DC Pierson’s The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To
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Let me start by saying that I was having a very strange day when I found this book. It was Halloween, I was at the thrift store with Mark, and my head was full of some impossible people I’d known once upon a time. For fifty cents, I wasn’t about to pass up a book called The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To. I was buying a stack of books – some bittersweet James Patterson novel about a diary, an equally bittersweet book about a locket (and a diary, from what I can tell), and one taking place in ancient Ur. However, it was The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep that I was inexplicably drawn to devour first.
From the very first page, when author DC Pierson endeared himself to me with the description of our generation as the Stand Around Each Other’s Laptops and Play The First Thirty Seconds of Every Song On The Hard Drive Generation, I was hooked. The story unfolds slowly, it seems – Darren Bennett’s the self-proclaimed nerd who sits in class drawing, and who nobody notices. Until Eric. Eric not only expresses an interest in Darren’s drawings, but by the end of the school week has added to them entire universes, species, ideas and well-fleshed out plans for feature films. They become fast friends, perhaps the only ones each other has ever had, and amidst the hormonally-driven chaos of high school, girls, Drama kids and video games, they form the foundations for their comic book. Movie. Novels? They’re not sure, but damned if their rambling movie titles don’t have “more colons than a proctologist,” and they’re not dedicated enough to have a soundtrack before putting together the storyline.
The boys create a universe that shimmers, only half-materialized, to the reader’s perception, but into which I was pulled regardless. Eric and Darren’s world of villainous cyborgs, mecha-warriors, Temporal Rangers and “Wolfpack Genetically Modified Not to Feel Fear” are the stuff of nerd’s dreams, and that’s how you just know DC Pierson is one of us. The Weird Kids.
It’s not long after that Darren uncovers a great secret about Eric, and for all his good intentions, can’t help but push it. Why does Eric never, ever sleep? How is that possible? Darren is awed, and despite a couple Hos-Before-Bros snags along the way, their friendship intensifies as the world they create becomes all the more real. Real enough, perhaps, to destroy them.
The writing is superb, and vividly descriptive yet simple in a way I’m beginning to worry only males can master. The changing times are warily embraced, as Darren’s got a more sensible head on his shoulders than most boys his age, and flowing from Pierson’s pen is everything you’d expect from modern high school scenes, only better – Adderall abuse, slang and social networking go hand in hand with words like ‘perspicacity’. Whereas Juno had adults the world over saying, ‘Oh, kids don’t have that kind of vocabulary’, The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep reminds me exactly of many high school interactions, online and in real life.
Right down to the friend here or there who “listens to music she finds on Livejournals that mostly feature pictures of emo boys making out with each other”, this book seems one of the very first to properly explain the new breed of Weird Kid. The ones with overactive imaginations and the internet addictions, manga, choreographed cast parties and friends ridiculous enough to fuel them.
It’s actually the first time in awhile I’ve read a non-Dresden Files book the very year it came out, and there’s something delightful in seeing modern online habits, such as Facebook (Namespot, in Pierson’s book) make their way into literature. I can’t quite put my finger on it, the way seeing such things in a novel adds a certain legitimacy to their place in the everyday lives of millions, but I’m very glad Pierson took that route. Darren even admits, “I am part of the problem.” Though you’d think a couple pages’ worth of someone setting up their Facebook profile could run the risk of being boring, it’s novel because it’s in a novel. I think it was a great choice on Pierson’s part, although it will perhaps limit his reader base to those born after 1983.
Even the supporting characters are consistently amusing – the older brother who sleeps, eats and breathes Irvine Welsh and the rock band hangers-on that float in and out of the tale as dazedly and in as Hipster a manner as you’d expect. (Darren goes on for some time about this particular group. Why and how their sarcasm sounded so much like sincerity, and vice versa – something noticeable in Pierson’s own talent for long stretches of incisive dialogue.) In the length of time between front cover and back, both characters lose their virginity – unfortunately, to the same girl. Both have seemingly unremarkable home lives, aside from the occasional ninja gang on the lawn. Both are bored to death by school, and can’t help shaking their heads at the kids who “stop reading on page two if page one was too dense or too gay or too historical.” (But those ones are my favorites!)
As if texts, drugs and rock’n'roll weren’t difficult enough all at once, Eric’s mental productivity and lack of sleep begin to manifest themselves in harmful ways. While all this is going on – maybe because of it, too – Eric and Darren fall ever deeper into a world where ‘impossible’ isn’t a word, and where thoughts are some truly dangerous things to let run around unattended. Eric breaks a promise, and his conscience has a life of its own as he and Eric run afoul of mysteriously familiar, yet terrifying pursuers. Darren attempts to push a weakening Eric to the limits of what he calls his friend’s ‘power’.
When at last the reader is given a glimpse of how the book might end, the climax still comes as a surprise in its simplicity. The repeated shout-outs to the genius of Chuck Palahniuk don’t prepare you for what’s coming, so don’t think for a second it’s going to end like that. The lessons in the book reveal themselves over time and, despite being elementary, make all kinds of sense: don’t rat your friends out, don’t let girls get in the way of a good bromance, and sometimes, despite all evidence to the contrary, thought alone really is enough to make it so.
It’s the stages of character evolution, as much of the quirks of the story itself, that make this such an amazing read. It parallels well the processes of growing up, from the mundane tasks one inevitably grows into, to higher concepts – as a child knows that anything is possible, an adult knows too well that just because something can happen doesn’t mean it should.
Eric and Darren learn this in one of the most difficult ways. Even as the hammer of reality crashes down upon the imagination’s dubious triumphs, every page is a like a cynic’s best days, a joy for the prematurely weary. Upon finishing the last page, I wondered what DC Pierson has next up his sleeve for all the Weird Kids – the writers, the artists, and the effed-up, sleepless dreamers he summed up so well. Any one of us could sense in Darren and Eric an understanding of what it is to live in this time and place, lugging around a heavy excess of imagination, and with the whole world just a click or two away.
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