The Boomerang Effect by Gordon Jack (review)

When Lawrence and his Vietnamese-American friend, Alex, are called into the principal’s office for performing a “traditional Chinese Ribbon Dance” with toilet paper while shirtless and high, Lawrence comes armed with a letter from his high-powered lawyer father. Alex is not so fortunately parented, so he is sent to an alternative school. This first scene tells readers all they need to know about the way this story will go and whether they will enjoy it: Lawrence is a wealthy, privileged white boy who gets his friends into ridiculous scrapes from which he himself emerges unscathed. He does give himself the punishment of abstaining from his daily pot-smoking, though, and between the virtual parenting of his mother—she’s writing a book on the subject, so they communicate mostly through web videos and skyping—and his father’s insistence that Lawrence learn to schmooze with more socially powerful friends, he finds approaching the world sober difficult. Lawrence’s narration is stilted, and his attempts to go deep with his feelings read like cheerful intrusions of an adult authorial presence; the secondary characters offer little emotional compensation, as they talk mostly in quips, gnomic utterances, or the faux Elizabethan English of LARPers. Lawrence does, however, make some connections between his situations and those of Odysseus that actually work, and these go some way toward rescuing the work from a kind of flat silliness. Falling somewhere between Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Tharp’s The Spectacular Now (BCCB 2/09), this doesn’t quite attain to the rich humor of the former or the moral indictment of the latter; nevertheless, it may find its audience among fans of those works.