Alison Espach's THE ADULTS: Everybody knows it sucks to grow up

Consider Alison Espach's debut as three novellas about and narrated by the same character at various points in her life. The third is sublime, the second is tedious, and the first is tragic and difficult to take; but to get the full effect of the third, it's necessary to push and halt through the others.

When THE ADULTS opens Emily Vidal is 14, the only child of a family in a suburban Connecticut enclave, and her parents have just decided to get divorced. Two things happen to Emily that year: She witnesses the death of a neighbor, and she gets involved in a rather complicated relationship, and coupled with the effects of the divorce, those experiences follow her into adulthood as we revisit her later in life.

Hyperdetailed, almost painful, this first section can be overwhelming to the extent to which it forces you behind Emily's eyes. The ADULTS opens with this sort of set piece at Emily's father's fiftieth birthday party out on the lawn, at which Emily (as teenagers do) is sulky, disruptive and in a way envious of all the other people who know what they ought to be doing. (Or so it seems to her.) The boy who likes her and the boy she likes are both at the party, and hard to separate. She doesn't know where she stands with her best friend. The accumulation of detail is critical, but a little bit hard to take.

There's an overabundance of detail in the second section as well, but it isn't till the third section that it all snaps together. Not every sentence is packed with detail, but they all are pulling in unison toward a greater picture -- my favorite example being, and this is completely out of context, "Jonathan was asking me if I would like to pass him the bread basket as though it were an option to deny someone the bread basket." These are sentences that cut, but they also advance the conception of Emily as she moves away from these life-changing events and, yes, tries to measure her own maturity against the adults around her. I wouldn't call the second section of THE ADULTS a failure by that sense, but the details highlighted pull against any meaningful characterization that is going on, so the reader feels yanked in both directions at once.

As disturbing as I occasionally found THE ADULTS, it stays with me. That said, I had trouble finding the momentum to finish this book because some of the circumstances described in the beginning are difficult to comprehend. If having the impulse to shout at a fictional character (or a few) is not fun for you, you're not going to even get through the beginning of this book, but if you can hang on: it gets better.

My interest in this book was piqued when I saw Espach compete in Literary Death Match earlier this year. 

Literary Death Match Turns 5

On Thursday I went to my second ever Literary Death Match, a reading series where four writers are pitted against each other in front of three judges whose attention toward great books is at best tenuous. Literary Death Match started here, but I had to go to Baltimore this past fall to discover how fun it was, and saw BIG FISH author Daniel Wallace eke out a win at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

At the anniversary show, Iowa memoirist Andre Perry bested British memoirist Jane Bussmann (whose initial reaction to losing was unprintable, yet hilarious) in the final round featuring cupcake throwing and icing dart guns. Bussmann probably had a slight lead because her one-woman show was about to open here, but in the end no one could have predicted the outcome. Jimmy Donn of "The Daily Show" and Alison Espach also read in earlier rounds, Donn from a parody sex manual called OUR BODIES, OUR JUNK and Espach from her debut THE NEIGHBORS.

I highly recommend you seek out Literary Death Match if it's ever near to you; I go to a fair amount of readings, but most of them aren't so rowdy, and it is a welcome change. (I only look like I'm not having fun in Electric Literature's recap.) My initial attraction toward this edition was judge Hannibal Buress, "covering" literary merit -- "I thought this was supposed to be a nerdy '8 Mile,'" he said on finding out every competitor was reading an excerpt from a longer piece -- but not knowing the panelists is no object. New York's next edition is May 25.