I knocked my toothbrush off my sink the other day and the sound it made when it clattered to the floor reminded me of her. Like every moment has a little pupil of Andrea. Once, in the computer room, I saw her smell the eraser at the end of her pencil after she’d used it It’s like I think about her all the time. Some of her teeth are whiter than her other teeth. Sometimes she’ll make a little animal gesture, like turn her head really quick to look at something, and I’ll feel like I recognize her from an ancient time. Early in their interactions, he says, “It was like she was the underside of a leaf, smarting and naked and veiny.” Later, he says this: Of another inmate, Jacob says, “His face was so raw with his lips curling and his insides spilling out that there was something genital about it.” He says that his mother’s boyfriend “has the anger and sense of entitlement of a Vietnam vet except without the traumatic combat experience to explain it.” He describes his mentor Jim as “someone you would see trying to straighten out a picnic blanket.” But it is Andrea, a girl he likes, who he captures best. Rathbone’s characterization, seen through Jacob’s eyes, is also pitch perfect. And he painstakingly describes the strawberry icing on wafer cookies, almost his singular pleasure. She, or rather Jacob, describes the inane process of checking out pencils, of signing honor slips in order to use antiquated computers that have seizures and reboot if you type too fast, of being herded into a rec room to eat waxy cookies that could only be appreciated by “an astronaut who had lost touch with home base and run out of things to eat.” Jacob notices staples “embedded in the blue carpet.” He notices that the smoke detector in the rec room beeps every five minutes because no one has thought to change its battery. Rathbone’s attention to minutiae also makes Jacob’s world utterly real and sensate. It is how he survives the institution food, which he says “feels hostile.” It is how he survives the “minty, sterile kind of cold that is always just short of freezing balls off.” His humor, constructed out of the subtle and dark ways he manipulates language, keeps both him and us entertained, chuckling as we turn pages. Humor is how he survives the motley crew of self-absorbed social workers and guards who put him through the motions of rehabilitation. Oh, and did I mention the humor? It is how Jacob Higgins copes. More American than grass stains and painted curbs, with a little brutality thrown in for good measure. What I’m guilty of is a pretty standard, run-of-the-mill armed robbery. I didn’t make everyone watch while I transported a graceful, mythical beast from back in time, and then set it on fire. I didn’t realign the universe so all the planets crashed into one another and the stars got swept up like a tablecloth and all the skin got sucked off our faces. I didn’t do anything sweeping like corral a bunch of single moms into a boardroom and then gas it. Listen, as Jacob describes the crime that landed him in the JDC:Īs for me, what I did was simple enough. Its magic lies in the sarcasm that drools from its narrator’s voice and in the beauty of the way that voice strings together language. But like any great book, this one can’t be reduced to its plot. Emma Rathbone’s debut novel The Patterns of Paper Monsters is about Jacob Higgins, an angry kid incarcerated in a juvenile detention center.
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