There is a plot that appears obsessively in a multitude of novels in English. Six 14-year-old friends (three boys and three girls) spend a summer together. It thwarts their development forever, and they dedicate the rest of their lives to moping over that one mega-important summer. The only variety that Colin Walsh brings to this plot is that the characters of Kala speak with Irish accents and spend most of the novel boozing it up. We’ve all heard the stereotype that the Irish drink but Walsh wants to make sure that the belief in an irrepressible Irish alcoholism is hammered into every reader’s head.
Out of the 6 former teenage friends, two are drinking themselves into a stupor on every page, one became a woke drone who makes even the most sober of readers think longingly about a large bottle of rye, two escaped both alcoholism and wokeness by sagely meeting an early death, and one grew up and became normal, which makes her an absolute freak to the other characters.
For 400 booze-and-snot-covered pages, we follow the characters through long and painful hangovers during which they try to squeeze out of their addled brains who was a bigger douche at age 14.
For the life of me, I’ll never understand this fixation on the teenage years. I find adulthood much more fun. I finished Kara because I had started it on the day before I became sick, and I had no energy to select a different book once the symptoms started. It’s not badly written, except that one of the characters addresses himself as “you” and uses “ye” when talking about himself and his group of friends. This kept reminding me of Kanye, especially since the character is an infantile and addled rock star.
The resolution is appropriately woke plus there are many somewhat garbled musings on how important it is to “be like a river and flow” and “not put up walls”. Usually, in a mystery you really want to find out who murdered the victim. In Kala, however, all I wondered is why the murderer didn’t get rid of all these mopey alkies at once and spare us the pain of reading about their war on liver health.
Clarissa's Blog 
What a scathing critique — and so fun to read 😀
You really are an excellent writer (even when I don’t agree with your viewpoints, I enjoy reading them).
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Thank you! What a sweet thing to say.
Often, the whole reward for reading a book is publishing a takedown of it.
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If there is any pleasure to be gained from a really terrible book, it is being able to run it through the shredder in a reviews box.
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” I’ll never understand this fixation on the teenge years”
I think it’s related to the invention of the teenager in the US after WWII. While people in that age bracket have always existed it wasn’t until the 1950s that the idea of adolescence as a distinct life stage with its own culture and mores came into existence and it did not really spread everywhere (were there teenagers in the USSR?)
There’s an idea in the US of teenagehood as influencing or even determining adult experience in a way I don’t really think is common in Europe (notice how Jane Eyre just jumps from a child to a young adult with no adolescence at all).
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There is a means for the characters to escape, but the author is uninterested because that provides relief from the arranged tediousness.
If and when some of the characters discover they have little in common with the others, that they have moved on, then the “awful summer” becomes something to be put behind and forgotten, not something to be put up as a mantelpiece and given occasional nostalgic consideration.
But it’s this tendency toward nostalgia that’s the problem with this abortive gesture toward the Bildungsroman: the gap between the child and the adult is for Americans something to worship and regret for its passing, rather than being a neither-this-nor-that trap that should be gratefully escaped.
The blessing in disguise here is that all of the underdeveloped nostalgics wind up trapping themselves together, and so Kala is yet another Cautionary Tale in the vein of Hilaire Belloc where the characters are exemplars of how not to live life.
I generally detest the Bildungsroman and I suspect I’d detest it even more in its neurotic late capitalist form for which the shorthand is “woke”.
Hard pass, I’d rather be forced to eat a hardback copy of Demon Copperhead. 🙂
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