didn’t know that?

It’s hard to write adolescent characters who are both believable and interesting. Most writers fail at it. And Shapiro deserves credit for trying to make The Every Boy more than just middle-class teen mopery. Hannah and Harlan’s relationship is actually compelling, as is that of Lulu and Papi. But in the end, that’s not enough to save "The Every Boy" from the common fate of so many fifteen year-old boys—terminal boredom.

[Ed note: Dana Adam Shapiro is probably best known for Murderball, a documentary about quadriplegic rugby players.]

Reeves Hamilton is the world's greatest living unpublished author and hopes
to remain so. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.