Chances are you know the high school depicted in Martin Wilson's What They Always Tell Us. If you remember parties with invites distributed according to rigid hierarchies, as well as conversations that functioned as social trapdoors, then you know this high school well. And given Wilson's sharp eye for high school reality, the true feat in his debut novel is that he crafts a strikingly fresh story from that well worn terrain, finding the exceptional lurking in the shadows of the everyday.
Wilson’s prose is straightforward but powerful, so void of melodrama and over-reaching that its beauty sneaks up on you. But it’s there, all of it: the pinch in the lungs from running in the cold, the burn in the throat from swigs of vodka, the turbulence in the stomach from a forbidden crush. And, yes, those strips of fast food chains and hardware stores, those post-party living room floors littered with empties, those spooky church signs stationed along cotton fields—all of it is there.
But most importantly, perhaps, Wilson offers pitch perfect characters. The main players in Wilson's novel are at varying stages of adolescence themselves—James is a senior, younger brother Alex a junior, and their neighbor Henry is a precocious ten year old—yet they're all frustrated by the confines of their town, each realizing in his own way that he is now writing with ink on the pages of his life, that changing course, even at such a young age, is more difficult than anticipated. They are caught, like so many teenagers—so many people of any age—between despair that nothing will ever change and dread that everything is changing too fast.
Some of their dilemmas are immediately recognizable—James's ex-girlfriend sniping from the margins; his obsession over college admissions letters; Alex's uncertain entry into high school athletics—but that doesn't mean there's not real trouble, real menace, lurking in these pages. The intrigue surrounding Henry's mother—she leaves him too often unattended; strange cars hover by her drive at odd hours—transitions seamlessly from a mysterious diversion to a genuinely disturbing development. James, who more than anything is simply bored with what he sees as an irredeemably mundane high school life, brushes against Henry’s life with more friction on each page. And we learn early that Alex, while placid enough on the surface, nearly killed himself at a summer party. It all serves to remind the reader that, though the recognizable is always less threatening, that doesn't mean it's without pitfalls; in What They Always Tell Us, you never forget that young people can do each other harm.
This is most evident in Alex's friends. After his "incident," they all but shun him. Worse yet, some of them befriend James, inviting him to parties while conspicuously leaving Alex out, then making snide comments—in that timeless teenage art—that aren't explicitly about Alex, but drip with implication. It's a credit to Martin Wilson that he doesn't disentangle his characters from these troubles in tidy or heroic maneuvers, or in one grand gesture to put at bay forever all those foes of adolescence. Rather, his characters learn to support each other, in fits and starts, with a quality that is heroic only because of its scarcity: kindness.