(courtesy Simon & Schuster)
Working out who you are is a full-time, lifelong job.
But it gets going in earnest when we’re teenagers when life goes from idle, childlike curiosity to something chaotically emotional and emotional with a thousand competing questions buzzing for contemplative airtime in our head.
It’s a messy, confusing and often revelatory time and there’s no guarantee about what we’ll end up when the existential dust somewhat settles, but one is for sure – we’re never the same when it’s all over.
One person who can attest to the truth of that statement is one titular half of Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, who begins this luminously wonderful and deeply touching novel convinced he will never be anything but an angry, awkward-at-life person.
While he has a loving mum and dad (the latter, a Vietnam vet, feels distant and remote), the descendants of Mexican immigrants to the United States who have worked hard to keep their heritage alive while becoming part of their new home, his siblings are at least a decade older than him, with one of them, his only brother in prison and a topic of forbidden conversation within the family.
While he’s not unpopular at school, he’s not exactly popular either, preferring his own often moody though capable of mischievously fun conversation company to friends who don’t get him or appreciate his unique life circumstances.
He seems both content and doomed to stay that way; that is until he meets Dante one day and his whole world changes.
I guess I didn’t have it so bad. Maybe everybody didn’t love me, but I wasn’t one of those kids that everyone hated, either.
I was good in a fight. So people left me alone.
I was mostly invisible. I think I liked it that way.
And then Dante came along.
Dante is many things Aristotle is not.
A competent swimmer – the two boys meet when Dante offers to teach Ari, as he prefers to be known, to swim at the local pool – he is close to his parents, especially his urbane, fun dad Sam, loves art and learning and is able to easily talk to anybody, any age in a way that Ari can only dream of doing.
Theirs is simultaneously a meeting of opposites and like minds, and while Dante quickly wears his heart on his sleeve, quickly declaring, as is his openhearted way, how much his friendship with Ari means to him, Ari is far more reserved, unsure he wants a friend of any kind, much less who’s so wonderfully transformative as Dante seems to be.
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe charts the back-and-forth, two steps forward, one step backward friendship of these two guys whose attraction to each other, first as friends, and possibly more, becomes the nuanced emotional bedrock of a novel which beautifully articulates what the teen years are like when it comes to self discovery, wider realisations and the growth of relationships beyond the familial.
Anchored by the voice of Ari who is the emotional heart of this extraordinarily insightful book, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is one of those books that seems to get its characters, how they’d react in any given scene and why the journey that Ari has to make throughout is so challenging for him.
What makes Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe and so many of the queer YA rom-coms finding the light of publishing day at the moment is how beautifully they normalise what the coming to grips with your sexuality is like for so many teens and how that then informs their relationships.
Of course, being queer shouldn’t need normalising necessarily since its normal as hell for anyone who is queer, but the fact remains that we live in a largely heteronormative world which often treats LGBTQI+ people as lovely oddities who are somehow “other” and not one of “us”.
Novels like this not only help the world to understand that though queer people (your reviewer is one) might deviate from the mainstream when it comes to our sexuality, they love, cry, hope, dream and a thousand other things just like anyone else.
Again, that shouldn’t, in a perfect world need to be explicitly stated but we don’t live in that world, and so novels like Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe not only provide a window into the queer space but also provide a way for those going through that tumultuously transformative time to realise that their lives have worth, value and that they, in every way that matters, just like anyone else.
These kinds of novels are also a wish fulfilment of sorts for older queer people who didn’t have the benefit of being out at school, of dating normally and who had to skulk in the shadows from family and friends because they were made to feel so strangely other that they needed to hide who they really were.
Sometimes parents loved their sons so much that they made a romance out of their lives. They thought our youth could help us overcome everything. Maybe moms and dads forgot about this one small fact: being on the verge of seventeen could be harsh and painful and confusing. Being on the verge of seventeen could really suck.
Reading books like Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe remind us of the universality of the human experience.
Sweet, charming but also exhaustively honest and authentic about how tough coming to know yourself and others can be – while there is a rom-com fairytale aspect to this delightful book, it doesn’t pretend it’s all candy floss and unicorns which is groundedly refreshing – Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is a love story for the ages.
It lives in a world both fairytale wonderful and deeply, affectingly real which means it’s also inherently relatable and embraceable, the sort of story that allows you to dream and hope and get excited but also to be aware of what lies ahead on a journey that promises and delivers much but which isn’t an easy one to navigate.
There is so much honesty and love and hopeful possibility in Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe that your heart bursts with a quiet but fulsome joy as you read it, a rare experience when experiencing any kind of storytelling, and it stays with you long after the page is turned with the titular leads and their slow burn walk to self-discovery and love a story for the ages that reminds that while we marked by wondrous diversity, we are in the end all human and just looking for love and connection of the most profound kind.