Forever Young Adult
who CARES what happened to haymitch
I’m really bad at picking books to bring on holiday. Once, I brought Sylvia Plath’s diaries to Mexico for some reason. It was a five-hundred-page tome and a cry for help. Before my Big Asia Trip, I scampered over to Half Price Books the day before and bought First-Time Caller by B.K. Borison under duress. I made it through eight pages before setting it down for the next five weeks.
A hopeless romantic meets a jaded radio host in this cozy, Sleepless in Seattle-inspired love story from beloved author B.K. Borison.
Frankly, I’ve never seen Sleepless in Seattle because When Harry Met Sally is the only Meg Ryan movie that matters. The premise of the book is weak. Everyone listens to Apple Music in 2025. Aiden Valentine is a down-on-his-luck radio host at the last independent station in the world, and a fictional iHeartRadio is banging down the door. He hosts a late-night loveline where people call in specifically to destroy any remaining romantic notions he’s ever entertained. Complaints range from “he doesn’t do the dishes” to “he doesn’t love me anymore.”
If this were a novel with any basis in reality, Aiden very obviously would’ve been a podcaster trawling Raya for 23-year-old women. It would’ve been more compelling if Borison had written a fictionalized account about the host of The Daily who left his husband for his female producer. Lucie, the protagonist, feels like the culmination of throwing various tropes to the wall and seeing what sticks, except in the end, everything stuck. She’s a manic pixie dream mechanic, a teen mom, and a hopeless romantic. She lives next door to her baby daddy and his husband, and their tween daughter, Maya, goes back and forth like it’s Full House.
Not that I’ve met many mechanics, but I’ve especially never met a female mechanic. Any woman I have ever encountered in that environment has been a receptionist or, maybe, in the parts department. In the third act, Aiden is, of course, titillated by Lucie’s flatteringly oversized jumpsuit and adorably grease-smudged nose.
Maya calls into Aiden’s show in the hopes of helping her 29-year-old mother find love. It’s crazy that Lucie’s supposed to be 29. Shouldn’t she be more well-adjusted and a better advocate for herself?! I guess then it’d be a different book. In the name of saving ratings and moving the plot along, Lucie is installed as the second mic on the loveline and screens suitors live on air, while falling madly in love with her co-host. I’m not sure how much time is meant to elapse. There’s a lot of brushing of knees and elbows in close quarters. They call this “forced proximity.”
Aiden is a classic avoidant, on account of his mother’s recurring cancer. Instead of spending precious time with his grieving father and dying mother, he holes up in his row house and terrorizes the people of Baltimore with his ~bad~ personality. He feels like he has to steel himself in the face of tragedy because of toxic masculinity? Lucie’s love teaches him to Open His Heart, and vice versa.
Lucie, who is supposedly so many things, has only two thoughts and they are “woe is me!” and “I love my daughter.” She seems to suffers from a latent Madonna-whore complex. She got pregnant at eighteen and her rich parents disowned her. Why else has she led such a largely monastic existence up until this point? There could’ve been a religious angle here, but that might’ve been too polarizing for the general reader.
I like Baltimore as a setting, at least. It’s the place that gave us Luigi Mangione, The Wire, John Waters, the bridge collapse. It’s different! My mom’s family lived an hour outside the city briefly in the late 70s, so I am an honorary Baltimorienne.
The worst thing about contemporary novels is that a lot of them were written almost explicitly to be adapted.1 I can tell and I hate that. Unbelievably, First-Time Caller clocks in at a bloated 443 pages, even though it easily should’ve been half that. There’s slow-burn, and then there’s just pacing issues. I had to finish it, though, because I paid like $20 for it. I think it would feel really good to throw it in the trash. I read an entire other 400-page novel—The Idiot—while I was trying to avoid this one. The second-worst thing was that Aiden drives a Bronco.
I’ve decided that Elif Batuman wrote my favorite young adult series, and I’ve re-read it thrice through now.2 The Idiot covers Selin’s first year at Harvard, circa 1995, and Either/Or covers her second year. The Idiot cinematic universe is mostly driven by Selin’s unrequited crush on a senior named Ivan, who is Hungarian and has a girlfriend. They develop a rapport over an emerging technology called email. Selin gets in so deep, she spends the summer teaching English in a remote Hungarian village and making her relationship with Ivan even more strained and weird. In Either/Or, our Turkish-American heroine spends the summer running around Turkey to contribute to a student-run travel guide and gain life experience, by way of sleeping with randos.
Batuman can make a meandering, stream-of-consciousness narrative entertaining, in spite of or because of her hifalutin references that I get more with time. (I still haven’t read Proust. 🤨) First-Time Caller was so unfunny in a distinctly millennial way, but Batuman has a real sense of levity. There’s an entire sequence in Either/Or in which she describes the delicate political dynamics of a Pilates class.3
I sometimes went with Svetlana to Pilates—even though the logistics of mat placement was deeply stressful, in a way that made me feel like I understood the primal conflicts for land that formed the basis of modern history…Svetlana always made us get there early, to secure an advantageous position. Then the people who came later would try to crowd us out, inserting themselves between us, or directly in front of us, blocking our view—not apologetically, but with a self-righteous attitude.
One time, I was late to Pilates. Then I saw how everyone who had gotten there earlier was avoiding eye contact and doing stretches in the clear hope that I wouldn’t sit near them, and would sit somewhere else. This felt unfair and hurtful: I had signed up on time, and had as much right to be there as they did…Where, exactly, did they want me to go? Did they want me to just not exist? Was that how the Israelis and Palestinians felt about each other?
Like everyone else, I half-watched The White Lotus and it was fine. I kind of love how on-the-nose Mike White is. Everyone is just really whacking you over the head with it—our diminishing attention spans and their consequences. It feels like a lot of material starts with these soaring images or themes and the gaps get filled in haphazardly, rote mechanisms shuttling us from point A to point B. The payoff is generally dissatisfying and unearned. It doesn’t hold up.
All I ever want is for someone to say something interesting!
I will be seated for People We Meet on Vacation, however.
I braided all of my friends’ hair at The Hunger Games midnight premiere. That is my special skill.
It’s only gotten worse in our godless ClassPass era. Enduring human truth.