The Haters by Jesse Andrews

One of the StoryGraph Onboarding Reading Challenge prompts is to read a book that another user marked as DNF (did not finish). So, I started clicking through random users that had DNF lists and scrolled through my options until I came across a book I already owned. I ended up with The Haters by Jesse Andrews. This was an intriguing pick for me, since this is the same author that wrote Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and Munmun, both of which I read and loved a few months ago. Those were both 5-star reads for me, so I was really interested to see if I would feel the same way about The Haters. It's not a great sign that I found it on a list of books that someone didn't want to finish, but I couldn't imagine not liking something Jesse Andrews wrote. Accordingly, I went in expecting have a different experience from the reader that gave up on it.

The plot of The Haters follows Wes Doolittle, a high school student living in Pittsburgh. His life revolves pretty much entirely around music--he plays the bass guitar and spends hours listening to albums with his best friend Cody. Both boys have a tendency to be quite critical of different songs and artists, even ones that they truly like, which is why they consider themselves "haters." For them, hating on something is an extension of loving it. 

At the start of the novel, Wes and Cody are attending a summer jazz camp. Right away, they realize that they don't really fit in. They aren't as musically talented as the other campers and they don't feel very passionate about jazz as a musical genre. The one bright spot in their experience is Ash, a quirky guitar player and one of the only girls there. Ash isn't too thrilled with her camp experience either, so after a disastrous first practice, she convinces Wes and Cody to run away from the camp, form a band together, and go on a tour. 

The trio's tour is rife with misadventures from the start. They drive through several states, begging different venues to let them perform. They end up playing in some pretty strange places, including a Chinese buffet, a retired nurse's backyard, and a shady Southern bar. Some of their performances are terrible and some are epic. Along the way, they have to try and stymie the efforts of their parents, who are very worried about them, to find them and bring them home. This comes to include dodging the police after they wind up in some sticky situations. This tour changes their lives forever, and Wes, Cody, and Ash end up learning a lot about themselves, about music, and about the random imperfectness of real life. 

I had mixed feelings about this novel. The best way I can describe it is that it was like Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, but without the pathos. Andrews' trademark writing style was definitely on full display here. The characters were his usual mix of naive, sarcastic, introspective, and vulgar. Wes, Cody, and Ash have a lot of funny conversations throughout the story, and the parts of this that were lighthearted were genuinely a good time. However, there were a few moments that I felt like Andrews went overboard with the mature content. There is an overreliance on sexual jokes, gross-out masturbation scenes, and fairly graphic descriptions of sexual encounters. I am not against including these elements in young adult fiction by any means (it is realistic after all), but it grew tiresome here. It seems clear that Andrews intended The Haters to appeal to a male audience, and while I enjoyed most of the novel, I also consistently felt like this book wasn't for me. It seemed like it was exclusively for 15-18 year old boys.

Ash's character wasn't my favorite either. She was a low-level a manic pixie dream girl and seemed to exist purely to push Wes and Cody out of their comfort zones. While she does have some flaws and grows a bit throughout the novel, she's still that impossibly cool girl with the wacky ideas that all the male characters in the novel are chasing after. Wes and Cody are no exception here; they both have sexual encounters with her over the course of the trip and nearly end up destroying their friendship over it. There was also an uncomfortable age issue going on. Ash is 19 in this novel and has already graduated high school, while Wes and Cody are around 16. This isn't a huge deal--they are all still teenagers I suppose, but I couldn't help but wonder why Ash even wanted to mess around with either of them. It's not like they were examples of mature, cool guys. Quite the opposite, in fact. I also couldn't help but note that if the genders were swapped here, I would feel like the encounters were predatory. On top of all that, Ash was often oddly mean and made an absolutely incomprehensible and cruel decision at the end of the story that kind of made the whole plot seem pointless, so all in all, I didn't like her very much.

The Haters was clearly meant to be a more fun and lighthearted novel that Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and that's fine, but it also made it less enjoyable overall. I think that Andrews' immature humor and sarcasm works better when his characters are dealing with a serious topic. Then, those quirks become their way of dealing with something difficult. In this case, the characters were just behaving in a reckless manner, so their humor wasn't a coping mechanism, it was just who they were, and the endless dick jokes got old quickly. Andrews also ended the novel on a surprisingly sober note. I felt like he was trying to stir up emotions in the reader than he didn't really earn in the last few pages. 

So ultimately, I didn't like The Haters nearly as much as Jesse Andrews' other novels. It wasn't terrible, but it was too immature for me and didn't give me the poignant experience I have come to expect from his works. I can see why someone would abandon this one. It's definitely not for all readers. It was pretty funny a lot of the time though and, for me, it was very readable. It just wasn't Andrews' best work.  

     

Challenge Tally

StoryGraph Onboarding 2020 Challenge: 4/12

Total Books Read in 2020: 63