AMERICAN FANTASY, by Emma Straub
We get older, but boy bands stay the same age. While the dimples and the frosted tips might fade, their image stays fixed in the public imagination: teen idols pouring sugar into the ears of adolescent girls who are bound to outgrow them the same way they outgrow the Easter Bunny and training bras.
Oh, cruel world! Except there are numerous boy bands that qualify as vintage now, along with a legion of fans old enough to want to feel young again. And the cruise-ship industry figured out a while back that both those demographics can be well served by a floating funplex awash in activities and alcohol.
Emma Straub's sixth novel is named for one such boat: the "American Fantasy," on which 2,172 passengers, some 1,500 staffers and five members of the fictional late-1980s pop juggernaut Boy Talk, now in their 50s, spend pretty much all of the book's four-day timeline.
Part fan convention, part adult summer camp, the Boy Talk cruise serves as a sunny release valve for mostly middle-aged women (and the occasional husband or homosexual man) who come for the day-trip excursions, the group-selfies and the thrill of catching their lifelong pop-star crush smoking a furtive cigarette on the starboard.
But despite a narrative that overflows with lido-deck costume parties, bedazzled band merch and a sticky, ubiquitous cocktail called the Sexy Sunrise, the novel's tone largely foregoes the hard-candy finish of camp or satire for more measured and melancholic comic drama.
That's at least partly because each of Straub's three main characters is on the ship under some type of duress. Sarah, a 30-year-old production manager who is already an old hand at this type of expedition, has taken the Boy Talk booking primarily because the girlfriend she would have happily gone home to is instead frolicking in Queens with a 23-year-old dog walker named Plum.
Annie, perhaps the most reluctant guest on board, is 50 and also freshly single, a casual Boy Talk fan who had hardly thought about the band for decades before she agreed to come along with her younger sister, Katherine. Then Katherine broke her leg, leaving Annie literally adrift with a stranger — a New Jersey orthodontist's receptionist and hard-core Talker (as the fans call themselves) — for a roommate.
Finally there's Keith, Boy Talk's most gifted vocalist and also maybe its most congenitally miserable. Routinely outshined by his noisier, more outgoing bandmates — particularly his overbearing older brother Shawn — Keith is racked by general anxiety and the more specific pains of his cold-war marriage to a woman who "loved him, he thought, in the way that she loved one of her cousins or the brother she liked the least."
Straub, whose breezy, tenderhearted novels include "The Vacationers" and "This Time Tomorrow," deftly sketches out the contours of fandom, especially as they relate to the commodification of nostalgia and niche subcultures for Gen X and millennials.
There's no shortage of soft targets here, though Straub's portrayal of her more ridiculous characters generally feels more canny than cruel. Like Sarah's nepo-baby assistant, a useless noodle with an oversize neck tattoo who scoffs at Boy Talk "as if the most impressive thing he'd ever done wasn't taking his father's sports car for slow, supervised joy rides around a gated community."
Marveling at one cruise-goer's "perfect tube of bangs," Annie tries to puzzle out "if it was a costume or not -- sometimes it was hard to tell. Everyone got stuck in one time period or another. It couldn't all be old men wearing handsome fedoras. Some people had to live in the '80s forever."
One member of Boy Talk, at least, has been freed from the burden of concealing what he couldn't even whisper 40 years ago: Scotty, once deeply closeted, is now living his best gay life in Los Angeles, selling sketchy vitamins on Instagram and bedding a brawny redhead on the cruise security team whose nickname is "Lars the Viking."
Keith aside, insight into the Boys' inner lives remains scant. Shawn serves as the group's mercurial taskmaster and unofficial spirit leader, while the pony-tailed, libertarian Terrence spends the majority of the trip locked at the lips with his new, much younger wife.
Corey, though, is an interesting case; an outlier whose fame transcended the rest a long time ago. Once the baby of the band, he grew up to be a serious actor and a very bad boy in tabloids—the kind whose bone structure and weaponized charisma have kept him unaccountable for so long that there might not be a human being in there anymore; just shiny man-shaped id.
The linear plotting in "American Fantasy" picks up various strands of mild conflict and self-actualization as it goes, with a sweet late-game wisp of wish-fulfillment romance. But like the ship on its short route -- "Miami, Bahamas, Miami, a small loop in the shape of a deflating balloon" -- it mostly moves unhurriedly, a throwback melody bobbing along on a current of Top 40 party playlists and gentle emotional swells.
AMERICAN FANTASY | By Emma Straub | Riverhead | 286 pp. | $30