Love, without the Breadcrumbs
Lost souls find their way in joyful new novel
Love's a messy business, the heart a paradox. In relationships there's always a certain push and pull, a duet between "I love you" and "Please leave me alone." Leah Hager Cohen's aptly titled new novel, Heart, You Bully, You Punk (Penguin, 224 pp., $13), is a study in such emotions. There's the teenage Ann James, endearing and precocious; her father, the kind and steadfast Wally; and her teacher and Wally's new love interest, the brisk and once brokenhearted I.J. Esker. In prose that is rhythmically lyrical yet at the same time as efficient and ordered as the math Esker teaches, Cohen details the ways in which our hurts and our desires connect and bind us to one another.
Ann is full of hormones and a burgeoning independence, the world mysterious and still so unknown. At times, what she wishes for is a blueprint, a map. "Where's the compass?" she asks. As she soon finds, however, "Nobody ever has a map, that's the open secret, they just embark with more confidence. Maybe the trick is you're supposed to pretend you know the way. But the breadcrumbs, where are the breadcrumbs?"
In Esker, Ann sees an adult who is generous yet purposeful, the type with a "dread of nostalgia." What Ann can't see, though, are the romantic bruises Esker carries with her. She's haunted by a past love, "the ghost of a living person," and that's why she prizes order, a plain deliberateness in everything she does. When she begins to fall in love with Wally, though, her pragmatic approach to life falters. He isn't one to go into emotional exile each time the world is cruel. His wife may have left him for Hollywood but still he views "every sad thing, every loss or hurt" as "really a challenge to love that much more, really just another of beauty's many strongholds."
Cohen's strength is a lack of sentimentality. She never wavers into the land of sappy prose, and every character rings true. Teenage dialect is a quirky thing, yet in scenes involving Ann and her friends, Cohen captures it perfectly. As the characters in Heart, You Bully, You Punk discover, the power of the heart lies in its sharply edged duality, its ability to save as well as betray.
—Lacey Galbraith
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