Pick the Lock

I think I would have loved A.S. King's novels as a teenager. I like them quite a lot now, though I'm not the intended audience.

Their consistent thread is that no one among the characters knows what others knows, and so your life is an unintended detective story. Children especially don't understand the larger world or their family dynamics/dysfunction and how it fits, especially when they have parents who withhold information from them or abuse them.

But I have learned, from reading her earlier books, that I can trust King to not hurt me in the end, and I value that.

Her recent book, Pick the Lock, is a post-covid, justifiably angry look at domestic violence and the patriarchy, mixed with magical realism. Like all of her books it's not worth explaining much more than that about it. The story has to unfold. 

I will say the book made me feel my age. It begins in fall 2024, the same time I was reading it, and extends into early 2025. Past dates, as the story moves through flashbacks, are clearly dated. The main character's mother's punk Riot Grrrl band launches in the mid-1990s — which still seems like recent history to me but is clearly the far past in this story. (Which it is to many people, I know!)

One final thing. King spends a lot of her time on author visits at high schools, talking to Gen Z students, so I trust her portrayal of them. She thinks the kids are all right, in a complex way. They're fluid and accepting, especially the girls. But too many of the boys are rigid.

While I was reading the book, I happened to read an article on Teen Vogue about young men who did and didn't manage to leave the sickening world of anti-woman radicalization called the manosphere. I don't know how widely known this problem is outside of people like me who are "extremely online." I've mentioned it to women with teenaged sons and they knew nothing about it. It's very disturbing. 

To close, here's one quote from the punk rocker mom character, after the main character finally gets to talk to her:

"Try to have compassion for your father. He was raised in the patriarchy and was never allowed to grow a heart or a warm place in his chest for himself."

"Fuck him."

"Fair. But the patriarchy harms men as much as it harms women. They live in a delusional world where they are in charge and sexual royalty, when in reality, they have little power and are often disinterested in sex," she said.... "Then they twist it all to be our fault, when it's the fault of the System they invented in the first place. This is why I like being in a band. No one is in charge. We're all in charge. And we change the rules as we need to. That's how life and government are supposed to work" (pp. 280–281)

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Here's a list of King's books. I'll asterisk the ones I've read. Not sure how I missed the other ones.

• Switch (2021)
• Dig (2019)*
• The Dust of 100 Dogs (2017/2009)*
• Still Life with Tornado (2016)
• I Crawl Through It (2015)*
• Glory O'Brien's History of the Future (2014)
• Reality Boy (2013)
• Ask the Passengers (2012)*
• Everybody Sees the Ants (2011)*
• Please Ignore Vera Dietz (2010)