Ah, the ‘Suburban Stepford Novel’. Ever since women became a marketable force in
the literary world, there have been books targeted toward qualities that
publishers presume women admire or covet.
The formula is simple: passionate, thwarted teenage love, surprise baby,
domineering battleaxe mother, death, tear-soaked happy ending. Easily digestible over tea and bantered over coffee
tables during book clubs.
Kristen Hanna’s “Night Road” follows along a similar path of
most Suburban Stepford Novels, but takes itself to such extremes that the
entire event turns laughable. It’s the
story of Lexi Baill (the name and spelling is indicative of her character), who
sprouts forth from a dysfunctional family and a history of foster care
ludicrously unscathed to live with her great aunt and to become involved with a
towheaded set of twins who change her life forever.
The teenage twins are Zack and Mia Farraday, and they are
Special. Zack is on track to follow his
father into medicine, and Mia is a Super Special Lonely Artistic Wallflower;
they live in a beautiful suburban home with their orderly control freak mother
and nonentity surgeon father. Lexie
becomes Mia’s instant best friend, and Zack’s love object. The threesome slowly form such a fusion of
personality that by the time they’re seniors in high school that a crises forms
over whether or not Zack and Lexie will attend an ivy league college together,
leaving clingy wallflower Mia to attend USC alone. That Zack is outraged and is
perfectly willing to throw away the possibility of a medical career to hang
around with his girlfriend and sister in a shared apartment while attending a
community college is natural and actually in-character development for a
teenager. The problem is with the narrative’s
refusal to take Jude’s much more logical point of view seriously, instead
insisting that it’s perfectly rational to cling like a barnacle to the person
you love, no matter the risk to your own personal development.
The Gordian knot of the Zack/Mia/Lexie disaster begs to
exist in a different book. Think of the
lost possibilities. In a thriller, Mia
would single white female Lexie because of her attachment to Zack. In erotica, the obvious sexual tension
between the three of them would explode into an orgasmic three-for-all. But because we’re trapped by the conventions
of a weepy Suburban Stepford Novel, it can only end in one way – a Life-Altering
Tragedy.
In this case, the tragedy is a car crash caused by a drunken
Lexi on their way back from a graduation party – even though she’s the most
sober person there, and the twins so feared disappointing their mother by
drinking and ignoring her designated driver rules that she was pressed into
service. Mia dies of a head injury and
hangs on long enough to have all of her organs donated, and shit promptly gets
real. Lexie submits herself to guilt and
takes a prison term, but not before we discover that a graduation night tryst with
Zach resulted in a baby. Zack bitterly
shuffles off to the ivy league, and the Farraday paterfamilias take care of
Lexie’s baby, their grandchild.
The addition of a child to the plot drives home the treaclely
nature of what eventually occurs. While
Lexie flagellates herself over her decision to drive drunk, Jude develops an
anxiety condition and takes out her anger and bitterness over Mia’s death on
her blonde wallflower grandaughter. The
beats from here on out are predictable. Of
course, Lexie’s downward spiral halts she meets an angel who stops her from
doing drugs behind bars. Of course, the
character is black and only exists to behave like a mammy to Lexie. Of
course once Lexie model-prisoners her way out of jail she gets pissed off
enough to fight for custody of her so-much-like-Mia daughter, and her presence
eventually opens the child up socially and gets her to start talking to people
who aren’t her invisible, golden-haired imaginary friend (take a wild guess as
to who this is supposed to be). Of
course, Zack has remained socially arrested enough to engage in a relationship
with Lexi, and will from a happy family with Lexie and his daughter as if time,
prison sentences and parenthood do not fundamentally change people from the
people they were at eighteen. Of course
Jude will Snap Out of It, regain her ability to self-govern, re-open her heart
to Lexie and approve of her relationship with Zack (this is accomplished
through a mostly boring subplot in which she sees a psychiatrist). Of course her husband will have absolutely no
opinion at all, and her long-neglected garden, that long-ago symbol of
order-will bloom again.
This is the predictable Pablum a thousand authors have
choked out before her, and Hannah fails to add a fresh spin to it. The only example of an original character
might be mousey, flighty Mia, but even she’s a wallflowery cliché. She calls her mother ‘mami’ for some reason
and wears baggy outfits and is a quirky artist type, because all wallflowers
have to be the quirky artistic type, and of course she and Lexi have a super
deep appreciation of classic literature that only teenagers in novels written
by adults have. Everyone else is
cardboard.
Jude has an affinity for creating lists. Perhaps next time, Ms. Hannah will add a
little piss and vinegar to the super-sweet sugary froth of a recipe when she
crafts her next novel.
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