Jonathan Unleashed: A Novel
Growing up is hard, but Jonathan Trefoil is doing his best. Recently out of college, he’s lucked into a well-paying, if dead boring job writing ad copy. In another stroke of good fortune, he falls into a great deal on an apartment on the Lower West Side of New York City. Now his straitlaced, midwestern girlfriend has taken a job at Bridal 360 magazine and is ready to try cohabiting with Jonathan. What could go wrong?
Well . . . dogs, for one thing.
Meg Rosoff’s Jonathan Unleashed is a sprightly summer tale of a young man at the cusp of adulthood. Though he’s an aspiring cartoonist, Jonathan is trying to be an adult: “Real adult life seemed to exist over there, somewhere as distant and unreachable as Uranus. He had no idea how people crossed over to this place or why—the demands of being a grown up seemed exhausting.” So he takes the mind-numbing job, finds the apartment, and agrees to care for his older brother’s two dogs for six months. He even agrees to the wedding, bought, paid for, and live-streamed by his girlfriend’s magazine. Is he an adult yet?
Jonathan Unleashed is clearly a New York fairy tale. Well-paying job right out of college? Affordable apartment in Manhattan without roommates? Not exactly believable. Jonathan himself is a nebbishy, neurotic Woody Allen clone, pondering the parameters of adulthood and the weltschmerz of his dogs aloud to whoever will listen to his spiel.
And yet Rosoff turns what could have been a clichéd mess into a charming, funny tale, a love story to youth and the most iconic American city. Jonathan might be anxiety ridden, but he is also an earnest, kind boyman. Despite having his creative ideas turned down month after month in favor of bland copy, he keeps trying to make a difference at his job. He takes in dogs when he initially has no idea how to care for them and makes their welfare his prime concern.
He even agrees to a marriage he’s not sure he wants because he can’t bear the thought of hurting Julie, his long-term girlfriend. “Sure? Of course he wasn’t sure. He wasn’t even somewhat unsure. He was entirely one hundred percent unsure. Still, who needed sure when you were channeling bold?” he thinks to himself. This decision leads to one of the novel’s funniest calamities, and acts as the catalyst that changes everything for Jonathan.
Rosoff is going for more than laughs in this novel, though those come fast and often. On one level it’s a classic romcom, full of chance-but-significant meetings (usually manipulated by his dogs), fast patter, and colorful characters, including Jonathan’s world-wise, womanizing best friend. Rosoff tips her hand early, though, in a conversation Jonathan has with a new, and very patient, vet: “Maybe we distort ourselves into a semblance of conformity so everyone thinks we’ve adapted, when in fact all we’ve done is make the best of an untenable situation.”
Jonathan’s idea of adulthood is formed by the media he often references; he’s tied to a single ideal model of what a man is supposed to be, but that ideal is being tested: “He had an apartment and a girlfriend and a job, but everything felt somehow spindly.” His wise dogs lead him from problems to solutions, another romcom-ready bit, but the reader is left with the suspicion that it’s Jonathan’s own good sense that is really at work. When Jonathan is truly unleashed by letting go of that golden idol of Adulthood (with a capital A) it feels like a triumph.
Whether read for its wildly comic straight ahead story or for the subtler subtext about what it means to really grow up, Meg Rosoff’s Jonathan Unleashed is a summertime joy. Anyone who has felt the tug between childhood and adulthood should be affected by this charming story of a man floundering in the spaces between and finally clambering out. Jonathan’s best friend, Max, has world wisdom to set the reader on the way: “Ninety-nine percent of all rejections involve someone you don’t like as much as you think you do telling you something you should have already known.”
Adulthood accomplished.