I love love love it when authors describe their complicated books in a very simple way. Helen Oyeyemi has said that White Is for Witching is about a xenophobic house. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie described Americanah as a romance. And Benjamin Alire Sáenz says this about Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe: “Some boys just know they’re gay. . . . And I think other boys don’t know, and they start discovering that. And that’s the book.”
That’s parts of the book. There are other parts too. There are parts about what secrets do to a family, and the power of being open. Ari has a brother in prison, and his parents never talk about him anymore. There are parts about coming to view your family as specific humans, not just the family member they are in relation to you. There are parts about what it is like to feel separated by your race from people around you, but also separated from that racial identity by virtue of being different. Aristotle and Dante fret a great deal about the meaning of being Mexican, whether they can consider themselves truly Mexican when they don’t speak Spanish fluently, or they don’t hang out with other Mexicans or behave like a particular vision of what being Mexican would mean.
Aristotle — he goes by Ari — is a loner. His mother frets because he doesn’t seem to have any friends, until one day he meets a boy called Dante at the swimming pool, who offers to teach him how to swim. From there, they become the closest of friends. Dante chatters nonstop, and Ari talks some and thinks more.
“It helped,” he said. “Going to the counselor. It wasn’t so bad. It really did help.”
“Are you going back?”
“Maybe.”
I nodded. “Talking doesn’t help everybody.”
Dante smiled. “Not that you’d know.”
I smiled back. “Yeah. Not that I’d know.”
If I had a problem with the book, it was that for a book about feeling things quietly, Aristotle and Dante had a surprising number of cataclysmic events. Some of them drove narrative developments, and other ones didn’t, and although any one of them might have felt like an acceptable intrusion of, like, the Violence of the Wider World, the cumulative effect felt slightly like a cheat. When you know an author can achieve a devastating emotional effect without the benefit of one character saving another character’s life by pushing him out of the path of a moving car, it’s easy to wonder why he didn’t choose to. Jodie and Renay said some excellent and insightful things on this topic in their joint review at Lady Business, which I encourage you to check out.
They read it too: Roof Beam Reader, Book Smugglers, Jodie and Renay of Lady Business. Tell me if I missed yours!