TUESDAY, AUGUST 6 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C3
after getting closer to Jules, re-
evaluates that stance. Of course,
relying on another teenager for
emotional stability isn’t the
healthiest way to go about sobri-
ety, as Rue’s Narcotics Anony-
mous sponsor warns her, but
Levinson leans toward depicting
reality in its harshest form.
As free-spirited as she is,
Jules’s escapades sometimes
steer her toward manic pixie
territory — but the show manag-
es to add depth to the character
when, for example, she wonders
whether she might hook up with
so many men as a means to
“conquer femininity.” (The show
addresses the fact that Jules, like
the actress who plays her, is trans
but is careful not to exploit this.)
Jules also struggles under the
pressure of having Rue’s well-be-
ing hinge upon the state of their
emotional relationship, the toxic
nature of which seems to cement
in Rue’s mind in the finale, when
she bails on their sudden plans to
run away to the big city. For
Jules, this is compounded by the
stress of having the violent
school quarterback, Nate Jacobs
(Jacob Elordi), who tries to sup-
press his own queerness, catfish
her on a dating app before black-
mailing her with her nude pho-
tos.
While Rue, Jules and Nate
determine the direction of “Eu-
phoria,” Levinson tries to do
their classmates justice as well.
Kat Hernandez (Barbie Ferreira)
becomes an edgy cam girl to
reject her innocent, virginal rep-
utation but, in the end, recogniz-
es there was nothing wrong with
how she was in the first place.
Maddy Perez (Alexa Demie) fi-
nally comes to terms with the
fact that her relationship with
the abusive Nate won’t end well
for either of them, though her
friends seem to think she’ll con-
tinue to fall into it time and time
again. Cassie Howard (Sydney
Sweeney), Lexi’s older sister, is
saddled with the teen-centric
drama’s cliche pregnancy story
line, but the show at least tries to
turn it into a catalyst for Cassie
to think about her own future.
Unlike many of its peers —
such as “The Handmaid’s Tale,”
which has increasingly become
proof that drama series don’t
always require lengthy seasons
— “Euphoria” could have ben-
efited from a few more episodes
to fully flesh out some of the
characters who simply exist
within the universe. Fans have
argued since the start that Fezco
(Angus Cloud), Rue’s regretful
drug dealer, deserves as an epi-
sode of his own, as the snippets
we see of his life lay the ground-
work for a rich backstory.
While it lacks in certain areas,
Levinson’s risky storytelling
highlights his potential, as well
as that of his young characters.
Luckily, HBO renewed “Eupho-
ria” for a second season early last
month, giving Levinson — and
the teenagers — ample opportu-
nity to grow.
[email protected]BY SONIA RAOThis story contains spoilers for
the season finale of HBO’s
“Euphoria.”Days before “Euphoria” pre-
miered in June, the Hollywood
Reporter ran a piece with a
headline that asked, “How much
teen sex and drugs is too much?”
The mild apprehension behind
that question infiltrated most
early discussions of the HBO
drama, an exceedingly explicit
show about suburban teenagers
in California that, as creator Sam
Levinson has said, isn’t really
intended for a teenage audience
at all.
A network executive told the
magazine “Euphoria” wouldn’t
be “sensational to be sensation-
al,” and the first season, which
wrapped Sunday night, largely
backed that promise. While some
remained wary of moments in
which the beautifully choreo-
graphed show appeared to favor
style over substance, critics
seemed to warm up to it as the
weeks went by. For curious
adults — including Leonardo Di-
Caprio, a professed fan — “Eu-
phoria” is a brutally honest an-
swer to what growing up Gen Z
might be like.
It’s an answer and not the
answer, of course, as there are
surely kids out there who identi-
fy more with the demure Lexi
Howard (Maude Apatow, who
barely gets screen time) than
with her depicted peers, whose
actions are more likely to shock
viewers. But Levinson consis-
tently contextualizes their ac-
tions in a way that aims to
explain without providing excus-
es — starting with Rue Bennett
(Zendaya), a somewhat unreli-
able narrator who serves as our
primary lens into the high
schoolers’ wild world.
The season begins with Rue’s
return home from rehab, where
she spent the summer after an
overdose, and ends with her
relapsing after three months
clean. The six months in between
— she still used for the first three,
unbeknown to her worried
mother — paint a complex por-
trait of what life becomes for not
only the person in recovery, but
for those around them. Levin-
son’s own struggles inform his
depiction of Rue, who also has
bipolar disorder, as is addressed
in the penultimate episode of the
season. Manic episodes inspire
her to figure out why her best
friend, Jules Vaughn (Hunter
Schafer), has been so distant,
while their depressive counter-
parts give Rue a kidney infection,
and the episode its title: “The
Trials and Tribulations of Trying
to Pee While Depressed.”
