Book Review: Promising Young Man
Promising Young Man, Elias Axel, My Delightful Life Press, February 2025, print, 238.
Reviewed by Philip Janowski.
The genre of bildungsroman, or the coming-of-age novel, has arguably two primary sources in Western literature. Both sources were published in the 1700s: The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by English writer Henry Fielding, followed several decades later by the German Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. The modern form of the coming-of-age story, including Promising Young Man, utilizes elements from both these ur-novels. Tom Jones sets the foundation of a young man setting out on a realistic quest—realistic here meaning not formed by mythological themes, ala the Arthurian grail legends—to come to a better understanding of the world and his place in it.
Wilhelm Meister is purposefully messier and involves more encounters with chance (even before being compared to Tom Jones, one of the most carefully constructed plots in the history of fiction), but influences the history of literature with its focus on the protagonist’s psychological growth and realization of personal identity.
Elias Axel’s novel, Promising Young Man, is a coming-of-age novel following an eighteen-year-old with ADHD, or ADD. Novels with neurodivergent protagonists, at least explicitly advertised neurodivergent protagonists, are unfortunately rare. Written in a first-person, “I” perspective, Axel gives his protagonist Oscar a narrative voice authentic to a real individual, with the strengths and weaknesses that come with attention deficit disorder. Oscar’s creative spirit or excited “love”—as Promising Young Man puts it—leaps from topic to topic both in dialogue and in the narrator’s private asides. We also witness his addictive personality, marijuana being his initial substance of choice, as well as bouts of sudden despair.
Despite the narrator’s focal leaps this is not an experimental work. Or, at least, not the kind of experimental work that is hard to follow. The story clearly follows a roadtrip from Chicagoland to Los Angeles, routed through the southwestern United States. After failing to write a paper necessary to graduate high school, Oscar attends a party where he drinks too much, blacks out, and wakes up having taken the fall for his friend, Christian, who broke into a local diner and damaged a valuable milkshake machine. Oscar is tasked to journey with his grandmother (referred to as “Grammy” in the narrative) on the roadtrip to Los Angeles in order to obtain a replacement.
This introductory summary may leave the reader with some logical questions. In the standard of Tom Jones, where quiet mysteries build and are neatly resolved by the end, your questions will be answered. Tom Jones suggested that the world, no matter how messy, ultimately has answers. Promising Young Man does the same, while keeping the integrity of the protagonist’s challenges with ADHD intact.
Along the way Oscar meets several new friends and possibly new family members. He discovers greater richness in life than he formerly felt, smoking weed alone in his room, and re-contextualizes his recurring fantasies of death. (Let this be a warning that the novel covers some dark material — but in a realistic, worthwhile way.) An immediate comparison may be made to Hal Ashby’s classic 1971 film, Harold and Maude, about a suicidal young man teaming up with a spirited elderly woman. Comparatively, Oscar has his more cheerful moments, and Grammy has her more depressed ones. And they are certainly not in a romantic relationship.
The reviewer was impressed by the emotional richness of the characters, the tackling of ADHD, and the well-constructed plot. Recommended.
