The Agonies by Ben Faulkner

In all earnestness, the teenaged narrator of this affecting novel desperately needs sports. A sport, any sport: even a sedentary bookworm like myself can recognize that the kid has too much energy and too few healthy outlets.

The kid in question is Armie Bernal, the son of two semi-famous writers who divorced when he was in the single digits. Mom stayed in New York City while he followed his dad to Baltimore. Dad is, frankly, too self-absorbed to be a good parent. Armie decides that he doesn’t want to talk to his mom any more and sinks into a cesspool of online reactionaries and contrarians. At some point, he uses his dad’s credit card to source a whole bunch of different drugs from shady sources on the Internet (see, again: bad parenting.) Unsurprisingly, a psychotic break ensues. In the aftermath, Armie tries to make sense of his life by writing this book.

There is, oddly, “an act of terrifying violence” promised as the climax of this story. It never manifests, unless the last page is meant to be a veiled metaphor told from Dill’s point of view. If so, it’s so vague as to lack any impact. I actually hope it isn’t, as the novel functions quite well without it.

And what is that function? To showcase the rambling, often incoherent but deeply believed thought processes of a disaffected young man in the 2010-20s. The Agonies well deserves its comparisons to Camus’ The Stranger (which I loved) and Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye (which I despised,) updating the disconnect felt by the protagonists of those classics to better gel with the challenges kids face today. And there are so many challenges facing our kids right now. From gun violence to online radicalization to the excesses of late-stage capitalism, our current era is a hard time for smart, sensitive kids to make sense of. I felt tremendous sympathy for Armie, even as I was appalled at the utter lack of guidance he was given.

And, going back to my opening salvo, I really felt that pre-breakdown Armie needed regular physical activity to help siphon off his excess energy. A team sport would have helped inculcate a bunch of positive values to a kid clearly in need of community, but even an individual sport would have helped him set goals and stave off his feelings of both aimlessness and helplessness.

I’m digressing hard, but that’s how convinced I was of Armie’s depiction as a representative of a far too large subset of our society. As the mom of three boys just coming into and leaving middle school, I’m hyper-vigilant of their habits and consumption. All our computers are in the same room so that my co-parent and I can monitor their behaviors, in just one example of how we try to stay involved in their interests. It helps that we live in a public school district that emphasizes media savviness as well as kind and courteous behavior, so they’re getting positive encouragement from all sides. Just last night, I was complimenting my eldest kid on the way he firmly enforced his boundaries with an online friend without bringing negative emotions into the conflict. Honestly, I could learn a thing or two from him.

But going back to this book, you can’t help but feel sorry for Armie, even as you’re repulsed by his casual racism, sexism and other strains of awfulness. Ben Faulkner has done a terrific job of bringing this poor, messed up kid to life. A pity that boys like these aren’t constrained to the page, and that parents don’t try harder to make it so.

The Agonies by Ben Faulkner was published March 25 2025 by Arcade and is available from all good booksellers, including