Daniel Handler - All The Dirty Parts

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good book

I thought All The Dirty Parts was very good in many ways.  It's well written and has some valuable things to say.  (It's worth saying at the outset that there is a lot of extremely frank talk about sex, often expressed in what TV announcers call Very Strong Language, so if you don't like all that then this won't be a book for you.)

The book is narrated by Cole, a young man at High School in a small US town who is, shall we say, sexually active.  It's an episodic narrative in short sections with no chapters which for me gave it a strong drive.  It is hard to say much about the story without giving too much away, but Daniel Handler captures well Cole's unthinking, exploitative sexism, his obsession with sex and the painful learning which that brings.

The book is short (only 140 pages or so) but Handler's style manages to cram a lot into it.  I was Cole's age in the early 1970s, which was a very different age indeed; I didn't think or behave as Cole does, so I can't really vouch for the authenticity of his present-day experience, but his voice, his internal experiences and his behaviour seemed very well drawn and plausible to me.  I found it an easy and compelling read and although the message was not an original one, it makes its points pretty well, although the later parts did seem just a little unsubtle.  Nonetheless, it held my attention to the last. 

It is almost impossible to quote from the book because of the subject matter and language, but one bit which I liked in language suitable for a review here was: "For every girl I thought I was uncomplicated sex, it wasn't.  Put it this way: if you can't see the complication, you're probably it."

Teenage boys especially should read this, but so should anyone looking for a portrait of a certain kind of modern teenage male mind.  It's not a groundbreaking classic but it's very readable and makes important points.  Recommended.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)