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On the first day of seventh grade one kid realizes that nothing matters. He stands up, leaves and starts spending his days sitting in a plum tree and jeering at his former classmates about the meaningless of everything.

His classmates are not happy with him.

Displeased. Angry. Furious.

The plot sounds kind of like Calvino's Baron in the Trees, another tale about a boy in a tree that annoys people just by his being in the tree. The kid in Nothing doesn't live in the tree though, he just spends his days there. But he does spend it with, say I use this word?, evangelical spirit of letting other people in on the truth he has found.

The jacket copy and some reviews talk about this book as being like Lord of the Flies. It's not. Except that kids do revert to a sort of savagery, but it's a different kind of savagery in place here. Lord of the Flies is about the flimsy constructs of civilization and how easily it is to Fall into a 'natural' state of savagery. It's like a big fuck you (opps I just cursed in a children's review) to Rousseau and his noble savage.

When these kids go all 'savage' their fury isn't because they have stepped (been thrown, to appropriate a Heideggarian term, which is ok since this novel is existential in many ways) to a point past 'civilization'; to a malaise that could be appropriately called post-survival: the idea that life is meaningless and what one does when they are confronted with this proposition.

This is like Plato's allegory of the cave, but the dude who escapes and comes back to spread his 'gospel' isn't saying that the world you are seeing is all an illusion but there is a better, more pure world out there; rather this world is all an illusion and there is nothing beyond it. There is no meaning to any of this, and what 'this' is isn't worth anything either.

Anyway all of this philosophical bullshit aside, this book is much bleaker than Lord of the Flies. It's another one of these YA books that surprises me with its edginess (jeez I hate that term, but I'm getting sick with myself for all the putting words in quotes that is going on in his review, this one should have quotes around it too, but now I can have my ironic cake and eat it too), and for the quality of the book.

A great dark book about meaninglessness, what people do when they are confronted with the idea that maybe there is no meaning, and through the different children many of the ways that this question is side-stepped/answered by people in our society are shown to be empty shells of delusion.