Project X (Alex Awards (Awards)) [Hardcover]

Jim Shepard (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 140004071X | ISBN-13: 978-1400040711 | Publication Date: January 27, 2004 | Edition: 1

Below the sign welcoming the new eighth-grade class to school is one that promises to leave no child unsuccessful and a handout that offers eight ways of being smart. For Edwin Hanratty, at times as hilarious as he is miserable, this is part of what makes junior high pretty much a relentless nightmare. And so, with Flake, his only friend, he contends with clique upon clique—the jocks who pummel them, the girls who ignore or taunt them—as well as the dogged and disconcerting attentions of a sixth-grader who’s even more ferociously disaffected than they are. And while Edwin’s parents work hard to understand him, they face without fully realizing it a demoralization so systemic that he and Flake have no recourse other than their own bitter and smart remarks, until they gradually begin flirting with the most horrible revenge of all.

This lethal impulse, which has touched communities across America, has never been given such shocking credibility as it has in Project X, which suggests that these boys’ central predicament is not their hatred of the world but their agonized and enduring love of it. Never before has Jim Shepard’s compassionate virtuosity been on such conspicuous, unsettling, and haunting display.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This engrossing novel gives the overworked subject of Columbine-style school massacres an unusually subtle and affecting treatment. Shepard (Nosferatu; Battling Against Castro; etc.) follows the travails of Edwin Hanratty, a misfit stuck at the bottom of the ruthless eighth-grade pecking order ("It's a big shitpile with everybody shitting downward so you want to be as high as possible"). Beaten up and mocked by bullies, disliked by his teachers and at loggerheads with his exasperated parents, he lives a nightmare of loneliness and anxiety with only his even more isolated friend, Flake, to cling to. Together, the two boys feed each other's wounded, sullen disgruntlement and edge toward vengeance as the only salve for their overwhelming sense of impotence and humiliation. Shepard makes these miserable characters sympathetic and even funny (" `Suck my dog's chew toy, how's that?' he goes. `Your mother's still busy with it,' I tell him"), but avoids easy sociological explanations for their predicament. The two boys, who have only their alienation to cling to, are often snotty and off-putting, and bat away all helping hands; there are also hints of deeper pathologies. With a pitch-perfect feel for the flat, sardonic, "I-go-then-he-goes" language of disaffected teens, Shepard explores how, in two disturbed minds, the normal adolescent obsessions with competence, mastery and status take on disastrous proportions, and the search for social belonging becomes a life-or-death matter.
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From Bookmarks Magazine

What would possess two boys to kill their classmates? Shepard doesn't provide any straightforward answers, but he expertly imagines the mindset of one miserable and wounded adolescent. It's an eye-opening portrait. The narrator is in turns funny, sympathetic, and rude, but he's not obsessed with video games or music by Marilyn Manson. And he still feels homicidal. Most reviewers compared this short novel to DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little, the 2003 Booker Prize-winner on the same subject. And in every case, critics dubbed Project X the far superior work. It's pitch-perfect, bold, and not easily forgotten--particularly if you have teenagers.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (January 27, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 140004071X
• ISBN-13: 978-1400040711
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (68 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,372,958 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jim Shepard was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and is the author of six novels, including most recently Project X, and four story collections, including the forthcoming You Think That's Bad (March 2011). His third collection, Like You'd Understand, Anyway, was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. Project X won the 2005 Library of Congress/Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, as well as the ALEX Award from the American Library Association. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, Harper's, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, DoubleTake, the New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Playboy, and he was a columnist on film for the magazine The Believer. Four of his stories have been chosen for the Best American Short Stories and one for a Pushcart Prize. He's won an Artists' Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at Williams College and lives in Williamstown with his wife Karen, his three children, and two beagles.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What Went Wrong?, July 27, 2004

By 

A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Project X (Alex Awards (Awards)) (Hardcover)

In the few years since the Columbine massacre, there have been a slew of novels (including the 2003 Booker Prize winner, Vernon God Little) attempting to understand what triggers such horrifying acts. Shepard's is the first of these I've read, and it's hard to imagine a superior version existing. This story of two boys plotting revenge on a school that has shunned them is a nuanced and subtle work that perfectly captures the speech and emotions of its protagonists while shying away from offering easy answers. Edwin and his only friend, Flake, are not metal/goth listening, animal torturing, trench coat-wearing, video-game junkie, grumpy teens. Teetering between adolescence and teenagerdom, they are the perpetual targets, not ultra geeky or ultra feeble or ultra nerdy, just enough of each to make them a pair of misfits worth picking on.

