Grasshopper Jungle

There is no image for this book, because I am too sick to bother to take one.

by Andrew Smith

Grasshopper Jungle made me horny.

No, wait. It didn't do that. It did the opposite of that. 

Grasshopper Jungle is a really difficult book to read when you're sick in bed, largely because of the grotesque imagery and the giant bugs and the terribly sad descriptions of small-town Iowa. Not the quaint small towns that are inhabited by old people. Picture a dying strip mall from some realist film that was gunning for a hipster Oscar. There. That's the sad small-town I'm talking about. Lots of piss and grime.

It's a difficult read when you're sick in bed because, aside from the bits where I had to slog through everyone's cigarette butts, this book made me really excited. I read it at rapid-fire pace, because I had to, I had to know what was coming next, and what the deal was with the bugs, and who was going to get eaten, and when the characters were going to put the pieces together. I had to shoot through all the extraneous "historical" details presented by the main character. I wanted the meat, dang it, just like a giant hungry mantis wants to tear off your mandible and eat it. 

Grasshopper Jungle kept up an excellent pace, with just enough little hints and sideways deviations from the plot to frustrate me, but not so many that I got annoyed and stopped reading. I actually quite enjoyed that the main character, Austin, was such a historian, but without over-thinking his compulsion to record events, or being particularly nerdy about it. 

The pace was a good metaphor for teenage sexuality, really, especially for Austin. All these things are dangled out in front of him, making him inexplicably horny, forcing him to act. It's not that he wants to have sex with everything, just that he has no real outlet for his various emotions, other than to keep ploughing forward while looking ever-backward on this super-creepy giant-bug adventure that descends on him. That's how we, as humans, try and sort out all the crazy stuff that is happening to us, either internally, or externally. To continue my developing pattern of only being able to explain characters by relating them to other characters, Austin is much like Paul Atreides from Frank Herbert's Dune, the way he talks about seeing all the lines and clues and key events cross his desk as he writes his histories. Austin says that the why of everything is not his concern, only the what. But I think he was searching for what next? in his own personal life by examining all those clues and converging pieces of history.