When Simon asks her if she’s depressed, she replies, “Let’s just say I like the feel of a good pair of crafting scissors on my supple Black thighs.” Her disclosures are self-lacerating, but they strike with such frequency that their sharpness is dulled. Louise, also 15, is jokey-saturnine, quick with a quip that points to her own spoiled lot. Three hundred thousand of them die each year from an opioid overdose.” “Eighty years from now the world’s oceans will be so hot they will stop producing oxygen” “there are more than forty-one million opioid users on Planet Earth. Just 15 years old, Simon hyperventilates into a paper bag and thinks in terms of the stark absolutes he’s read about: Tucked away at the Float Anxiety Abatement Center, a $1,500-a-night psychiatric facility outside Chicago, Simon Oliver and Louise Conklin idle in medicated agitation. The faces of agony have been replaced by emojis. Yes, there is mention of the “nail-biting work” of parenting - the time spent “felting costumes for the school play,” the sleepovers, “soccer Saturdays” - but the language is impersonal. The novel gamely captures the exterior energy of the moment without sharing its interior reverberations. “Newspapers filled with photographs of parents falling to their knees, their lips spread in an impossible O.” “If there were an emoji for this growing crisis, it would be the openmouthed scream,” Hawley writes.
The author’s attempts to articulate the severity of the catastrophe are cartoonish. “Trapped in the pain of becoming,” the youngsters see finitude as preferable to an assured bleak inheritance. It is pointless to go on, they think, so they don’t. Here, suicide “is an idea” capable of spreading “from person to person.” The kids see the future, one their parents continue to tarnish, as an irresolvable abyss. Instead, Hawley diagnoses a universal symptom. The questions relevant to each individual suicide are ignored. A few years after the covid-19 pandemic, so many children begin killing themselves that it becomes a global issue.
To keep the didactic element entertaining, Hawley augments the stakes. The result is a novel that feels like having the front-page headlines of the newspaper explained to you.
Saturated with purpose, its attempt to Say Something Serious - “to create coherence from incoherence,” as the author puts it - often devolves into didacticism. Noah Hawley’s Anthem, though ambitious, could be accused of doing the same thing. Someone says, “Now it’s dark in here.” Commenting on the light’s absence merely states the obvious.
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