Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before, by David Yoo
Yoo, David (2008). Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before. NY: Hyperion. 374 pages.
By the end of his sophomore year, Albert Kim has figured out how to endure high school. Uprooted twice by his family and forced to start over in new schools, Albert decides that disengagement is his best strategy and becomes what he calls an “intentional loser.” As an intentional loser, Albert becomes a loner observer in the halls of his high school and spends his afterschool time hanging out with a group of sixth grade kids. His intentional loserdom is threatened when Albert becomes friends with Mia Stone, one half of the most popular couple at school and half of his housekeeping team at the Inn where both work during the summer. Mia confesses that she is struggling to come to terms with her recent breakup with school lacrosse star Ryan Stackhouse and, as she and Albert spend time together, they begin a relationship. The trouble? When both return to school, Albert’s intentional loserdom doesn’t jive with Mia’s group of popular friends. Even worse, Ryan isn’t taking too kindly to Mia’s new boyfriend. Then, Ryan is diagnosed with cancer, and, as the whole school–including Mia–rallies around him, Albert is convinced that, cancer or no cancer, Ryan is out to sabotage his and Mia’s relationship.
David Yoo’s second novel is funny, but the source of its wit is definitely not its brevity. At nearly 400 pages, Stop Me is a little too long to be the comedy it aspires to be. This is not to say that the novel fails in its attempts at humor. Indeed, there are many truly clever observations and some very funny scenes in the novel. Much of the humor is of the schadenfreude variety, and derives from Albert’s chagrin over Ryan’s illness and the way his cancer patient status has changed his reputation from popular asshole jock to heroic cancer victim.
My primary complaint has to do with the novel’s length. Now, I don’t have any problems with a long novel and I have definitely read longer novels that work well as comedies (C.D. Payne’s hilarious Youth in Revolt [1996] comes to mind here); however, what makes these longer novels work as comedies is the pacing, which Stop Me hasn’t really mastered yet. For example, in an early “scene” in the novel, Albert (who narrates the book) is explaining what a new student has to “prove” to fit in in a new school, using the metaphor of the jailhouse (”My life was playing out like a generic prison movie, minus the sodomy,” Albert observes). While Albert’s bon mot is definitely funny, the two-page explication of the metaphor, where Albert describes (humorously, but at length) what one must do to earn respect in the yard, is a little much.
A bit of feminist criticism here, too: Initially much is made of the fact that Mia has never had sex with Ryan and that her resistance to intimacy was one of the reasons the couple split. At the end of the novel, a revelation involving Ryan’s and Mia’s sexual history becomes a pivotal plot point, in a way that I kind of resented. I don’t want to spoil the ending, but at one point, I thought Ryan and Albert were going to start dueling for Mia’s honor, a plot twist that I consider a bit to retrograde for my taste.