Rue’s season-long arc deals
with her inability to break down
the walls she built up throughout
the course of her father’s termi-
nal illness, the period in which
she began to use. She attributes
her early relapses to a lack of care
about her own well-being but,hours). Beginning in 1911 in Som-
erset, England, it is the story of
Leopold, boy and man with an
affinity for horses, and a rich
landowner’s daughter, Charlotte,
who aspires, against convention,
to be a veterinarian. Leonard is
forced off his father’s farm in a
shocking incident and wanders
hither and thither, becoming
slave to gypsies, farmworker, sail-
or, diver and horseman. Char-
lotte, in turn, has her own cruel
tribulations. The genius of these
books lies in their dramatic, de-
tailed descriptions of work and
their quiet celebration of the crea-
tures and human devices of the
English countryside of a vanished
era. Keeble, a master of the argot
and manner of speech of the West
Country, further enhances these
great novels, making them among
the best audiobooks I have en-
countered in some three decades
spent listening to audiobooks.
[email protected]Katherine A. Powers reviews
audiobooks every month for The
Washington Post.pedestrian novels into enjoyable
entertainments. Adrian Mc-
Kinty’s “The Chain” (Hachette,
10¼ hours) is far from pedestrian,
but, in LaVoy’s performance, the
chilling, suspenseful novel tran-
scends the page. Set in present-
day Massachusetts, this is the ter-
rifying story of the abduction of a
teenage girl whose kidnappers
demand, in addition to money,
that the girl’s mother, Rachel, kid-
nap another child — whose par-
ents will be handed the same
demand. This is “the chain.” Ra-
chel’s pain, desperation and hor-
ror are urgent in LaVoy’s voice.
The rest of the characters — sym-
pathetic, skeptical, intimidating,
and just plain evil — troop in one
by one, their various personalities
embodied in this extraordinary
narrator’s protean voice.
Jonathan Keeble’s narrative
ability, reserved and cultivated in
general narrative, opens doors to
the past. He is at his very finest in
Tim Pears’s West Country Trilogy:
“The Horseman” (Isis, 7½ hours),
“The Wanders” (Isis, 8½ hours)
and “The Redeemed” (Isis, 9delivery has contributed another
dimension to the silent page.
Anna Burns’s “Milkman” —
winner of the Man Booker Prize
and the National Book Critics Cir-
cle Award for fiction — is a bril-
liant but difficult novel, one that
has stymied a number of readers
who experienced it in print. Set in
Belfast during the 1970s amid
Northern Ireland’s Troubles, it is
the sardonic, sometimes free-
form first-person account of a
young woman being stalked by a
terrorist and held in suspicion by
her own community. At times
challenging and slow-going to
read in print, it opens itself when
delivered by the actor Bríd Bren-
nan, a native of Northern Ireland
herself. (Dreamscape, 14¼ hours)
She captures the dialogue’s ca-
dence wherein much of the nov-
el’s sense lies, renders the menace
palpable, and conveys the narra-
tor’s subtle humor with fitting
understatement.
January LaVoy has a voice that
contains multitudes, and her ver-
satility and empathetic character-
ization have transformed somewhose upper-class villains do, I
admit, sound like Lady Bracknell.
My own divergence from general
opinion is an aversion to the
much-lauded, award-winning,
too-swoopy voice of Davina Porter
and that of the equally celebrated
Scott Brick, the cilantro of narra-
tors — you like it or don’t.
Many authors like to read their
own books. Sometimes that’s a
good thing. But too often authors
lack a natural gift for voice narra-
tion and aren’t trained in it. Slop-
py enunciation, glottal mayhem,
off-kilter expressiveness and a
general airlessness have killed
some books read by the very per-
son who created them. To be sure,
the situation has improved since
the rough-hewed days of the
1990s, and certain authors are
now truly accomplished narra-
tors, their delivery enhancing the
words on the page. Among the
finest are Louise Erdrich, John le
Carré, Trevor Noah, Neil Gaiman,
Toni Morrison, and, surprisingly,
Jim Bouton (who died last
month). Bouton would not be the
right man to read anything but his
own “Ball Four” (Audible Stu-
dios), a vastly entertaining exposé
of the world of major-league base-
ball players that he delivers with
infectious relish.
Truly great narrators are a rare
and wondrous thing: how they
manage to distinguish between
characters with such limberness,
how they can — seamlessly and
without apparent effort — change
timbre, pitch, manner and accent
from character to character.
There are many candidates for the
top spot, but here are three whose
BOOK WORLD FROM C1
preoccupied for hours,” she says.
But then, as an adult, she went to
an evening pool party. With the
giant bowls of sketchy booze,
women in bikinis and carousing
men, it was like going to a night-
club next to a puddle of chlorine.
She was done.
Robin Aufses, who heads the
English department at the Lycée
Français de New York, still be-
lieves in pool parties. She believes
the secret to a successful, non-
stressful one is to invite children.
She hosted a pool party on Thurs-
day for her colleagues and they
were encouraged to bring their
kids, who range in age from 2 to
early teens. “Having children
there seems to liberate everyone
from worrying about how they
look in swimsuits and forces
them to focus on both keeping an
eye on the kids and having fun
themselves,” Aufses says. That is,
of course, if one likes partying
with children. Other people’s
children. But we digress.
