Liz Colville

  • culture October 25, 2011

    Everything Happens Today by Jesse Browner

    In the world of the teenager, time doesn’t march forward, but oozes lazily. Wes, the sixteen-year-old protagonist of Jesse Browner’s fourth novel, may be rapidly gathering the faculties of a grown-up, but he’s still very much stuck in the mindset of an adolescent, in which an hour feels as long as a day. What better way, then, to depict the scale of the teenage mind than to set a novel over the course of twenty-four hours? “Everything happens today,” Wes declares about halfway through the day in question, a Saturday in New York City on the eve of the 2008 presidential election. If he were to