Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World by Sasha Fletcher

​  If a socially conscious, socialism leaning, well-educated, precociously stylistic, hopelessly romantic millennial was somehow magically turned into a book…this would have been the result.
   Which is to say it is about as tolerable as you would find such a person. But also, strangely compelling. Quite a bizarre combination. Under all the stylistic flair which includes weirdly formatted pages where the text takes up only about 3/4th of the page lined up in a neat vertical columns, there is actually a proper story.
    The story features two characters, Sam and Eleanor. They are somewhere in their early 30s, somewhere in NYC, trying to get by in the world increasingly hostile to bare survival. Sam is underemployed, but he’s good in bed and in the kitchen, so Eleanor floats the bills for most of the story.  They are very much in love, though they are smart enough to be justifiably terrified by the world around them.
    The story is presented by a sort of omniscient narrator, who, along with the characters, tends to go on these elaborate sociopolitical tangents chronicling the decline of the country around them. These are actually surprisingly good, often the highlights of the entire production, because they are so (sadly) accurate that they create a nicely apocalyptic ambiance for the entire production. It’s a slow apocalypse, like the proverbial boiling of a frog, the water gets hotter slowly enough that people continue to tread it.
      Sam especially is completely hampered by college loans, so there’s much discussion of that. But there are other things, like race, politics, etc. And while you may disagree with the novel’s distinctly socialism take on them, the facts are undeniably there for you to draw your own depressing conclusions. Or not, presumably, since we do live in the country that has a peculiar disdain for facts.
     The thing with this novel is that normally I likely would find it tediously precocious, over-stylized, over-done, and yet there’s something so nice and refreshing and relatable about having someone be terrified and appalled by the state of things the way one, by all rights, ought to be…that it kind of acts as the book’s saving grace.
      Overall, from a purely fictional perspective this may not be the greatest novel and it certainly won’t be to everyone’s liking, although it’s terribly hip and is sure to gather acclaim that way, but it is undeniably an excellent representation of its time and its generation and on that merit alone it works very nicely. The end of the world is nigh, don’t be alone, find someone to love. Find a book to read. Thanks Netgalley.