A review by stromberg
It Helps with the Blues by Bryan Cebulski

emotional reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This short novel ends with a question that, in one form or another, the story has been asking its narrator throughout. One perplexing imperative life imposes on each adolescent is to learn what they want—want in life, want from others, want themselves to be. High school, perhaps the shittiest period in many people’s lives, is where our maturation begins to require us to be responsible for our own vulnerability and for the harm we can do to vulnerable others—to learn to be non-shitty.

The novel’s unnamed narrator is staring down the end of high school and, beyond that, a drab, lukewarm future in his family’s prosperous business that will demand little of him. Like many teenagers, he is self-absorbed and unambitious—or rather, at a loss as to what ambitions he might conceivably hold. Though privileged, he is not haughty; he dwells in a state of quiet distance from others, a gulf he occasionally attempts to bridge with alcohol abuse. His only close friends, longtime crush Jules and occasional hook-up Gabriel, begin to orbit away from him after a classmate’s suicide shocks them all—but how this tragedy truly acts on them is to widen cracks already present.

The painful lesson awaiting the narrator is that to desire to relate to someone can be to burden them—to be infatuated can be to instrumentalise another—to long for another human, that most natural of impulses, can be dehumanising. Because a person is a person through other people, there is a danger that what he wants from Jules can end up forcibly defining her, even for Jules herself. He must come to realise what his knowledge or understanding does not extend to. One must not assume one always has the resources to figure other people out—and attempts to figure them out can actually be defensive struggles to avoid the much more emotionally perilous endeavour of relating to them.

Sexual and gender identity form significant elements of this tale, but I hesitate to call it a queer coming-of-age. Queerness in the end is a single facet of the narrator’s persona and experiences, part of the larger existential process of growing up which condemns him to learn about himself. His social isolation and personal dysphoria worsen and his drinking tips into unhealthiness, until it becomes urgent that, even at the cost of letting go of lost hopes of happiness, he find his people and define himself.


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