Gendered pathologies
What Boys Learn
by Andromeda Romano-Lax
New York: Soho Crime, 2026
$39.95 / 9781641296915
Reviewed by Jessica Poon
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What do you do when your socially awkward son becomes a suspect in the murder of two girls? If he’s guilty, how much responsibility, as a single mother—a much maligned demographic—is requisite? These are questions asked in What Boys Learn, the new novel by southern Gulf Islands resident Andromeda Romano-Lax (The Deepest Lake). It is a propulsive, horrifying psychological thriller rife with ambivalence, suspense, and maternal guilt.
Abby is a high school counsellor and a sole parent to a teenage son, Benjamin. When Sidney Mayfield is found dead, Abby’s competence is questioned and her job jeopardized. The situation gets worse still when the body of Isabella Scarlatti (“Izzy”), Sidney’s former best friend, is soon discovered. The girls’ deaths are treated as murder investigations. Abby suspects her son may not be entirely innocent.
To make matters worse, Abby is haunted by memories of her imprisoned older brother, Ewan. Abby fears there are hints of Ewan in Benjamin’s personality. Between her desire for justice and her maternal instincts, Abby must ask herself how willing she is to protect her son, and question the veracity of her own innocence in recalling her past.
Enter Abby’s ex, Robert. He’s a cop who has clearly not given up the idea of romantically reconciling with her. Though Abby characterizes him as a mostly good man—one assumes the bar is exceptionally low—his proprietary feelings for her and apparent confusion about the existence of boundaries would likely constitute stalking to other people. The tension between Robert being a useful ally as he lingers as a suitor is interesting (if aggravating on a vicarious level).
The novel largely remains in first-person, from Abby’s point of view, though her childhood memories are rendered in third-person and there are occasional glimpses of Benjamin’s voice in first-person in the novel’s closing chapters. Benjamin’s voice is suitably bratty and petulant, full of contempt yet also somewhat lacking in introspection.
Abby is first introduced to the reader when she, in the midst of moving, invades Benjamin’s privacy by rifling through his drawers. With this scene, Romano-Lax illustrates the uncomfortably overlapping nature of privacy invasion and natural curiosity. Abby is a flawed mother, but also a deeply concerned one—and, it seems, for good reason. But is anything ever what it seems?
When a detective points out Benjamin’s use of gendered epithets in text messages to one of the victims, Benjamin explains he wanted to have sex with her. In other words, calling Izzy terrible names was, bizarrely, his deliberately chosen method for expressing the ferocity of his desire. (I can only assume that flowers, or kind words, are too old-fashioned).
As Benjamin explains the dynamic he had with Izzy, who liked complaining about her older boyfriend to him, the detective, trying to curry avuncular favour, suggests Benjamin was being treated by Izzy like a girlfriend, i.e., not like a virile male, but a platonic female friend. At this, Abby interjects: “Are you telling my son that spending time listening to a girl is not an acceptable thing for a boy to do?”
When Abby recalls bringing Benjamin to a psychologist, she’s frustrated with the relative passivity of a wait-and-see approach:
“She seemed to be saying I was hiding Benjamin’s true character by being a half-decent mother. But she wasn’t promising that my adequate parenting would be enough.”
Dr. Adelman added, “Later childhood and adolescence is when you may know better, unfortunately.”
“You’re saying I have to wait until he’s a real problem before I know he has a real problem?”
Benjamin’s adolescent judgment, for all its flaws, is a byproduct of and adaptation to a world where softness—an undesirable quality synonymous with weakness—is typically assumed as the sole provenance of the feminine. Abby notes that: “ … he was better prepared than I was for the world he’d soon face as an adult—a world in which presidents got away with rape and cops got away with murder, where older men dated young girls and used them up and threw them away.” In other words, Benjamin understands perfectly well that the behaviour of an uncouth, entitled man is absolutely something you can get away with—you might even become president.
Though there are several critical differences, I was reminded of the premise of Netflix’s Adolescence. The premise is familiar to the point of feeling like a documentary—boys disseminate sensitive photos of a girl and call her a slut. The girl retaliates with cyber-bullying and calls one of the boys an incel, a bit of a strange insult (how many sexually active thirteen-year-old boys do you know?) The boy does not take the insult well. He responds by killing her. Without a doubt or shred of ambiguity, the boy is guilty. And the boy—a murderer—is also a son.
Adolescence is predominantly concerned with the parents’ guilt—how much should they assume, and could they have known and prevented it? The father admits to avoiding his son’s gaze during an especially abysmal athletic performance, a blow to his son’s ego and a lasting stain on the father’s résumé of guilt. The question remains: how does a seemingly normal boy become prey to a predatory, misogynistic, right-wing community full of male bluster? How much responsibility do parents bear for their children’s crimes? A lonely boy, guided by horniness and equipped with the Internet, is one fitness video algorithm away from committing a heinous crime. Or, as the comedian Ronny Chieng says, “I do think it’s tough for straight men in 2024 to sincerely look up self-improvement on the internet without five weeks later storming the Capitol, okay?”
Although the whodunit aspects are doubtless fascinating, I was more taken with the psychological depth of the characters. What Boys Learn is a well-crafted confrontation with distorted values masquerading as masculinity and the resultant, Andrew Tate-esque entitlement toward female bodies, and meditation on the complexities of parental guilt. I made the mistake of reading it on an empty stomach on an unpleasant bus ride while I was already in an overly pensive mood. What Boys Learn is best read with a heating blanket, on a full stomach, ideally with the reassurance of a warm dog curled up near you.
Jessica Poon is a writer in East Vancouver. [Editor’s note: Jessica Poon has reviewed recent books by Linda Cheng, Neko Case, Karina Halle, Jen Sookfong Lee, Bal Khabra, Léa Taranto, Martin West, and Terry Berryman for BCR.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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