BookBrowse Reviews The Book of George by Kate Greathead

BookBrowse:

The author of Laura & Emma pokes gentle fun at the vulnerabilities of modern masculinity in her excellent new comic novel.

The premise of The Book of George, the witty, highly entertaining new novel from Kate Greathead, is that every reader knows a George. Well-heeled and well-connected, he's a young man with all of life's doors open to him—and a young man who systematically fails to walk through a single one. He's got smarts, but he's too lazy to use them; he's got a loving girlfriend, but he's too self-absorbed to commit. From early adolescence to the cusp of middle age, we follow this eponymous hero in episodic chapters plucked from a life emblematic of stagnating millennial masculinity.

Wasted potential and failure to follow through unite the fragments of George's story. After choosing last minute to major in philosophy, he drifts from one short-term endeavor to the next, trying his hand at everything from hedge fund intern to high-end dog walker to TV commercial actor. Greathead cleverly plays on the idea of the picaresque hero (see Beyond the Book), a loveable rogue satirizing society's mores as he slips from one adventure to the next. In her modern writing of the genre, George is the butt of the joke. Even as Jenny, his long-suffering girlfriend, wants to start getting serious about their relationship, this disaffected 21st-century pícaro can't help but shake off the foundations of a happy, stable life.

Whether one can share in Jenny's (somewhat begrudging) love of George will depend on their patience. What's certain is that he's a permanent frustration to those around him—not least the reader. Yet this is far from a failure of the novel; in fact, it's the book's great success. Greathead has painted a strikingly relatable portrait of, as she calls him, "a benign asshole." He can be funny and tender, but also pig-headed, idle, and maddeningly inconsiderate. (That he readily admits to these flaws leads him to think he has permission to indulge in them.) By far George's most impressive quality is how true to life he feels on the page. It takes no mean skill to craft a character whose foibles and fixations are so recognizable in friends, family, or—most unsettling of all—the reader himself.

Greathead's writing on the whole is quick and cutting, with something of the terse black wit of Kurt Vonnegut. "A plane crashed into a tower of the World Trade Center," she writes plainly. "And then another plane crashed into the other tower." It's a style that ensures George's life skips along at an enjoyable clip, but one which sadly doesn't lend itself to the level of depth the author at times aims for. George's picaresque adventures cut through some of the great social upheavals of the last two decades—Occupy Wall Street, MAGA, the MeToo movement—but the novel's fast-paced episodes mean that too often these feel more like superficial waypoints through the 21st century than cultural moments worthy of true reflection.

Greathead's strengths instead lie in the witty back-and-forth of her dialogue and the unspoken conflict tangled beneath. Indeed, tragedy underlies the "sitcom-level banter" that comes so naturally to George; having lost his father at an early age, grief has led him to retreat into himself. But Jenny too is no stranger to childhood trauma, and her continued thoughtfulness and determination feel like a pointed rebuttal. Why does she thrive while her boyfriend wallows in lazy self-absorption? One old friend pierces to the heart of the matter: "You're a privileged white guy who grew up thinking you were God's gift." But now, to succeed in the shifting power dynamics of the new century, Greathead shows that young men like George might actually have to start matching the efforts of the less privileged. And like so many of his generation, he steps up to this challenge with a mixture of bewilderment, resentment, and inertia.

Though the satire may be biting, it is never damning. Greathead is a gifted storyteller who fills The Book of George with joyous humor and small, heartfelt moments that hint at its hero's redemption, or at least its possibility. After all, there must be some reason Jenny sticks with him—and it's the emotional thread of that decades-long relationship that will pull readers through the twists and turns of this charming novel. In the end, that may be George's most redeeming feature: that so often he has someone like Jenny fighting his corner.

This review first ran in the November 6, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.