Told in the voices of ten young people in ten separate chapters, their lives
interact with each other over the course of a day. What ties them together is their
incomprehension of each other. This
translates into anger and resentment, causing each of them to have a moment when
they flip each other off. This leads in the end to some late moralizing about how we might all be happier if we took a little more time and effort to understand each other.
The result is clever, but often distractingly so. At times, it is something of an effort to tie
characters together. Also, given the overall
structural demands of the story, linking the characters overshadows any significant
storytelling. It is a story entirely too
much in danger of being too clever.
Still, I liked the experiment and the ten voices were at least
interesting to follow. Naturally enough,
it’s a bit gritty and having the central
organizing conceit being an impolite gesture is a bit risqué.
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