Told from Edwin's perspective, the novel depicts junior high as an endless series of insults and defeats, sometimes culminating in a bloody beating. Adding insult to injury, teachers never give Edwin the benefit of the doubt. This has led many reviews to write that the teachers pick on him or dislike him, which is actually not true. It would be very easy to portray the teachers as monsters from Edwin's viewpoint, but in fact, the teachers are often shown reaching out and making at least clumsy attempts to try and understand what his problems are. But because he is sometimes in the wrong, and can often be sarcastic or disrespectful, it's also easy to see why he is sometimes unjustly punished. And this is part of the complexity of the novel that makes it work-the teachers' actions do contribute to Edwin's misery, but not by design.

Similarly, Edwin's home life is hardly the dysfunctional den of horrors one might expect. His father is around, if distracted much of the time, but his mother is very aware that he is troubled, and frets about it a great deal. And there's Gus, his four-year-old brother, whom he clearly loves a great deal. Edwin's parents make repeated attempts to try and get him to open up and talk about what's bothering him, but he just can't get out of his shell. His mother manages to empathize with his emotional pain, mouthing the perfect words, but all her best efforts just never quite penetrate. Again, the complexity lies in the reality that the family is very typical, the parents don't do anything wrong, and yet Edwin sees shooting his classmates as a viable action. Interestingly, Shepard shows Edwin as suffering from sever reoccurring headaches and severe insomnia, which may speak to a physical or chemical disorder that might explain much else. Of course, these may also be stress or anxiety induced, but either explanation goes a long way toward explaining why he seems to sleepwalk through life.

As the book progresses, Edwin and Flake wallow deeper in their misery, humiliation, and ambivalent hatred, while remaining relatively sympathetic and amusing characters. As a counterpoint, their social prospects actually seem to improve slightly even as X-Day approaches. One sees rays of hope as a girl flirts with Edwin and his art project is enthusiastically lauded. Their plans for revenge are so desultory that one prays that they'll be abandoned as too much trouble, but in the end, Edwin's actions are precisely what we expect them to be. So what is the ultimate message? Shepard's novel seems to be delivering the disheartening message that even essentially good kids can be turned into powder kegs, and given the ease of access to guns in this country, we shouldn't be surprised when tragedies such as Columbine occur.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Adults have no idea, December 19, 2005

By 

Jennifer (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Project X (Alex Awards (Awards)) (Hardcover)

Why do adults lose their capacity to see reality especially from a kid's perspective? Jim Shepard does not lose this capacity in anyway during Project X. This book captures what kids think but 99.9% of them do not do. Of course tortured kids think these things when being bullied by insane selfish Kings or Queens of the school, how simple life would be without these type of people. But you have to keep in mind that this type of bullying is what makes a lot of great people great. What is crueler what Edwin and Flake do or what others do to them that drives them to it? Not for innocent or closed minded people who think the earth is a great rosy place. This book is reality. Jennifer, a 27 year old kid.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Riveting, frightening, March 15, 2004

By 

Brian W. Milligan (Grafton, MA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Project X (Alex Awards (Awards)) (Hardcover)

Shepard's novel is more frightening in its depiction of the normal, every day life of two terribly alienated teens, rather than its depiction of a Columbinelike school massacre. Yes, we know going into the book that the two main characters are sliding inevitably toward a school shooting. But what truly captures our attention is their listless, violent lives and their failed attempts to either connect with peers or even see any hopes of ever doing so. We see painful glimpses of what the narrator's life could be if he could simply pull himself out of his downward spiral - he does well in an art project and in English class. Yet the constant bullying, and his own angry reaction to it are making him a virtual puppet for his less-worthy and far more dangerous best friend, Flake. The novel simply cannot be put down, and is best read on a dark night while you're lying alone on the sofa. Shepard gets into the mindset of these lost characters, and his prose is haunting. Ironically, I'm saving the book for my two boys. I want them to read it when they become teens so they can see the terrible costs of alienation, and how easy it is to slip down the wrong path. Pick up Project X. You won't put it down till you're done.