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How I Learned to Hate in Ohio by David Stuart MacLean
In late-1980s rural Ohio, bright but mostly friendless Barry Nadler begins his freshman year of high school with the goal of going unnoticed as much as possible. But his world is upended by the arrival of Gurbaksh, Gary for short, a Sikh teenager who moves to his small town and instantly befriends Barry and, in Gatsby-esque fashion, pulls him into a series of increasingly unlikely adventures. As their friendship deepens, Barry’s world begins to unravel, and his classmates and neighbors react to the presence of a family so different from theirs. Through darkly comic and bitingly intelligent asides and wry observations, Barry reveals how the seeds of xenophobia and racism ?nd fertile soil in this insular community, and in an easy, graceless, unintentional slide, tragedy unfolds.
Review from Publishers Weekly:
MacLean’s laborious debut novel (after the memoir The Answer to the Riddle Is Me) explores the insidious effects of racism, homophobia, and toxic masculinity via the coming-of-age tale of a bullied high school freshman. It’s 1985 in an Ohio college and factory town, and lonely protagonist Barry Nadler, nicknamed “Yo-yo Fag” for refusing to share his yo-yo, has just started his freshman year. Just as Barry is resigned to another year of harassment, the new kid in school, a Sikh boy named Gurbaksh Singh, befriends him. Soon, Barry is drawn into the orbit of Gurbaksh, who stands up to the bullies who taunt him with racist slurs and beat him up. But when Barry discovers his mother and Gurbaksh’s father are having an affair, his social and familial worlds begin to crumble. Rife with collapsing marriages and lost friendships, the novel is intent on exposing how quotidian situations can lead to outbursts of destructive racial violence. Unfortunately, MacLean’s occasionally sharp prose does little to ameliorate disjointed pacing and wooden turns of phrase (“Hate is safe. Hate is urgent. Hate is unkind”). In the end, the novel is glaringly message-driven, without much else to show for itself.
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