Oscar doesn’t feel normal, but he is typical: a high school stoner with ADHD who hyperfixates, procrastinates, and generally fails to meet expectations. When a night of senior-week revelry gets out of hand, however, Oscar is forced to accompany his grandmother on a road trip from Chicago to California—and to see a world outside of himself for the first time in too long.
Told from the first-person perspective of its adolescent protagonist, the narrative voice makes or breaks Elias Axel’s PROMISING YOUNG MAN. Oscar is smart and curious, and that lends itself to a youthful, well-observed descriptive style. The prose hits in moments of simple, effective imagery (“Suddenly it’s like the sun’s banging on the curtains”), and in phrases that snappily evoke character (“Seymour—a skinny old man as gruff and pointy as a goblin shark”). It also smartly conveys theme, as when Oscar queasily compares Jell-O shots at a party to “tiny buckets of pigs’ blood.” These strengths are always present, although they can’t disguise some of the friction inherent to spending so much time in the head of an 18-year-old boy. There’s no questioning the verisimilitude of the device, but the narrator immediately judges the sexual attractiveness of every girl or woman he meets (“tall and tan. Curvy. Immaculate boobs”)—offering some particularly grating misogyny along the way (“In a circle of mid-level girls, she was the hot one”).
Oscar’s ADHD, however, provides some meaningful context for these unfettered intrusive thoughts. The text’s overall shape (cross-country journey, ultimately, of self-discovery) is familiar, but its attitudes are distinctly modern: Oscar’s perspectives and lived experiences are shaped by his neurodivergence, in both positive and negative ways. Some aspects of ADHD can play out particularly well in prose; since the story is necessarily compressing or stretching time, it’s easy to feel the frequent ADHD phenomenon of finding that more time has elapsed than one realized or intended. The explicit neurodivergence framing also makes small moments pop, like when Oscar meets Freda, another teen with ADHD. Oscar’s comfort at not having to mask, at being his authentic self with another person, is palpable.
The central plot involves some convolutions of family history, and the narrative wraps up somewhat abruptly. But overall, PROMISING YOUNG MAN remains a thoughtful and personable reflection on the difficulties of self-discovery while simultaneously managing and discovering one’s neurodivergence.
Though the overall setup is fairly conventional, Elias Axel’s PROMISING YOUNG MAN is a charming, empathetic portrait of neurodivergent youth.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader