Reviewed by Jill Meyers
6.22.07

In I Love You, Beth Cooper, Larry Doyle gives teen drama a fresh soundtrack and sensibility. Buffalo Grove class of 2007 is wilder, faster and funnier than your average group of graduating seniors. Paying homage to high school flicks like Dazed and Confused and American Graffiti, Doyle compresses a complex coming-of-age narrative into one momentous night.

Graduation night begins in earnest when Denis, captain of the debate team, tells Beth Cooper, head cheerleader, that he loves her in the middle of his valedictorian speech. This declaration has a domino effect; Beth seeks out Denis, he invites her to a “party” he’s hosting, and Beth’s meathead Army boyfriend, Kevin, threatens Denis. Over a very long and debauched evening, Beth’s interest in Denis blooms, Denis dials down his idealization of Beth, and Kevin makes multiple attempts to humiliate and hurt Denis.

A wisecracking cultural anthropologist’s tour of high school, Beth Cooper delineates cliques and types to hilarious effect; we see “math-letes” and French Clubbers, minor jocks and big-deal athletes, a dealer specializing in ADD drugs, a DJ who spins a cheesy party mix while listening to Thelonious Monk. A sampling of Doyle’s humorous tribute to the high school geek:

Treece wrinkled her nose. “Champagne.” She uncurled the word as if it were French for excessive and frequent evacuation of watery feces.
“Same alcohol as beer,” pitched Rich, selling hard.
“More,” Denis said. “Two point …” He quickly calculated:
A(beer) = Avg[.04 -> .06] = .05
A(champagne) = Avg[.08 -> .14] = .11
∆(alcohol) = A(champagne)/A(beer) = 2.2.
“Two times as much alcohol, on average.”
Rich could only shake his head in admiration at his friend’s determination to be himself, no matter what the cost.

Beth and Denis, plus Beth’s two sidekicks and Denis’s possibly gay best friend, ping-pong from one activity to the next, in a truly ADD manner—buying beer, tipping cows, crashing a party, stealing a car, hitting the girls’ locker room showers, sneaking away to a lake house. Their most frequent activity, besides drinking, is running away from people. Kevin, of course, gives them good reason to flee. He is out for Denis’s blood, and when he catches up with Denis, which is frequently, he beats him with whatever is convenient—his fist, or a femur from Denis’s model skeleton. Beth engineers several spectacular escapes (hotwiring her car and incurring much property damage in the process), and Denis gains the upper hand by using his hidden talents. Doyle does not short Beth Cooper on plot. Both the entanglements and the getaways are inspired—one fight is “supervised” by the high school gym teacher in the midst of a party—but the manic pacing can, at times, seem tiresome.

The characters’ multiple escapes are important, however, because the novel focuses on the larger breakout of graduation, the loosening of cliquish ties, the strange gap between high school and what’s next. Denis and Beth, while not Bogart and Bacall, have their own flickering chemistry. As the night wears on, they speak to each other with an honesty rare to 18 year-olds.

Comics artist and writer Evan Dorkin drew the cover art and developed the novel’s twenty-four chapter illustrations, which represent Denis over the course of his graduation night (from nervous to beat down to euphoric and back again). The illustrations furnish Beth Cooper with further geek cred; Dorkin is known for his violent, funny, pop-culture-riffing Milk and Cheese and Dork comics. His harried, sweaty Denis becomes the perfect guide to this tale of teenage heaven and hell.