Canadian author Andromeda Romano-Lax’s new psychological thriller What Boys Learn arrives at a timely moment. In many countries there’s an ongoing discussion about the rise of toxic masculinity and the perceived unhappiness of men in modern society. A perceptive counsellor like this book’s protagonist, Abby Rosso, is acutely aware of these broad issues through both her work and her personal life. Raising her teenage son as a single mom, and working in a private high school in an affluent suburban area north of Chicago, she sees it daily.
The story begins at a painful place. One of the students Abby has been regularly counselling has died, and the initial impression is suicide. Why didn’t she see it? The dean of the school wants to know, the girl’s angry and overbearing father wants to know and the police want to know. Most of all, Abby herself wants to know. If this death hasn’t raised the stakes, they escalate sharply when the girl’s best friend is also found dead, and the police begin treating the deaths as homicides.
Worst of all for Abby is the fact that her son Benjamin has not been completely honest with her about his relationship with the girls. His hostility and lies suggest there was more going on with them than he’ll admit to, which more than feeds her anxiety. She begins to suspect him. Maybe most parents wouldn’t go quite that far, but anyone who has ever parented an adolescent will recognise the feeling of staring into a black hole of possibilities.
It’s especially hard for Abby to sort out her present thoughts and feelings because of her troubled past. We see this in flashbacks to Abby’s childhood, primarily to a late-night car ride involving her older brother, Ewan, and his friend, Grant. Abby sat in the back seat, drinking spiked lemonade, while Ewan bargained with Grant, offering to trade Abby’s virginity for a discount on a used car. Much about that night is unclear to Abby, blocked from memory, though she knows it ended in an auto crash in which Grant died.
The book’s interiority is rather slow-going at times, however the author’s character development is so strong it will keep you powering on, even after an old professor of Abby’s, Curtis Campbell, arrives in the story. As a doctor of psychology, he helps her by adding another layer of interpretation and analysis. And, as a specialist in adolescent males, he generously takes Benjamin under his wing.
Another worry for Abby is that Ewan has been in contact from prison. He’s started writing to her and, she suspects, Benjamin. He would have been released years before if he hadn’t been so violent toward the staff, all in keeping with his psychopathic diagnosis. Were those dangerous psychological traits transmitted through her to Ben? Dr Campbell apparently believes so. He also believes Abby has a few of them, perhaps in milder form, herself.
The deaths of the two girls brought an end to Abby’s job and the house that went along with it. Dr Campbell helps her obtain a summer position at a different private school that may morph into a full-time position in the fall and also comes with a house. So, things are looking up. Or are they?
The most stable aspect of Abby’s life in this particular summer is not very stable at all. It’s her on-again, off-again friendship with a former policeman, Robert. Even though Abby wants to think of their relationship as ‘off,’ he does not, and I relished the breath of clear thinking Robert brings to every scene he’s in. He helps put the deaths of the girls into a broader context, which engages Abby’s interest as well as providing food for thought for us readers.
For the purposes of a thriller, the story does have to arrive at some conclusions about all these personal, familial and societal factors. The author has created a large and complicated tapestry, the threads of which are rather neatly tied up at the end, though I couldn’t help but think the picture she’s woven remains rather blurry and unfinished. Just as in real life.
Also see Perfect Happiness by You-jeong Jeong or The Living and the Dead by Christoffer Carlsson.
Soho Crime
Print/Kindle
£20.95
CFL Rating: 4 Stars
