Grasshopper Jungle: A History by Andrew Smith (review)

Austin faces two dilemmas: he is in love with both his girlfriend, Shann, and his best friend, Robby, and the world is ending. This last circumstance is the result of a chain of events that he and Robby have unwittingly set in motion, involving the release of a genetic agent that infects its human victim with a larva that consumes the host and erupts into a six-foot-tall praying mantis bent on only two things: eating and reproducing. The play of themes and metaphors here is as multi-tiered as a wedding cake but with significantly more deadpan irony than icing; mostly the irony centers on Austin’s confusion with regard to his sexuality, which he continually refers to as experimenting, calling that designation for teenage sexual identity into question as well as drawing subtle attention to the unintended consequences of the decades-long experimenting that led to the giant bug mutations. Austin’s narrative voice fizzes with catchphrases that keep the reader on track as he dives into history and backstory. His obsessively repetitive but somehow endearing style calls to mind Vonnegut and Heller, which, given the characters’ ultimate descent into a bunker left over from the early ’70s, is more than thematically appropriate; indeed, the raw postmodern aesthetics of this text accord with its theme of flawed humanity. It would be easy enough to label the novel edgy, but since many of Smith’s previous offerings, such as Stick (BCCB 12/11), The Marbury Lens, and Passenger (BCCB 12/12), have redefined where exactly the edges are, it’s more accurate to say that this one approaches its own edge of sophisticated brutality, sensory and intellectual overload, and sheer weirdness, and then jumps right off.