RaveX-Ray... a text which diagnoses the simultaneously short and far-sighted condition of youth, its absurd logic and its uncanny wisdom ... What I love most about Teenager is its willingness to learn. To be clear, I don’t mean Smith’s willingness to write character arcs, or his ability to write a character who learns. No, I mean that I love the way that the book itself learns as it goes on, the way it comes to redefine happiness. Over the course of its 383 pages, Teenager understands happiness as motion away from hopelessness, then as simple motion, and then, finally, as a kind of stasis daring hopelessness to catch up ... PS: I can’t and I won’t discuss in detail the scene on pages 374-375 for reasons having to do with a proper and unspoiled experience of this fabulous novel, but I will say that they are perhaps the best two pages that I have read this year. More than any other passage in Teenager, 374-375 captures the kind of timeless love that Smith is after. They are masterful, and we are lucky to read them in our lifetime.
