The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai

 

On the one hand, there's no really good reason a novel about a librarian going to some extraordinary lengths to protect a gay kid from his parents should still feel as relevant--no, as necessary--as it does, thirteen years after it was published; on the other hand, it's as fucking relevant now as it was then, maybe more so. There are parts of the novel that are a little disjointed, especially once the away-running gets started, but it's a narrative disjunction not a thematic one. The librarian and the kid are really well-drawn characters, especially the librarian--who comes across as a really mild person whose buttons just got mashed hard this one time, and whose reactions to that carry on some way past the kid making it back to his parents. Maybe thirteen years ago the kid's parents--especially his mom--might have been easier to take as played for laughs, but anyone who's lived through the 2020s so far knows there's no real long-term laughs there, that shit's serious and real.