In The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno, the boy detective is Billy Argo, supernaturally gifted to solve crimes. It’s a blessing and a curse. It sounds like a kid’s story, and in many ways it is. Meno includes secret clues, a decoder thingy in the jacket flap, and a variety of spooks (secret codes are here). But the real mystery is how Meno makes adults feel like kids reading it, but elevates the stories of the kids to the place where it’s all of our stories—fear and hope, loneliness and love.
Argo’s story is sad. He has this special gift, but his sister commits suicide and he lands in an institution to recover. He works as a hair replacement salesman, which Meno manages to tie into the book’s larger themes.
The book’s tone reminds me of Tony Earley’s works Jim the Boy and The Bluest Star—both writers look unflinchingly at youth and the real questions and anxieties raised by the uncertainties of age. Both writers are honest about the bigness of the problems of youth.
In other ways there are good connections to fictional characters like Jonathan Safran Foer’s Oskar Schell or Jonathan Wray’s Lowboy. Like Schell, Argo is funny, unpretentious, and is experiencing a self-imposed isolation because of his loss. Their shared question is whether it’s worth it to risk being hurt for the rewards love offers. Billy, who can solve any riddle, admits, “Love is one of the questions I do not even know how to begin to answer” (189). Later the masked woman Margaret spells out the problem of love—“The world must come to understand that love is chaos” (207). This chaos results in fear and risk, shown when Oskar visits the shrink toward the end of Extremely Loud.
Like Lowboy, he blurs the lines of reality and bends genre in unexpected ways.
Part of the novel’s background is that forces of evil have conspired (at a funny conference, showing Meno’s satirical skills at work) to rid the world of buildings that don’t have right angles. In that Meno finds metaphor: “We live in a town that is disappearing, and worse, like the buildings, our hope is gone and we are no longer surprised by anything” (35). This loss of hope underpins Billy’s predicament—without his sister Caroline he longer believes. He feels that evil has won.
“It is the strain of walking around the world…and not knowing who might want to destroy you, who might like to fill your heart with poison, who might rob you and stab you, who might stand above you in the dark with a tarantula. In the end, it is the invisibility of those who might really hate you that makes him so sad” (114).
Meno depicts the problem of evil literally and uses it to launch into more metaphysical questions. The klepto Penny Maple: “Do you think there’s any way for people to stop themselves from doing bad things?” (218). It’s a simple and heart-breaking question: can people change? If so, why can’t I seem to? Both Penny and Billy are stuck. In Caroline’s last diary entry she asks “how can anyone in the world believe in good anymore?” (256).
One of the novel’s best passages seems to let Meno’s voice come through to answer this question:
“Why is mystery so terrifying to us as adults? Is it because our worlds have become worlds of routine and safety and order the older we’ve grown? Is it because we have learned the answer to everything and that answer is that there is never a secret passageway, a hidden treasure, or a note written in code to save us from our darkest moments? Why are we struggling so hard against believing there is a world we don’t know? Is it more frightening to accept our lives as they are than it is to entertain a fantasy of hope” (129-130).
As much as anything this novel seeks to surprise, to renew the mystery of reading, to take the expected and wrinkle it. By the time Meno urges readers to write their names in the book it would take a true cynic to stay the pen.
House Theater of Chicago short film of Boy Detective:
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