'Wreck and Order' Unoriginal Yet Warm

Literature has a long history of romanticizing purposeless youth. From “The Sun Also Rises” to “On the Road,” many aspiring Hemingways and Kerouacs have paid tribute to the sad young men and women who leave home behind, travel without a plan, fall in love or get into trouble, and become lost souls forever lingering on the highway. In fact, these images have been so ingrained in popular culture that they have inevitably become clichéd. The everlasting trend of rebellious escape and spontaneous travels has even given rise to successful businesses such as CouchSurfing and BlaBlaCar. In such a world, is it necessary to write yet another story of a lost twentysomething traveling around the world? “Wreck and Order” shows that maybe it really isn't.

Hannah Tennant-Moore’s debut novel follows a storyline that has more or less become the standard formula for “wandering youth” tales. Elsie, an aimless, self-destructive young woman, gives up college and takes to the road with her tuition dollars in an attempt to find her inner calling. Unsurprisingly, she finds herself in Paris, the moveable feast of a city where she has experimental sex with almost every man she meets before she returns to California and falls in love with a reckless layabout named Jared. When their relationship collapses into an unavoidable mess, she leaves her country again to—of course—the East, where she tries to find peace of mind in Sri Lanka.

It is ironic that what should be a rebellion against the norm has eventually become the norm itself, and it is even more ironic that both the main character, Elsie, and the author, Tennant-Moore, seem to be self-absorbed in their endeavor, unaware that they are merely following a path undertaken by thousands. In the end, what they consider to be a journey of existentialist self-discovery and accumulation of experience is nothing more than a hormone-driven adolescent fever fed by the world of consumption. While Elsie always believes she is living adventurously, most of her decisions and opinions are surprisingly predictable; for instance, her obsession with the French language falls nicely into the stereotype of teenage girl fantasies. When Elsie encounters a French Sri Lankan man, the author spends a few pages eagerly describing how nervous and excited Elsie is to speak French with him, how she has learned French in school, and how she has long had an affinity for Flaubert and Labé—quel chic, les Français!

Apart from giving her heroine a clichéd personality, Tennant-Moore also attempts a clichéd style of writing as she blurs the boundary between the present and the past. Quite often, she lets Elsie slip into her own memories when she catches sight of a familiar object, which at least in some passages looks like a writing exercise based on Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” (guess which country Proust is from). Tennant-Moore also punctuates the story with Elsie’s reflections on contemporary issues, from the Iraq war to sexual assault. However, despite her efforts to be profound, many of these discussions are disappointingly unoriginal, and tend to be maudlin opinions rather than mature thoughts.

Fortunately, honesty and wholeheartedness save the story from being a bore. The heroine never shies away from sensitive topics and is always open to anatomizing herself. She gives a very honest and detailed account of her sex life: her first sexual experience, experiments while growing up and traveling around, her feelings about orgasms, and her attempts to come to terms with her own body. Many times in the novel she recounts the intercourse she has and discusses what the episodes mean to her in a tone so believable and relatable that the words seem to be directly transcribed from a conversation between intimate friends. This direct honesty renders Elsie likeable no matter how flawed she is, and at times, brilliant reflections on topics such as selfishness in sexual relationships or the awkward but exciting experiences of teenage sex stem from such conversations.

Unfortunately, as nice as honesty is, the best it can do is to turn a mediocre novel into an honest and mediocre novel. Honesty cannot give more depth to a story, an attribute that “Wreck and Order” lacks the most, and much of Tennant-Moore’s book remains sentimental and self-pitying. Young people may always be the same. They might always make the same mistake and embark on the same spontaneous trips. “Wreck and Order” unfortunately seems to be just one of the many unimpressive stops on this never-ending journey.

—Staff writer Tianxing V. Lan can be reached at tianxing.lan@thecrimson.com.