17. Exile

Exile (Blake Nelson, 1997)

I promise to stop reading Blake Nelson's books for a while. I just got on a roll ordering them from the library and his seem to be coming in faster than others in my queue. Moving on. Exile isn't a young adult novel, but it's similar to Nelson's YA work in theme and setting. Appropriately for National Poetry Month, this story centers around Mark, a spoken word poet from NYC who takes a position as poet-in-residence at a Portland college. I was a little confused because he called it Willamette, but that's really in Salem. It would be pretty difficult to get around downtown Portland on foot if you lived near campus an hour away. But I digress.

Exile is okay. I think it's telling that Nelson calls it his "difficult second novel." Girl was so good that he might have been trying to go in a completely different direction. He's right when he says it doesn't suck. Mark is a seriously messed up guy, and I found him both attractive and repulsive--maybe because I see people I've known in him. Like (too) many of Nelson's protagonists, he stumbles through life not really understanding what's going on around him or how he should behave or react. I guess it's a change from the standard precocious teens or hyper-witty and ironic twenty-somethings in books, but sometimes it goes too far. Mark is also in a state of arrested development, living like a teenager who acts on impulse and does what he wants without thinking of the consequences, while needing a real adult to take care of him. I liked this book, but Mark's realization that he needs to grow up comes kind of suddenly and seems a bit tacked on.