What I Was
Issue #34
By Meg Rosoff (Viking, 224 pages, $23.95)
By Michele Koury
Published: March 1st, 2008 | 12:00am
What I Was doesn’t read very differently from young-adult author Meg Rosoff’s teen novels. Although her writing style is decidedly less choppy, it’s still blunt, graphic, and direct. Shying away from her former trademark stream-of-conscious approach, the attempt at catering to an older audience in this novel is apparent. The book follows a 16-year-old wallflower, identified only as H, who attends a stuffy British all-boy boarding school. He encounters Finn, a mystifying young man living alone in a seaside hut.
As far as society is concerned, Finn doesn’t exist. His name isn’t in any government records, he lives in geographical seclusion, and he doesn’t have relationships with anyone in the outside world. He fishes for his food, makes his own fires, and bathes in the ocean. We get it: The contrast of Finn’s primal instincts to H’s sheltered English civility is supposed to be stunning. Predictably, the two form a bond that incites H’s taste for adventure.
Unfortunately, Rosoff doesn’t quite develop her characters enough to make the story engrossing. She reiterates H’s adolescent self-loathing relentlessly, and her attempts to make H charmingly accessible in his failings only makes him seem boring and klutzy. She should also stick to female protagonists: Her depiction of the male mentality feels borderline stereotypical when she details testosterone-fueled altercations and secret porn collections. She also puts too much effort in painting a superficially gothic world for her preppy schoolboys — compulsively describing scenes with the word “Edwardian” — but the stylistic details simply don’t suit her factual, direct writing style.
When Meg Rosoff debuted with the taboo-busting and politically charged How I Live Now in 2004, critics couldn’t stop raving. Her momentum was building when she followed up with Salinger-esque Just In Case. Now, she’s trying adult literature, and she might need a little more practice.
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