The Every Boy

Dana Adam Shapiro

Hardie Grant

Otago Daily Times, April 8th 2006

The term ‘everyman’ is commonly used to describe an ordinary individual with whom everyone can identify, making the hero of Dana Adam Shapiro’s novel The Every Boy both literally and figuratively eponymous.

Fifteen-year-old Henry Every is little different from any other adolescent stumbling through the complications of life. Left to his own devices when his parents split up (his father, Harlen, is far more interested in his collection of jellyfish than his son), Henry and his best friend, Jorden, occupy a world of crazy schemes and mildly criminal enterprises until their developing sexuality complicates their easy comradeship.

Then, lured by prospect of easy sex (personified by the young seductress, Benna), and the aspiration to find a minority group to join, he runs away to New York. Four months later Henry’s body washes up on a local beach, leaving his father in possession of a journal detailing the thoughts, dreams and events that had shaped the last five years of his son’s life. In its pages (colour-coded by mood of entry), Harlen comes to understand both the stranger who was once his child, and how he unknowingly drove his wife and son away.

Although we learn of Henry’s death on the first page, The Every Boy is far from depressing. Henry is quirky and endearing, and his life is so full that his death seems more a completion than a truncation. His legacy, the journal, also offers Harlen a route out of his own sterile and isolated life.

I sighed, I giggled, I empathised, I had fun. What more can a reviewer ask?