Author: John Corey Whaley
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Rating: WARTY!
"Life can go straight to your head" Really? Which genius at Atheneum came up with that rhinestone - and why is he/she still employed there?
The premise for this sounds like the start of a brain-dead joke: "This guy gets his head cut off and comes back to life", so this is an out-there kind of a novel, but it just goes to prove that you can get a novel out of anything if you want to try. Whether that novel is worth anything when it's done is another matter. This one wasn't.
The author has a curious habit of titling each chapter with the last few words from the previous chapter, although he starts tripping up with this at chapter fourteen and beyond. He's written one other novel (as of this writing) which I haven't read and have no intention of doing so after this one, so I don't know if it's just here that he does this, or if it's his trademark.
Noggin is the nickname of Travis Coates, a guy who died, but who even then kept his head - in cryo on the off-chance that science had the opportunity to resurrect him with a new (and not-dying) body. Seventeen people made this same choice, but Travis is only the second one who survived the process. Now he's back from cryo space to find that no one's standing there with that sad look upon their face. I have to ask, of course, if they have the medical science to achieve this, what the hell this science was when he was sick!
So, five years have passed, which is far less than he'd imagined it would take to perfect this process. His best friend Kyle (who still hasn't come out of the closet) is now a man who looks trim and dresses well. Travis's girlfriend, Cate, has moved on, now engaged to marry someone else even though she lied that she'd wait for him, but while everyone else has gone on with their lives, Travis has to go back to school and pick-up from where he left off.
This story is odd, but believe it or not, it's not the first I've read where someone has a body transplant. A long time ago I read a similar story, but in that case narrated by a man whose wife had a body transplant. Of course, her new body was buxom and hot, whereas his wife's old body wasn't, and we were expected to believe that he had a problem with that. It really made no impression on me at all, which probably explains why I can't remember the title.
The novel is an easy read, and it starts out reasonably well, and humorously, but it rapidly goes downhill and become maudlin and repetitive, focused solely on what a whiny loser Travis is, and how he's too stupid to let his old life go. At least it has short chapters, so it's easy to end at a good point when you have to put the book down - and you might want to - a lot.
For a novel so rooted in sci-fi, it's rather ironic that the author gives the science such short shrift because at one point, when he depicts Travis and Cate on a roof watching the Leonids, Travis says, "We'd reached the age where the science behind it matters…" What a betrayal!
The author didn't think this through too well, either, because this novel takes place Kansas where the age of consent is 16, so why he depicts Travis as being concerned over 'soon he'll be seventeen' vis-a-vis Cate's five-year head-start on him is a bit of a mystery. Although given how little of this was thought through, I guess it's no surprise. I mean some things in it were well-written, but other parts just made my jaw drop as I wondered how such a blunder could have crept in. This is another example which shows that Big Publishing™ offers no guarantee that you will end up with a quality product.
Travis's pursuit of Cate is doomed from the start but he's just too stupid to get the message. There's a Nora Ephron moment in a Karaoke bar, and there's a moment when they get together and talk, briefly, but there's also a moment where she delivers him that most horrible of lines: we can be friends. In a way I can see that, but in another way I can see it as a complete betrayal of everything they had. I mean if they truly do have what it takes to be best friends, then why don't they have what it takes to spend their lives together? She has callously abandoned him, and he's not smart enough to get that, but instead of feeling sympathy for him, I felt only cringing and groaning as he continued to blindly hammer his transplanted head against a solid brick wall.
The problem is that Travis hasn't moved on and Cate is now five years older than he, is engaged to the guy with whom she's living, and has made no effort whatsoever to get in touch with him. He just doesn't want to get that message. He's completely unrealistic in his obsession with her, in his blind belief that she'll take him, a sixteen-year-old, into her 21-year-old arms and everything will be like it used to be.
He's already in pain over this, but he can't see that this will cause him more pain and worse, will cause her pain too. That pain is the difference between love and obsession. That much is fine, but the fact that this drags on and on and on is what drags this novel into the WARTY! pile for me. It's like it gets stuck in a groove and will not move on, just like Travis, and nothing really happens from that point onwards. It makes what started out great into a thoroughly unsatisfying read.
There are other problems, too. For instance, there's this one incident where Travis and Kyle go to a burger place and Travis's last memory of it is when he was undergoing chemo and threw-up right after they ate. Now he's looking forward to trying it sans chemo. This struck me as being a bit odd. If I'd associated the place and the food with violent vomiting, I sincerely doubt that I'd be anxious to get back there and try it again! That's irrational, yes, but it's realistic! The negative association would be too off-putting; then again, not everyone is the same, and I can't speak for Travis. Only Whaley can do that, 'cause Travis is his character, but this does bring me to the observation that Travis seems way too mature for his age. It's like he stayed sixteen but matured at the same rate as everyone else. There goes credibility!
One thing which this novel neglects to mention is the medical hurdles over which science would have to leap to make something like this work. There's no discussion of the problems inherent in trying to fix severed nerves, or of tissue-matching or rejection problems such as Graft Versus Host disease. Obviously this is science fiction, so there's no requirement that a writer get into deep technical detail over how or why something works. Indeed, I rather dislike it when they try, but the fact that Whaley doesn't even offer a nod and a wink to this was a serious weakness, I thought. Most transplant recipients are looking at a lifetime of anti-rejection medication, and even then can still have serious issues. It's a bit disrespectful to them to sweep all that under a rug like it was never there.
Back in high school Travis starts trying to resume the learning process, with the attention of counselors and doctors, and the fact that he's a celebrity - only the second person to come back from the dead (unless you count that myth from the Middle East 2,000 years ago, which I don't). On his first day back, he's befriended by a guy named Hatton, who takes on the role of an entertaining side-kick and who is the one who gives Travis his nickname, which is the title of the novel. He also meets Kyle's younger sister, who is now Travis's age. The fact that these two are going to end up together is telegraphed pretty loudly, even though it's played as though Travis is shocked by the idea that he could date his best friend's kid sister. Seriously?
Other than that awful cliché, this was for a while readable and entertaining. Whaley definitely has an eye (or an ear!) for dialog and for depicting relationships well, but then it's like he loses it, and it all goes to hell in a hand-basket. The way he has Travis reflect on his love affair with the younger version of Cate definitely makes it hard to accept that he's never going to end up with her, but the sweetness of this is smashed to a bloody pulp by Travis's wooden-headedness - if I can put it like that! Whaley also puts a much-appreciated fresh face on a main character's relationship with his parents. After reading so many sad YA trope novels where families are dysfunctional, or are missing one component or another, it was refreshing to read of a normal family with loving parents who are not caricatures.
But what drags it all down is that Travis cannot let go of Cate. In some ways this is understandable: she's grown up, given up (on him) and moved on. It's really no different to a common situation where someone of whom you're very fond decides they don't want to be with you. It's awful, but it's life, yet Travis can't see it that way because of how they parted, and because he's so young, and because of the commitment Cate made to him. It was one which she was clearly too young to make, but neither of them knew any better. The problem is that he still doesn't
So in conclusion: began well, started to smell; made me think, then it stinks; reached its peak, began to reek. You get the (olfactory) picture? I can't recommend this novel.
