Ann Angel’s interview with Lauren Myracle about The Infinite Moment of Us touched on the emergence of New Adult—a publishing category designed to appeal to readers in their upper teens and early twenties. Various other discussion groups have focused on New Adult—what it is, what kinds of books are being published, and how it differs from Young Adult and general adult fiction.
Several months ago, the publisher namelos approached me about their historical New Adult novel coming out this fall, Nicole Pietsch’s Sideshow of Merit. Many New Adult titles explore relationships and romance among college students and twentysomethings with more explicit language and detail than generally found in YA titles that have to pass muster with school and library gatekeepers. However, this novel apparently found its way to New Adult through a different pathway, in its portrayal of two men in their early twenties who are trapped emotionally by a horrific event that occurred to both of them in their teens.
The narrator of Sideshow of Merit is 23-year-old Tevan George, who has been on the run with his sidekick James Rowley, ever since the two of them escaped from a mandatory tuberculosis testing five years earlier, in 1961. Both of these young Canadian men spent time in a TB sanitarium in their teens, where they were sexually abused by another patient who would choke them for sexual pleasure. As the assailant said, sex was all about power, not love. Tevan and James come to reenact this sexualized choking for a circus sideshow run by the cruel and corrupt Buddy Merit and his son Damon.
Author Pietsch draws parallels between Tevan and James and the protagonists of John Steinbeck’s classic Of Mice and Men. Like George (whose last name he shares), Tevan is an intelligent but deeply troubled drifter. James, like Lennie, is cognitively disabled giant with little awareness of his strength or ability to control his desires. Still, he is the gentler and more innocent of the two. James has a long police record, which includes a restraint order against his being near Tevan, something the two keep secret from the Merits because they need the work. Their co-workers in this sideshow are drifters, drug addicts, and undocumented immigrants, including an African-American man who fled to avoid serving in Vietnam.
The novel is complex, gripping, and insightful in its portrayal of the long-term effects of trauma and abuse. Alternating real-time narrative with flashbacks, it presents an institution where desperately ill boys created their own brutal society in the absence of caring adults. Young Tevan’s fear of going to the bathroom to avoid being accosted (also a fear of children and teens targeted by bullies today) led to a dangerous urinary tract infection on top of his TB. Tevan and James repeat the patterns of their lives in the “san” the same way abuse survivors often continue the cycle. Readers pursue the glimmer of hope implicit in Tevan’s past-tense first-person narrative and wonder how the two will ever break free of their past.
Because Sideshow of Merit has been classified as New Adult, what does it tell us about this emerging genre? The writer who most came to mind when I read this novel is Russell Banks, whose Lost Memory of Skin also depicts victims and perpetrators of sexual abuse forced to live on the margins of society. Banks’s Rule of the Bone, with its teenage protagonist on the run with an adult friend who is Jamaican, draws from a classic work of literature in the same way that Sideshow of Merit does. I would like to see Pietsch’s novel find the same audience, and get taken just as seriously. Will that happen with the New Adult category? This is a question, with a book, worth exploring.
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