At the Edge of the Universe by Shaun David Hutchinson Review

WARNING: THERE MAY BE SPOILERS BELOW

“It's impossible to let go of the people we love. Pieces of them remain embedded inside of us like shrapnel. Every breath causes those fragments to burrow through our muscles, nearer to our hearts. And we think the pain will kill us, but it won't. Eventually, scar tissue forms around those twisted splinters like cocoons. They remain part of us, but slowly hurt less. At least, I hoped they would.”- At the Edge of the Universe, Shaun David Hutchinson

Tommy and Ozzie have been best friends since second grade, and boyfriends since eighth. They spent countless days dreaming of escaping their small town—and then Tommy vanished.

More accurately, he ceased to exist, erased from the minds and memories of everyone who knew him. Everyone except Ozzie.

Ozzie doesn’t know how to navigate life without Tommy, and soon suspects that something else is going on: that the universe is shrinking.

When Ozzie is paired up with new student Calvin on a physics project, he begins to wonder if Calvin could somehow be involved. But the more time they spend together, the harder it is for him to deny the feelings developing between them, even if he still loves Tommy.

But Ozzie knows there isn’t much time left to find Tommy–that once the door closes, it can’t be opened again. And he’s determined to keep it open as long as possible.

Believe it or not, I actually liked We Are the Ants. Sure, it was pretentious, and I'm really not into books that constantly muse about the Universe, but it was also beautifully written and felt original, and I ended up really liking both Henry and Diego and even found myself blinking away a few tears at the ending.

So with that positive prior experience with one of Hutchinson's books, I didn't expect myself to be so apprehensive picking up another. In fact, I wasn't even going to read this book at all, but I saw it in the library and walked past it like five times before deciding what the hell and adding it to my pile on the desk. 

By the way, this title/author name combination could give EverythingBeautifulIsNotRuinedbyDanielleYounge-Ullman a run for its money. I hate typing this one equally as much and I keep wanting to call it Across the Universe, which is a completely different book altogether and whenever I see it that Beatles song gets stuck in my head on a loop. Personally, I prefer long titles when the authors have a nice short name to go along with it- like The Tsar of Love and Techno or Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. But that's just me.

Fun fact before I actually begin. I started reading it when I was on vacation. I'm also petrified of flying. The flight to the place I was going on vacation to was just fine, and I was fine for the first two days until I started reading this book, and the plane crashed after Ozzie got off it. And for the rest of the vacation I couldn't read this book because I kept thinking about how the airplane I was supposed to fly home on was going to crash and I was going to die a slow and painful death. Obviously that didn't happen, but Jesus, I was doing just fine until this book. I'm not telling Hutchinson to put in a trigger warning or anything, though from what I know of his personality he probably would anyway. The only reason I'm bringing this up is to show that this book and I didn't exactly start off on the right foot. 

When I got back I started reading it again right from where I left off because I read Pride and Prejudice and also because I was actually kind of enjoying it- I just wish characters would stop bringing up that goddamn flight. I mean, it was already extremely pretentious and the theories made my head spin, but again, I read We Are the Ants and knew to expect a certain amount of that shit from his work and once I moved past it I could actually begin enjoying the book. And for the first 100 or so pages, I did. 

And after that, I started to get a bit bored and restless. I think Hutchinson bit off a bit more than he could chew. There was so much he tried to pile into this book-the word bloated comes to mind-, and all of it was to greater enhance his message, which is usually fine, but started to get really repetitive after a while. I got the gist of where he was going at the 250-300 page mark, and after that this book started to get exhausting. So much drama, so much time to angst over it constantly I wonder if Shaun David Hutchinson had all kinds of individual ideas for books and his publisher told him what the hell, just throw it all together. Lua could have been a book alone, as well as Dustin and Calvin and Warren. I wonder if this book would have been more successful if it was more of a collection of short stories, kind of like the aforementioned The Tsar of Love and Techno. It could have been billed as an interconnected collection of short stories, all taking place in the same town as We Are the Ants, and each would follow the whole universe-is-shrinking/look-forward-to-the-future message of the book, and the main story would be Ozzie and Tommy. Because, frankly, as a result of the overcrowding of stuff going on, I felt like I didn't really connect with anyone. I wanted more of Warren, more of his decision to join, and felt like his accident was tacked on and ultimately unfair to his character. I think Calvin's history of abuse and self harm could have been more developed. Hell, even Trent deserved more than what he got. 

Another issue I found with the book is that this book played way too many things way too safe. I did a lot of rolling my eyes and of coursing. Of course the father's a cheater. Of course the father's abusive. Of course coach is abusive. That's not even a spoiler, since anyone can see it coming from a mile away. Even the message wasn't anything new and original. 

All my complaints keep going back to one issue, that it was too long. I don't really know why I found this book way too long whereas We Are the Ants was roughly around the same size and yet I didn't have that issue. In this book, the prose that I loved so much in We Are the Ants started to grate on me from page 350 on, and I started fastforwarding a lot of the philosophical parts with Ozzie and Calvin because I felt like I had read that conversation again. And that writing style does not age well as it goes on. The quote I chose is a great example of the way Hutchinson writes. It's like he doesn't know when to stop. This is fine in a shorter novel of 300 pages, but when a huge novel is written like that it gets old quickly. I was beginning to wonder if Hutchinson's editor fell asleep.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against long novels. It's just that he writes, well, he writes the opposite of Markus Zusak. For those of you unfamiliar with Zusak and the way he writes, his style is more on the beige side, but he writes like a poet. His work is filled with these short, simple sentences that manage to be poignant, and, in the end, say so much more in 7 words than so many authors can say in 30. I could read a 700 page novel of his because of those gorgeous sentences. What I cannot do or do not want to do is read almost 500 pages of pure purple. Again, that quote up there actually makes me a little angry, because I don't want to put a whole fucking paragraph as a chosen quote, but none of the individual sentences work well enough on their own.

The ending was a relief, even if it did end a bit too nicely with everything working out for all the characters. I guess I can't complain too much about the ending, because Graffiti Moon had the same "everything works out for everyone" ending and I loved that book, but I actually liked all the characters in that book and it was also the perfect length- not too long, not too short, just perfect.

I thought about Graffiti Moon a lot while reading this book, probably because it was fresh in my mind. It's funny, but if you asked me at the beginning of the month I would say that those reviews should have been reversed. The glowing, emotional and impactful one should have gone to At the Edge of the Universe, whereas the pretentious, overwrought, and tiresome one should have gone to Graffiti Moon. In the end, I don't like this one nearly as much as We Are the Ants. There is an audience for this book, a wide one, and I know I am probably in the minority for it. If you do read Across the At the Edge of the Universe, I hope you like it more than I did. 

5 out of 10