The Kids Will be Alright
A Review of The Big T by Clancy Steadwell
The Big T is an upmarket YA novel by Clancy Steadwell that follows the friendship of two boys, Jude and Tommy, from middle school through adulthood in the small town of Veddersburg. It begins media en rez, starting near the end of the novel with the boys’ final run together. The story is told from a first-person distant point of view, where the main character, Jude, looks back in retrospect upon their friendship, before working his way backward to document the fall of his best friend to addiction and mental illness.
In the beginning, we start with two bookish, awkward boys and how they bond over their shared love of books. In high school, Tommy and Jude make new friends, start dating girls, and Tommy’s drinking habits begin. By the time they reach college, Tommy’s struggles with alcohol addiction and mental illness puts a strain on all of his relationships.
The tone of the novel begins apostolic, where the narrator shines his focus and admiration upon another. Think of Chief and Red in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, or Nick Caraway and Jay Gatsby in the Great Gatsby. Tommy is everything that Jude wishes he could have been: Tall, handsome, talented at poetry, born to rich parents, and bleeding confidence with a lust for life. This works because it keeps the narrative focus outward, away from the trap of saying “me, me, me.” As the book progresses, more time is taken away from Tommy, and Jude has more room for introspection - the novel itself is Jude looking back in hindsight, lending voice and context for things that he may not have understood while he was younger. That’s also where one of the flaws of the book comes in, as Jude’s wisened authority punctuates the structure of the chapters.
The novel was originally supposed to be published as a serial on Substack, which shows. Each chapter tends to begin in “Big Voice,” meaning the narrator begins with an essay-like topic sentence, and exposition, and it usually takes a couple of pages before Steadwell gets into scene. The chapters rarely if ever end at a place of heightened tension - instead, each chapter’s ending deflates all tension with Jude’s Big Voice dictating some lesson he learned from what had transpired, or outright telling the reader what had happened would be indicative of more things to come. Another holdover from the novel’s previous serial format is the often occurring reintroduction of characters. For example, in an early chapter, Tommy gets a dog, Waldo, but in the proceeding chapters, Waldo is constantly reintroduced as “Tommy’s dog, Waldo,” never just, “Waldo.”1 It also happens when Jude dates one of Tommy’s cousins, Maggie, who will always be addressed as “Maggie, Tommy’s cousin.” This would have been an easy fix if Steadwell had an editor to point this out.
For a story about addiction and the weird underbelly of suburbia, this book has too many spoons and not enough needles. This is to say that Jude always dictates to the reader how he feels about what transpired in a scene, and when tension is built, it’s in service of pointing at a greater, inevitable tragedy, instead of escalating the current situation. For example, Tommy and Jude go exploring a woodsy creek area in search of golf balls to sell back to the local golf club, and they bring Waldo with them. Homeless people are known to camp there, and there are abandoned needles on the ground. Nobody, not even Waldo, steps on a needle, and instead they are a sort of fixture that points at addiction later. Another example is Jude and Tommy crash a frat party, and Tommy steals the frat’s prized cowboy hat. Jude and Tommy get chased out by the frat, and make it home safe. This event gets used as ammo by Jude later to berate Tommy for his behavior and putting Jude at risk, though Jude never actually gets hurt.
The Big T is full of millennial nostalgia, properly timestamped by songs, games, films, fashions, and the worries of young people growing up in those times. Minus the running, I could see myself alongside Jude, trying to figure out what it means to be a boy in the time of Napoleon Dynamite. Steadwell correctly surveils the ebbs and flows of friendships of suburbia, and the funny ways people grow apart and come back together.
And there’s no Where’s Waldo jokes!