Larry and the Meaning of Life, by Janet Tashijan
Tashijan, Janet (2008). Larry and the Meaning of Life. NY: Henry Holt. 224 pages.
This is the third book in Tashijan's series of novels about "Larry," an eighteen-year-old named Josh who started a popular anti-consumerist blog and was "outed" as a kid (The Gospel According to Larry), who ran for president (Larry for President) and is now in something of a slump. Poised to attend Princeton and to begin his "real" life, Larry has returned to his Boston home and is living rather restlessly with his stepfather. His best friend Beth has already started school in Providence, RI, and Larry is feeling lonely and out of sorts. When he meets Gus, a guru who persuades him to "study" the meaning of life with a group of assorted hippies, Larry is eager to participate (even more so when he discovers his ex-girlfriend is part of the group of hippies); however, he soon begins to wonder if the whole group is a sham or a cover-up for more nefarious activity.
As with the other "Larry" books, this novel features a quick-thinking narrator and unobtrusive footnotes (it's really easy to overdo the things, and Tashijan uses them sparingly but appropriately). As the novel spirals into sort of a mystery, it becomes hard to tell what's "real" and what's not, especially since one of the goals of Larry's guru is to challenge his students' conceptions of reality. The ending comes as something of a surprise and is, in actuality, two endings. The first is a farce (and one totally appropriate to the book's greater theme) and the second is a surprise (or it was to me).
While I'm a big fan of the Larry books, I sometimes resent the character's preachiness and--even more--resent the critical and professional assumption that the character is a youth mouthpiece. It's a book of fiction, folks. Yes, a lot of what Larry talks about aligns with left-leaning ideology and that's cool and all, but the books are not instruction manuals and we can neither assume that young readers will interpret them as such nor evaluate them favorably based on this potential (e.g. This book is good because it makes kids . . . ). Geesh! I found this one to be the hardest to read because so much of its deliberate obfuscation was in service of its ending. In this way, the book was surprisingly and sophisticatedly meta. Knowing that makes me want to read it again.