Let’s stipulate that having kids
splashing around with abandon
can put a little of the innocent fun
back into a pool party. But those
little digital natives, those gener-
ation whatevers, are the ones who
are turning every aspect of life
into a performance in the first
place. And pool parties, as Uni-
versity of Mississippi student
Baylor Pillow argues, are a tale of
masochism in multiple acts.
Act I: Do I look fat in this
swimsuit?
Act II: It’s so hot and smoke
keeps coming at me from the grill,
should I just get in the darn pool?
Act III: People have peed in
this pool, haven’t they?
The end.
[email protected]Or their friend’s friends. What is
the classic anxiety dream? Walk-
ing in front of a crowd of people
and realizing that you’re naked.
What is a pool party? As close as
you can come to being naked in
polite company.
A 35-year-old radio producer
in Toronto, who only recently
came out as gay, describes pool
parties as a “millstone” around
his neck. One hosted by two close
friends during Pride Month was
especially daunting:
“I knew from the start that I
couldn’t go — given that their
friends are largely muscled,
masculine-presenting gay men,
something that I am, speaking
broadly, not,” he emails. He
asked that his name not be used
because he realized, as he went
on, that his self-analysis was
sounding a little like a therapy
session.
“These are largely my own
hang-ups,” he writes, “but I have
developed the feeling that if, in
some quarters, you don’t, at first
glance, fit a pretty tight (figura-
tively and literally) physical tem-
plate, then the scorn can be swift
and the judgment immediate.”
“I consider myself to be a
perfectly happy, assured person
with lots of friends whom I love
spending time with,” he contin-
ues. “But the prospect of a pool
party managed to demolish those
contentments in one fell swoop.”
Damn you, pool parties! Look
at the existential crises you cause.
We are not born hating pool
parties. We grow to loathe them.
When we were children, they
could be delightful.
Scoggins remembers that joy.
“I could be given a hot dog and
some diving rings and I’d betoxic masculinity. “Eighth Grade”
uses one to convey awkward ado-
lescence. And the “fat babe pool
party” in Hulu’s “Shrill” is a politi-
cal statement — a celebration of
self-confidence in the face of
cultural prejudices that attach
shame to large bodies.
No garment stirs more compli-
cated emotions about body im-
age, self-esteem, cultural expecta-
tions and gender than a swimsuit.
If you are a body positivity guru
who is all empowered and self-ac-
tualized, good for you. Let us all
strive to be so evolved. Until then,
let the rest of us bow our heads
and pray for a moratorium on
these needlessly stressful pool-
side soirees in which we are
deprived of cover.
If a friend said, “Hey, why don’t
you come over for a swim?” that
would be a lovely suggestion be-
cause the day would revolve
around an activity for which you
were appropriately dressed. A
pool party is an invitation to
come over and walk around in a
swimsuit in front of people whom
you may or may not know for the
sole purpose of... walking
around in a swimsuit.
Why don’t you just give me a
sash and a tiara and ask me about
world peace? At least there’d be
prize money in the wretchedness
of it all.
Pool parties strip away the
protective armor that clothing
provides in social settings. What’s
left isn’t honesty; it’s vulnerabili-
ty. And most people really only
want to expose their soft under-
belly to people they’ve grown to
trust. Typically, that does not
mean a mob of co-workers and
their spouses. Or the bossypants
parents in their kids’ play group.family get-together. These are
formally planned social affairs
that aspire to glamour — Brigitte
Bardot in St. Tropez, Herb Ritts
on Fire Island, Beyoncé on that
yacht off the coast of Capri. God
bless aspirations.
“Every fiber within my being
absolutely abhors pool parties. I
have never been to a single pool
party that I did not leave crispy or
miserable,” emails Jenna Scog-
gins, a writer who recently relo-
cated to New York from Atlanta.
“I think the original idea of a pool
party is made from an honest
desire of a good time but the idea
and the execution are never the
same.”
“The food? Soggy at best. The
people? Covered in sunscreen oil
and a little too close. The music?
Always too loud and usually
someone’s attempt at turning
their DJ side hustle into a full
career,” Scoggins continues. “I’m
getting anxious just thinking
about being in a bathing suit in
front of people who literally
spend hundreds of dollars to win
the unspoken bikini competition
that goes on near the shallow
end.”
Ah, the competitive superfici-
ality of a pool party: the designer
swimsuits not meant for the wa-
ter, the freshly waxed beefcake,
the perma-lashes, the side-angled
posing to elongate the legs. The
pool is a mere backdrop for what
is a de facto beauty pageant and
bodybuilding competition.
In popular culture, a pool party
is never simply a neutral event. In
“Wolf of Wall Street,” it is a skeezy,
over-the-top indulgence that un-
derscores the lead character’s
POOL FROM C1
The pool party, a.k.a. the half-naked and the dread
KZENON/ISTOCKA good narrator should be the talk of the industry
A.R.N.“Huckleberry Finn,” “Born a Crime” and “The Chain” all benefit from having good narrators.AUDIBLE HACHETTEHBO’s ‘Euphoria’ took
risks for the right reasons
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