A co-worker let me borrow their flagged and heavily annotated copy of Divergent. I misunderstood their intention: it wasn't loaned in the spirit of "this is something I think you will like," but more in the spirit of "I am interested to know your thoughts about this book." I have many thoughts.

I found it problematic in a number of ways. Now, I am not one to rip into a book angrily; I can dislike a thing, but voicing that dislike is only useful so long as I can pull cogent thoughts from it. I am not really in the business of acting like an angry cat crapping on the carpet next to the litter box in a snit. I offer this in the spirit of an honest dissection of themes, moments, and structures I found particularly troublesome. Spoilers follow.

My first major problem is with Roth’s world building. The notion of a society broken down into factions that idealize and uphold only a single trait among all those which make up the human experience is a hard sell to me. Even though at some points Roth shows this to be a flaw of this system, it’s very hard to imagine how a near-future society could have gotten there. In Atwood’s /The Handmaid’s Tale/, Butler’s /The Parable of the Sower/, Huxley’s /Brave New World/ and in Orwell’s /1984/, we have dystopias that arise out clear if/thens, but the real bedrock of these stories is that the societies they attempt to explore are patterned in ways that seem plausible, given what we take to be true about people. Roth structures her story around “A Very Bad Society” without imagining how that might come about. As a result, I felt immediately disconnected, and so the end of their social order had very little emotional payoff for me.

In Tris’s Divergence, there is thrust toward exclusivity and exceptionalism. In Roth’s world, to be Divergent is to lean toward more than one faction as revealed by an aptitude simulation and to be resistant to Erudite’s mind control. These two things are related, but since I found it so difficult to chew on the idea people could be normative by gravitating to only one faction in the first place, this idea of being “special” because of it fell apart. Roth doesn’t offer this as a critique of exceptionalism, either-- Tris and Tobias are just “the special ones” because they are Divergent, and Abnegation seems to produce more of those. Is this a value judgment? If so, it comes with a strong anti-intellectual underpinning (who are the villians? The Erudite. Who are the self-effacing victims? Abnegation. Who is the hero? An Abnegation-born Dauntless, our Divergent, Tris). In the end, with all the killing and dying over who gets to rule, Tris being special by virtue of her mind control resistance seemed to work against the idea of moving toward a more wholly feeling humanity. The undercurrents were all jangly and at odds.

Much of the book is devoted to following Tris through her Dauntless training and initiation, which felt aimless to me. It diverts any power the conflict among the factions might have by zooming in on a section of time where we don’t get to see anything come into focus. It’s just Tris. Tris doesn’t feel like much of character, but a vehicle to ask questions about whether or not she measures up, to feel a bunch of disconnected insecurities, and to unfold a romance upon. The romance between Tobias and Tris follows a typical YA pattern, normalizing some pretty awful behavior on the part of Tobias because of the terrible things that happened in his past. This kind of narrative tends to give me a visceral negative reaction. I think it is one more brick in the edifice telling girls to accept all kinds of abusive behavior from love interests. Even more sticky here is the fact that this is all going on during Tris’s brutal training/initiation, where she is sexually assaulted (she downplays this), and her fellow initiates attempt to murder her (also downplayed, occurs in the same incident). Murder most foul occurs in stories all the time, but what strikes me here is the manner in which Roth ties these things together. It is Tobias that tells her to play weak, “for her own protection.” It read as a standard danger from which the heroine must be rescued because you live in a bad world, this is what you have do, don’t make waves. And in the end, to have love conquer all, to rely on an armed Tobias being able to fight off the new improved catch-the-Divergent-too simulation and not shoot Tris in the head, to have it all come down to a trust fall… the implications of that made me a bit queasy.

I found Roth’s prose cumbersome, the story told in a present tense first-person, only from within the walls of Tris’s head, and always asking self-doubting questions. It left me lukewarm at best. Being tied up in Tris’s doubts bogged down the narrative.

Not a book for me, and if any of the above gives you pause, it likely would not be for you, either.