Books: The Haters

Jesse Andrews
The Haters

Published 2016/03/23

I first discovered The Haters looking for Jesse Andrews’ first novel, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, which I’d heard great stuff about. The bookstore I entered was all out of Me and Earl, but I picked Andrews’ second novel The Haters off the shelf, read a couple pages, and was hooked. This was over a year ago, and I’ve been itching to write something about it ever since.

Wes and Corey are two high school boys—solid but unexceptional musicians, yet unrelenting and omnivorous music freaks—stuck for two weeks at jazz camp, a place with “way too many dudes,” all of them anxiously eager to show how enthused they are to be there, prone to slip into “jazz voice” at the slightest provocation. “You cats mind if I make it a trio?” says the first dude to approach them; it’s that kind of scene.

But of course there’s a girl at the camp, Ash, who feels even more out of sorts and repulsed than they are, and it doesn’t take long for the three of them to run off to start their own band.  The Haters, then, is part buddy novel, part love triangle, part road novel—but most important, it’s a great riff on what it means to love music and hate it, all in the same moment.

Frequent readers of this website will have noticed that I rarely unabashedly fawn over anything. Anyone coming to this site looking for music idolatry is coming to the wrong place. I can’t heap praise on any music without acknowledging its faults at the same time.

Irony fuels me. There are paradoxes at work in listening to and loving music, or in appreciating any art form. Often, a band’s greatness is at once its weakness; no artist is above a little good-natured ridicule, even the ones that you love.

For some, listening to music is a social event; but for me, it has always been intensely personal. I tend to listen to music alone, and love it alone. And sharing music with someone else always comes with risks. I can still remember times I’ve played a song or album for a friend, expecting them to like it the way I did, only to get a “meh” response—and then finding it hard to listen to it the same way again.

It’s the same with Wes, as he describes in flashback the moment when he first becomes aware of the love/hate dialectic of his relation to music. Wes plays a track for Corey, thinking “Kool & the Gang was nothing less than the soundtrack to human happiness,” and ends up with the realization that “I could never love Kool & the Gang ever again.” Listening to “Celebration”—once a source of pure joy—will forever make him feel trapped “in a furniture-store commercial.”

Wes and Corey and Ash are all haters. They love music, but can’t help but hate it, too. Being angst-ridden teens, they haven’t come to grips with this paradox yet. And this tension makes The Haters one of the most hilarious books I’ve ever read.

Just check out their take on a handful of classic and contemporary acts:

Wes’s love of all these bands makes him an expert in hating on them. And such capacity for hatred makes being a musician pretty difficult—because, as Wes notes, “Anything we did was just the less-good version of something else that already had some kind of fatal flaw.”

Yet despite their self-doubt, Wes and Corey and Ash start playing together, ditch the band camp, and set out to go on tour. The ensuing novel chronicles their desperate attempts to come up with—and shoot down—band names, several inspirational methods of dick-harm, and the inevitable shifting alliances and random conflicts that erupt within a group of three friends. Oh, and of course the numerous mishaps along the way in their Summer of Hate World Tour.

Of course, I next picked up Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, which is also excellent. It partly does for movies and high school romance what The Haters does for music and road trips. The main character’s horribly misguided recipe for making girls like him is pretty much a condensed, exaggerated rendition of my entire high school romantic life (thankfully, minus a few bright spots). Apparently there’s a movie adaptation of Me and Earl, which I haven’t seen but probably everyone else in creation has probably chuckled over a million times, making me hopelessly square and behind-the-times.

But in fact, I prefer The Haters. It speaks to me, about my love of music, and the inevitable hate that comes with it. Check it out.

By the way, The Haters is billed as a young adult novel, which it effectively is—but it would pretty much get a R-rating (or worse) for content. It’s a novel for teens the way Superbad was a teen flick. Its level of vulgarity feels realistic yet at once inappropriate for the age group it aims for, at least according to our puritan standards.

Cover Art:

• The Haters: Source, Barnes and Noble