Patterns of Paper Monsters by Emma Rathbone

The Patterns of Paper Monsters by Emma Rathbone. New York: Regan Arthur Books, 2010. Review by Sharon Harrigan

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The Patterns of Paper Monsters is a coming of age novel about a seventeen-year-old boy from the wrong part of Northern Virginia. His father abandoned him early in life, his mother is an infantile alcoholic, and his stepfather is a chronically unemployed wife beater. All the present action takes place in a juvenile detention center, where Jacob is being held for attempted armed robbery of a convenience store. But Rathbone manages a tricky feat: she turns this dark material into a hilarious trip through the twisted mind of a teenager with a sharp wit and enough attitude and energy to power a whole novel.

The book is framed as journal entries Jacob writes every evening, and the action covers the last few months of Jacob’s time as a prisoner, ending with a short narrative of what happens to him after he is released. It is written in the first person and present tense, which gives it an immediacy that pulls the reader in. Jacob uses a lot of sensory information, which makes us feel like we are in the room with him.

As with most first person narratives, the driving force of this book is the voice. It’s defiant and  judgmental of people and things that don’t seem authentic, sincere, or fair. It’s confessional, unrepentant, sarcastic, clever, and honest. It is never self-indulgent or self-pitying. With his honesty and perceptiveness, Jacob gains our sympathy.

Because Jacob is a nonconformist bent on seeing the world in his own way, he allows himself a lot of word play and inventiveness, which makes his journal entries surprising, refreshing, and funny. I started to underline the funny lines to pull out for quotes, but I had to stop, because I was underlining the whole book.

The humor helped cushion the jagged edges of the book’s theme: how to escape from a childhood of violence and neglect and come out intact. The violence is not just in the back story; while Jacob is in the detention center, his stepfather beats his mother so badly she goes into a coma. By the end of the book, she hasn’t recovered and may die or have permanent brain damage. Jacob also has to deal with the threat of violence at the detention center. David, a new boy, hatches a plot to blow the place up, and tries to force Jacob to help him. Without humor, I probably would have found these events difficult to read. This book showed how much humor and darkness can work together.

Even the gestures are funny, like this one: “My mom broke a cookie in half and tried to dislocate a chocolate chip from its socket.” It’s not just funny, though; it also reveals a lot about the characters. Jacob filters in the violence from his life and puts it into his descriptions of everything, including something as benign as watching someone eat a cookie.

Rathbone perfectly captures Jacob’s tone. It’s odd and jarring but precise. Instead of “Who’s that?” Jacob says: “Fuck is that guy?” Even with this tough way of talking, Jacob gets away with a multitude of metaphors and similes, while still sounding authentic and conversational. The analogies work, because they are not clichés, and they all serve to deepen our understanding of the characters. For instance, “All the anger, all the resentment I feel that day knocking around inside me like sneakers in a washing machine.” The analogy works because it’s so goofy, because the quotidian quality of washing machines and sneakers linked with something so abstract and complex as anger is startling. It also works because it’s sensory: we can hear the sneakers pounding on the metal.

I love metaphors and similes but usually have to cut them because they are more decorative than functional.  I am going to try to learn from the way weaves analogies into this book to add to the meaning. Jacob’s mixed metaphors give us a window into the way his mind works, for instance: “like everyone is writhing in some cinematic rinse cycle of redemption.”

When Jacob acts like he’s from Mars and all our Earthling rituals are new to him, it’s funny but it also reflects his feeling as a true outsider. For instance, he calls a cell phone “a shiny black miniature communications device” or when he calls Christianity “some religion where you can’t have sex.”

Rathbone does an impressive job using setting as character and portraying class differences. Jacob’s hometown is remarkable both for what it is and for what it is not: “It’s not the northern Virginia of freshly painted highways and wincingly bright glass buildings. It’s not the northern Virginia of tailored town centers with marble walkways and aggressive-looking plants. It’s a land of deserted concrete plazas, slumping strip malls, and schools with losing sports teams.”

Rathbone makes us empathize with Jacob, even though he is rude and defiant of adult authority. This is a problem for my teenage characters, too. I want them to be sarcastic and arrogant in a way that I think is true and captures the energy of someone at that age who really wants to live a life that isn’t boring and ordinary. Part of how Jacob gets our sympathy is by using grandiose phrases like: “If there was one message I could write in the sky with clouds, it would be . . .” You have to love somebody who sees his job as never expressing something in the expected way.

One way Jacob keeps his expression out of the ordinary is to replace a word out of a colloquial phrase with one that evokes an image, such as substituting “swab” for “take”: “meeting them, having them swab some impression of me.” Or he adds an adjective, usually visual, such as: “they are supposed to reach out an offer me some carpeted guidance.”

What’s interesting about such a rapid-fire observation machine as Jacob is that he does almost no talking at all. In fact, he makes a great effort to talk as little as possible. The dialogue that we do get is a study in how a teenager can be as aggravating as possible to an adult. The follow is one example, after he signs an “honor slip” in microscopic letters:

“That’s too small.”

“It’s my signature.”

“It’s unreadable.”

“You can’t read it?”

“No.”

“I can read it.”

Jacob hates the juvenile detention center, but he is not eager to live in the outside world, either. He has contempt for what he considers normal. But halfway through the book, he starts to change. He is cracked open by a girl he meets, a fellow juvie named Andrea. As time goes on, they have more intimate conversations and, he says, “it’s like we have day passes to each other’s souls.”

Patterns is a classic coming of age story, because its protagonist starts the book with a big dose of immaturity and arrogance, imagining that he is much wiser than he actually is, then later realizes he doesn’t know as much as he thought. At the beginning, he acts as if he’s already an old man: “I know something already that most people learn only once they’ve reached the end of whatever personal disappointment corridor they’ve started on . . . everything . . . is totally sad and completely pointless.”

At the end, Jacob is not transformed into a heartwarming greeting-card message spewing automaton, but at least he is trying to figure out how to live in the world without committing any more crimes. His “second cousin” (a kind of “Big Brother” the center assigns him) finds him a part-time job, and on the last page Jacob is sitting at his desk, trying to figure out “what it is that people do.” But the transformation is huge, because he knows that he doesn’t know. He is going to stop pretending he knows everything and instead try to learn.

I liked this book so much I recommended it to my book group (of nonwriters). I can’t remember the last time they enjoyed a book so unanimously. I recommend it to all readers, writers or not, young and old. If Jacob won over a jaded parent of a teen like me, he can win over anyone.