It’s hard sometimes to decide where a review should start, especially when I’ve read a good book and I’m yearning to tell someone all about it.  The book encompasses so much, and I don’t want to leave anything out, but I don’t want to give the good parts away either. That’s exactly how I feel about Will Entrekin’s new novel, Meets Girl.

It’s a love story, but not a typical love story.  It’s boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl, but said girl doesn’t love boy back.  Quite literally.  I think the narrator even tells the reader those exact sentences early on. So now what?

We should start at the beginning, right?  Once upon a time… Cliché? Yep.  But as the book suggests, what are clichés good for if we don’t use them?  The book actually begins with the one sentence: Once upon a time I fell in love with a girl who didn’t love me in return.  From there, our narrator spends much of the beginning of the book addressing the reader directly, romanticizing those four little words and the importance of the fairy tales they often introduce where the guy usually gets the girl.

From there, the book takes the reader through the journey of how said boy met girl.  The girl happens to be Veronica Sawyer, the sister of best friend Tom Sawyer.  Does that name sound familiar? Our narrator, Boy, remains anonymous.  And since “Boy” and Veronica sort of grew up together, we traipse through their high school and college years quickly until we get to Boy working a temp job in New York and dreaming of writing the next great American novel.

With a little pep talk from Veronica, he sits down and pounds out the novel – a time travel piece – in two weeks and presents the manuscript to her as a Christmas gift.  On New Year’s Eve that same year, he meets a gentleman by the name of Angus Silver (Think Anthony Hopkins, Boy tells us.) who is an investor in “futures.”

Angus hands Boy his business card, but later offers him a most interesting deal.  He can either be a great writer or get the girl, but must give up one for the other. His choice. Doting that he was responsible for Shakespeare and Beethoven’s fame, along with many others, Angus tells Boy they too made a decision like that.  Beethoven wanted to write great symphonies, but Angus made him give up his ability to hear them.

The reader will immediately wonder if Angus is the devil and selling your soul is required, but Boy even comes right out and asks him that very question.  So now you are probably wondering which choice boy makes, right?  Well, I’m not going to tell you because that would give the novel away now wouldn’t it?

If you don’t like gushy love stories, don’t worry.  There’s actually two loves here and one is a love for writing.  Entrekin has developed some very inspiring eutrophy about the act of writing in general which will have you rooting for Boy to pick his book over Veronica.  Not to mention all the literary references that Boy mentions. Here’s some prose from when our narrator sits down to finish his book:

I want to say that I was breathing heavily and sweating profusely – wouldn’t that be cool? – because I want it to seem dramatically more difficult and strenuous that it actually was, but I wasn’t, because no matter how much author-types might want you to believe otherwise, that’s not what writing is about. It’s not the sort of debauchery that earned Bret Easton Ellis and Morgan Entrekin the legacies and reputations they deserve, nor the sort of Benzedrine-fueled sprint for which Kerouac is canonized; it is, in face, a solitary gig writers accomplish best on their own, alone in a room with nothing but a blank page as a challenge.

and this…

I think too many people regard writing and literature as spiritual and metaphysical, and my feeling is that for it to really work, you can’t feel you need to look beyond yourself for inspiration. The real process is finding the inspiration inside you and hopefully using it to inspire others, whether by word or by deed.

A lot of the book moves in real time which makes you feel like Boy is talking directly to you as if you are right there in the room with him.  He discusses songs he’s listening to and how they make him feel.  Even the titles of the chapters give you a glimpse at what’s coming next like you are watching a play: Chapter Four, in which the trouble really starts, and which introduces a gun about a mantle, figuratively if not literally.

And speaking of chapters, at one point Boy skips a chapter because he’s too upset about what happens in it.  That’s right.  No Chapter 11, but he comes back to it later because he realizes it contains some crucial information for the reader.

And for those who don’t mind love, the author gives us scenes like this…

…I read a theory that Heaven is merely an instant that comes at final moment of one’s life, so close to the end that sense of time and space would have already been irrevocably lost, which makes that instant technically last forever. I don’t know if I believe that one, either, but if it is the case, I would have given anything to have Veronica’s slender finger tracking reverently along that white page I’d dedicated to her be my eternity.

So it’s romance and fairy tales.  But it’s magic and whimsy too. It’s a writer’s lament and a coming-of-age tale (for lack of a better cliché.)  It’s experimentation and taking chances. It’s poetry and music. It’s love and art.  Boy says so himself…

How can people create anything passionate if they themselves have never once known it? How could any artist – and I use the term as lossely as it might be applied – possibly be expected to create great art without loving anything besides art itself? …We want to believe love is about compromise, quiet dedication over a lifetime, simple work at co-existing with another soul, and it is, certainly, but it’s about those things as it is about many things. Love is infidelity every bit as much as it is faithful, avaricious every bit as much as it is committed, belligerent every bit as much as it is patient. Without meaning beyond the colors, feeling beyond the words, art would be merely paintings and books just as a kiss would be nothing more than four lips pressed together.

I applaud Will for taking chances, not just with his writing style, but with the format itself.  This is not your normal love story as you might have guessed by now, and although the reader has been addressed and made part of the story by authors before, it comes naturally here for our narrator and it just works because he never once turns his back on the reader.  In the end, Boy even takes the time to explain to you what just happened and who everyone was, or at least, who they were based upon (in case you hadn’t already guessed by then). Will Entrekin’s Meets Girl is indeed art, in its truest form, and I love that about a book…about a boy….who loved a girl….who didn’t love him back.

I was expecting

to eat myself small

and drink myself huge

but didn’t realize

I was already just the right size.

The day my letter comes, I’ll be expecting to open that envelope and find it addressed to Author. But it won’t be. It will say Dear Mr. Entrekin (that’s me)…

Somewhere, somewhen, there is a letter, and it is addressed to me. I just worry that all the rest will be addressed to ‘Author’, and I’m tired of opening the mail.

My crummy little Jersey City apartment. Baldwin Avenue. Near Journal Square. Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, lived less than a mile from me.

The sometimes poet, the editor of the literary magazine: everything short of the tweed jacket with the elbow patches, basically.

I wonder if my breath caught the World Trade Center and won’t let it go.

It is getting more difficult, then, to separate the wheat from the chaff.  Google can sometimes help, but not always.