The Universe Versus Alex Woods by Gavin Extence
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
At some point (probably later than I should have) I realized 1. where the plot was leading; and 2. this was a novel with An Agenda, which the novel (and likely — but not necessarily — the author) wanted to you agree with. My reactions were: 1. Didn’t make me happy, and really wasn’t something I wanted to read, although I saw that it absolutely what the characters would do; and 2. Never gonna happen. So I had to make a decision: do I finish this or move on?
I went ahead and finished it (which, by the way, confirmed 1 & 2), and I think it was a worthwhile use of my reading time.
Alex Woods is a socially awkward child/teen, an epileptic who’d been struck by a meteor as a child (and achieved a degree of notoriety because of this). He’s figuring out his way in this world the best he can, with little guidance from his fortune-teller mother (and even then, it’s dubious guidance at best), he mostly relies on the scientist who helped him understand the meteor that struck him and his neurologist.
That is, until, he meets Mr. Peterson — an American widower, who moved to England following his service in the Vietnam War and now that he’s widowed has no intention of sticking around. From the moment he’s introduced, it’s clear that Mr. Peterson will become a fixture in Alex’s life. That the two will form an unlikely bond, and this will form the emotional core of the book. (this would be clear even if the book didn’t open with Alex entering the country with Mr. Peterson’s ashes on the car seat next to him)
One of the things Mr. Peterson does is introduce Alex to the works of Kurt Vonnegut. They discuss the books as Alex works his way through them, Mr. Peterson explaining things — both in the books and in life — for Alex’s overly literalistic way of looking at life.
The strength of this book is Alex’s voice and personality. You’re drawn to Alex, you want to understand the way he looks at life, you want to hear how he ends up in the dicey legal situation he finds himself in at the beginning of the novel. If not for his charm, his naiveté, his humor, this book would’ve ended up on my abandoned pile pretty quickly.
Obviously, this is evident throughout. The strongest example that I think of at this moment is Alex’s description of (and reaction to) being bullied is so close to the Platonic ideal, that it alone justifies at least half the time spent reading. The bullying characters, and the reactions on the part of the faculty/students of Alex’s school to his encounters with them were so spot-on, that if Extence wasn’t borrowing from his own life, his imagination is scarily correct.
The only two characters that didn’t quite work for me were Alex’s mother and his female friend from school*. Now, this is either because Alex is a teenage male and has a strange relationship with these two women (because they’re strange, he’s an adolescent male, and they’re women) or because Extence didn’t quite have the handle on them as characters as he did with the rest. I could go with either explanation — the latter seems unlikely, but it’s possible. In the long run, while I couldn’t understand either character as I wanted to, this didn’t detract enough from the book to spend much more time on the point than this. I do wish things had resulted in a clearer resolution between Alex and the schoolmate — if not a definite “they were X forever”, at least a trajectory suggesting something.
In the end, it was a pleasure to spend time in Alex’s company and hearing his take on how he grew up and started in his adult life, whatever my issues with the plot. It’s not the best book I’ve read in awhile, but I’ll keep my eye out for whatever Extence does next.
* Sorry, I’ve forgotten her name and returned the book to the library — and google’s not helping at all.
