We Are the Ants

We are the Ants

Author: Shaun David Hutchinson

Rating: A

Vibe:  Warm, funny, and completely charming—the kind of book you inhale in a weekend and then wish were longer.

I read this in a day. Started it in the afternoon with the intention of getting through a chapter or two, looked up at some point and it was dark, and then I was on the last page not wanting to be finished. That does not happen to me anymore. I'm several decades into my reading life and mostly I know what a book is going to do to me by page thirty. This one got past the guard.

Henry Denton has been abducted by aliens since he was thirteen. He calls them sluggers, because they look like slugs and because naming a thing is one of the few forms of power he has. They take him and return him — frequently naked, often somewhere public, which is how a sixteen-year-old in a small Florida town acquires the nickname Space Boy and a school full of people who consider him a punchline. The world ends in 144 days, the sluggers tell him. There's a red button. Press it and everything continues. Don't, and it doesn't. He has until January 29th to decide.

And Henry isn't sure. That's the whole engine of the book, and it's a hell of an engine. His boyfriend Jesse died by suicide the year before without leaving a note or an explanation. His mother is a waitress running on cigarettes and exhaustion. His brother Charlie is a dropout with a pregnant girlfriend and a habit of solving his feelings by hitting Henry. His grandmother is disappearing into Alzheimer's one afternoon at a time. His best friend Audrey vanished when Jesse died and came back changed. And the boy Henry has been secretly hooking up with is also, in daylight, one of the people making his life unlivable.

That last thread is the one that got under my skin, and it's the reason I think this book belongs on any list of gay novels that actually understand something. Marcus McCoy is the golden boy — athletic, popular, effortlessly cruel in public, and something else entirely when nobody's watching. Henry keeps going back to him, not because he's stupid or weak, but because Marcus is the only person still touching him, and grief will make you take whatever's on offer. Hutchinson writes that dynamic with real precision and zero judgment. He understands that the shame isn't a side effect of the arrangement, it's the point of it, and that a closeted boy who hates himself will look for someone to hand that hatred to. I suspect most gay men over thirty know some version of Marcus. The boy who wanted you and needed the whole world to believe he didn't. Hutchinson refuses to make him a cartoon.

Diego Vega is the counterweight — new kid, artist, carrying a past he won't discuss, and impossible not to love. Here's what I admire most about the book's construction. Diego does not save Henry. A weaker novel would have made the sweet boy the answer, wrapped the whole thing in a bow, and called it hope. Hutchinson knows better. Diego is proof that other people exist and are worth the trouble, which is a different and much harder thing than rescue. The saving, such as it is, Henry has to do himself, and it costs him.

The sci-fi conceit works because Hutchinson never resolves it, and I've seen readers get annoyed about that. Are the sluggers real, or is this a boy building an elaborate architecture around the fact that he wants to die and can't say so? The book declines to tell you, and it's better for it. Both readings are fully supported, both are devastating, and the ambiguity is doing thematic work rather than dodging. If you need your speculative elements to snap shut at the end, be warned.

The title is the thesis, and the thesis is why the book has stayed with me all week. Henry keeps coming back to the idea that we're ants — insignificant, briefly here, crushed without malice by things that never noticed us. That could be a nihilist's argument, and for most of the book it is. What Hutchinson does in the last stretch is flip the same fact into permission. If nothing we do echoes forever, then nothing we do is too small to be worth doing either. Feed the ant. Tape the photographs to your grandmother's wall so she remembers who she is. Show up on a Tuesday. That's it. That's the whole case for staying.

I think that argument hits differently if you came up gay somewhere that made you feel disposable. A lot of us spent our adolescence being told, directly or by implication, that our lives were smaller and less real than everyone else's, and some of us believed it long enough for it to do damage. This is a book that takes a boy who has fully accepted that verdict and walks him, slowly and without cheating, to a different one. It doesn't cure him. It doesn't promise him anything. It just makes the case that he's allowed to want the world to keep existing, which for a certain kind of reader is the only case that matters.

An A, and one I'll be pressing on people. Just don't pick it up on a bad week. Pick it up on a good one, and let it remind you why you wanted a good one.