If I had to say something in it’s favor, I guess I’d tell you that I flew through Grant Ginder’s So Old, So Young, a novel about college friends that follows them from their days just after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania into their forties. Of course, that’s largely because of how insubstantial and weightless it is.
The main characters are Mia (journalist), Marco (finance), Sasha (gallerist), Theo (lawyer), Adam (something, but mostly defined as “gay”), and Richie (also gay, but defined more frequently as “addict.”) The book catches up to them, and to fringe members of their friend group, at parties where they all gather together over the years, starting with a New Year’s Eve part in New York City, and moving on to weddings, Labor Day retreats, kids’ Halloween parties, and the like. Some of the sextet have children and some don’t, and that distinction seems to mean more and more as time goes on, fraying the bonds between friends who’d previously thought themselves inseparable. Other things get in the way of these friendships, like illnesses, infidelities, and the like. All of it is rather pat and predictable, mostly because these characters aren’t well-rounded enough to do anything other than follow a map laid out for them to bring them to a pre-arranged endpoint.
Ginder’s main talent seems to be for setting up situations that allow his characters to do or say something horrible to each other. Each of the parties presented in the narrative builds up to some improbable revelation or moment of betrayal, as though the characters were being followed around by a Bravo television crew. Ginder also has a rather annoying habit of constantly referencing pop music in order to “set the scene.” As though it were some great accomplishment on his part that he remembers what songs were played at the parties he went to in college.
Like many contemporary novels, the main issue with So Old, So Young is that it really isn’t written to be a great novel. It’s written to catch the attention of one or more of Reese Witherspoon, Jenna Bush Hager, Good Morning America, or the TV production department at Apple.
