Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD on February 1, 2022
String Follow is marketed as “a darkly comic suburban Gothic.” There’s no doubt that the novel is dark. School shootings are as dark as it gets, and the novel’s school shooting is only a small part of the violence that pervades the story. But school shootings aren’t the stuff of comedy. How String Follow can be marketed as “darkly comic” is bewildering.
The characters are teens in Adena, Ohio. The real Adena, a small village at least an hour’s drive from Pittsburg, is more rural than suburban, but a novelist is free to change the reality of locations. The fictional Adena appears to change its size and shape as characters drive through streets that are simultaneously familiar and unrecognizable.
The story is narrated by a lurking presence (marketing materials describe it as a “malevolent force”) that purportedly helps the teens understand their choices “and see their architecture, the brutal structure behind them, as dense and complex and orderly as a blood spray.” The plot culminates in a “Death Party” at the (supposedly empty) home of a character who is presumed to be dead but is inconveniently alive — a party orchestrated by the malevolent force. String Follow is more of a horror novel than a dark comedy. I suppose horror alone suffices to convince marketing departments to describe a novel as “Gothic.” The underlying premise seems to be that it’s pretty horrifying to be a teen.
The characters are lost in their teen angst. Beth “bottled and buried her rage within herself,” instinctively turning her back and retreating from conflict. Her older brother Greg is seeing a psychiatrist who has him on Risperdal. Greg doesn’t tell his shrink about the voice he hears, the voice that begins to dictate his behavior. Beth also hears a voice that tells her what to do, although its not as demanding as her brother’s voice. Beth feels like she’s trapped in a tower and believes she sees colors that she interprets as souls.
Not to be outdone, Sarah spends an inexplicable amount of time thinking about colored lights. Her colors are not necessarily souls, but she sometimes perceives them as bodies. Purple seems to be a guiding light. Sarah can’t have sex without entertaining colorful scattered thoughts: “On the bed, she separated from her body,” a perspective that allows her to notice “the yellow of David’s room to the filtered gray palette of the world beyond him” and the “furious white” sky, an “impossibly dense color of equal violence” creating an atmosphere “as thick as language.” Readers who can decipher that prose might find String Follow to be a real treat.
Sarah is Beth’s best friend until she’s not. Sarah is also David’s girlfriend until they break up, and then his lover when he’s nice to her until she decides he’s not being nice, after all. David is given to “pornographic cult fantasies” but otherwise seems to be living in oblivion. During their breakup, Sarah hangs out with Greg, whose attention she enjoys until she doesn’t. Sarah has a driving need to be popular and to solve other people’s problems, then feels her friends are using her when they allow her to impose her will upon them. It's not surprising that Sarah drives away her friend Claire, a minor character who is embarrassed by her family’s prosperity.
Tyler and Rhea are the other key characters, although Rhea is something of a nonentity unless she’s bleeding. For a time, Tyler and Rhea explore Adena and surrounding communities, avoiding their homes and parents. Tyler then discovers that David left the house unlocked while his parents were taking an out-of-town trip. Tyler takes over the teen cave that David made for himself in the basement, locking David out. David thinks it is odd that the basement door is suddenly locked but his teen ennui prevents him from doing anything about it. Tyler eventually invites Rhea to join him in David’s basement. Using David’s computer, Tyler invites a younger girl named Marcy to join him, promising to fuck her to death if she brings weed, to which Marcy (who calls herself Typhus) responds “when and where?” Inviting Marcy turns out to be a bad decision, one that adds to the flowing blood that eventually drowns the story.
Claire becomes a fan of a teen named Graham, a member of a punk band who is locally famous for self-inducing blinding migraines so that he can express his pain through his music until he passes out. Later, a kid named Adam who suffers the same affliction (did Graham relocate and change his name?) is present during a school shooting that occurs late in the novel. He does nothing after noticing the gun. Adam then obsessively replays videos, watching himself and blaming himself for the bullet that struck one of the victims after he collapsed in pain.
With all these characters, String Fellow produces enough teen angst to power a small country. The malevolent force (self-described only as “we”) might be responsible for the colors that plague Sarah and Beth and the voices in Greg’s head. It is explicitly responsible for the school shooting, for Adam’s migraines, and for the Death Party, among other acts of violence. Perhaps malevolence directed at the reader motivates the narrating force to explain the inner thoughts of insecure teen characters. Too many paragraphs are devoted to internal monologues as characters fret about each new source of anxiety.
The malevolent force might not be a reliable narrator, given that events near the novel’s end involving Tyler and Rhea and Sarah make no sense at all. Near the end, Tyler leaves the basement with his friends in tow, only to return to the house (where he picks up Sarah as she flees from David) without appearing to recognize it as the same house he just vacated. Deliberate ambiguity is built into the story’s conclusion, ambiguity that creates pointless confusion. The force appears to be clouding the minds of the characters. It certainly clouded my mind, giving me an Graham/Adam-like headache as I tried to follow the plot. A lengthy passage in all caps seems to suggest that all possible versions of the story are simultaneously true, while a passage that follows in normal type suggests that alternative versions of the story could just as easily be told. Those passages made me say out loud: “Just pick a story and stick to it.” Perhaps the novel is meant to be experimental. If so, the experiment left me frustrated.
String Follow envisions evil as an external and sentient presence. Many writers have made that suggestion. It might be comforting to attribute teen violence that has no obvious explanation — and there’s plenty of that in String Follow — to a malevolent force rather than mental illness or poor parenting. As a society, we only have ourselves to blame for society’s failure to recognize the symptoms of mental illness or violence-prone kids and to intervene before tragedy ensues. Attributing violence to an amorphous evil seems like copout, although Simon Jacobs does try to have it both ways by portraying Adena as a town where adult supervision of teens is entirely absent.
On a more positive note, Jacobs’ prose is creative and robust. When they aren’t whining about their lives or behaving as if they are characters in a slasher movie, the kids occasionally do something interesting (the idea of taking over a random basement and using it as a hangout is cool). Had the story tried to explore teen violence as the product of something other than an evil force, it might have been compelling. I shouldn’t criticize a writer for failing to write a different book — the kind of book I might have enjoyed more — but I think it’s fair to criticize a writer for making a choice that doesn’t work. The “malevolent forces make kids bad” theme is too banal to succeed, despite offering some stirring moments to fans of gore.
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