Kissing, Sparks, and Growing Up

Growing up is a fairly audacious enterprise even under favorable conditions. The body changes, parents lose their aura of omniscience, friendships become existential, sexuality complicates relationships, and while you’re still trying to figure out who you could become, the world already asks for fairly definite answers about whom you will be.

Matti, the first-person narrator in Stephan Lohse’s new novel “The Cracking in Space,” has more than enough on his plate. And then his own perception starts to slip. The novel follows him from tenth through twelfth grade. At the outset, his class travels to Amrum. The teacher Pöllisch, responsible for English, physics, and dry humor, tries to turn the outing—with sand fleas, tides, and lousy bus connections—into a pedagogically usable class trip. The students drink, smoke weed, kiss, nag each other, and are, roughly, as reasonable as teenagers on a field trip tend to be.

Being Gay Matters, But It Doesn’t Explain Everything

Amidst this group, Matti feels both secure and adrift. There’s Anna, his best friend since childhood, beautiful, smart, stubborn, and so closely tied to Matti that friendship and love blur for a long time. And there’s Can, also beautiful, though in a way that Matti initially prefers to observe rather than understand. Anna is described as even more beautiful than Can, “which is why I couldn’t decide—and perhaps didn’t have to.” It’s a small, but programmatic, line.

“The Cracking in Space” is thankfully not a novel in which sexual identity is simply handed to the reader as a test result at the end. Matti kisses a girl. Matti desires a boy. He is in love, confused, aroused, unsettled—and often preoccupied with matters that feel more urgent. It is only quite late that he tells his mother: “I have a boyfriend, mom. I’m gay.” It’s in this admission that the novel’s queer quality reveals itself. Being gay matters, but it does not explain everything. It’s neither the great dark secret nor the universal code for Matti’s mental crisis. Love and desire are part of his life, but they are not everything in it.

The Rich Leftist and the Nazi

That Lohse distrusts simple explanations is most clearly shown in Matti’s relationship with Jens. Jens is for Matti “the Nazi.” He insults Can with racist taunts and initially seems to present a clearly unambiguous figure. Matti, meanwhile, sees himself as “clearly left.” His justification already has that funny self-incrimination that’s one of the novel’s strengths: “I thought rich parents made you that way, by necessity.” Unfortunately, Matti himself is very rich. His father runs a defense and security-technology conglomerate; the wealth on his maternal side traces back to a history of “Aryanization” and forced labor. Matti despises his father’s worldview and yet benefits from his money. He repudiates privileges while living inside them. Lohse doesn’t turn this into a moral sermon, but into a productive tension.

Jens is not confined to his role as the right-wing foil either. When Matti ends up in danger in the Watt, Jens is the one who helps. Later, he even hides Matti in the basement of the high-rise where he lives. This doesn’t make him sympathetic or politically harmless. But it makes him more complicated. The world loses its labels. Matti finds that uncomfortable.

When the Mind Stops Keeping Up

More importantly, perhaps, are the moments when perception, sense of time, and control of the body drift apart. He freezes, loses track of time, experiences panic and dissociative episodes. He is desperate to understand what’s happening to him. “Illnesses have numbers,” someone tells him once. For Matti, these numbers become a kind of railing: F43.2: Adjustment disorder. F44.9: Dissociative disorder, not otherwise specified. That his doctor, Frau Schellenbach, problematizes the very concept of “disease” strike Matti as odd. When your own head starts slipping off the rails, you may not want to begin with debates over the borders of psychiatric categories. You want a word for it.

Words play an especially prominent role in this book. Time and again, it’s said: “Words set the direction.” This applies to “gay” as well as “Nazi,” “ill,” “rich,” or “friend.” Words order the world, yet they are not maps. Matti must learn this.

Friendship as a Lifeline

The greatest strength of the novel lies in its portrayal of the friend group. Anna, Can, Aliya, Grumbach, Nico, and the others aren’t reduced to pedantically optimized representatives of social positions. Lohse isn’t immune to the danger of pigeonholing—he sometimes distributes origin, political stance, and social position a bit conspicuously across the ensemble. But his characters have enough stubbornness, wit, and contradiction to keep escaping those traps. Most of all, they talk to one another superbly.

Lohse has a keen ear for the teenage way of communicating when the most intense emotion sits right beside utter nonsense. They talk about suicide and Kroketten (Dutch croquettes), fascism and fondant, wormholes and football clubs. Not because young people can’t have priorities; rather, life itself, even in crisis, is full of trivial moments. This is especially evident in the dynamic between Matti and Can. Matti turns Can into a kind of invulnerable ideal, the “Lotus,” to whom everything deflects. Only later does this projection crack. When Matti attacks him and accuses him of not feeling anything, Can explodes. “Stop dying,” he finally says. And then: “I’m in love with you. Since the sixth grade.”

That may be the most emotionally powerful moment in the novel, precisely because for a moment all the clever dialogue, political codes, and cosmic metaphors vanish. A boy fears losing another boy. That’s all it takes. Lohse doesn’t make the mistake of equating love with healing. Can can hold Matti. Can love him. He cannot kiss away a dissociative disorder nor resolve his family tensions on Matti’s behalf. Love isn’t a cure-all. But it can be a reason to stay.

A Novel That Sometimes Wants Too Much

Until this point, “The Cracking in Space” is an exceptionally smart, sparkling, psychologically attentive coming-of-age novel. Then Lohse begins to trust his material a touch less. The novel is already loaded with elements: mental health crises, psychiatry, queerness, racism, right-wing youth culture, class divides, wealth, inherited Nazism, the arms industry, the climate crisis, dysfunctional parents, friendship, love, suicidality. For a long stretch, this abundance works surprisingly well. In the final third, however, it becomes almost an experimental setup where nearly every motif must face a final test again. The friends summon Matti from psychiatric care, return him to Amrum, Matti disappears again, Can confesses his love, and finally his mother’s BMW is set ablaze on a parking deck with flares and fireworks.

From the windows, “a galaxy explodes,” a black hole opens, time freezes, and the cosmos crackles. It’s a powerful image—perhaps almost too powerful. For in this moment a lot is meant to burn: wealth, origin, family entanglements, anger, status, perhaps even an older version of Matti himself. In parallel, he confesses to his mother, and her thousandth origami crane finds a place too. It can feel intensely moving. But one could also sense that a novel that had, up to this point, convincingly explored ambivalence and ambiguity ends up tying its symbols a little too neatly. Less would have been more here.

Even the nocturnal escape from psychiatry is moving and funny, yet dramaturgically it’s a touch too tidy. For a moment the clinic threatens to become a backdrop from which true friendship frees the hero. Lohse manages to recapture this scene, but the novel’s logic increasingly takes precedence over psychological plausibility. Also, these teenagers are extraordinarily brilliant—quick-witted, politically alert, ironic, and almost always sharply articulate. It’s a joy to read. Yet at times you can hear, just behind the distinct voices, the same highly articulate author speaking a bit too clearly. These are fair criticisms of a novel that can do so much—and therefore invites judgment on that very basis.

Quite Pleasant

Stephan Lohse, in any case, achieves something many coming-of-age novels stumble over: he takes his young characters seriously without turning solemn. He writes about mental illness without turning it into a piece of affective prose, and gay love without pathologizing or turning it into a didactic example. Most importantly, the novel is funny and tender at the same time. At one point Matti answers the common question of how he’s doing with, “Pleasant. Quite pleasant.” The others echo the line, until Can calls out to the Watt: “Hey island! My friend here is doing quite pleasantly!”

Perhaps that’s more meaningful than it first sounds. Because growing up for Lohse does not mean arriving at a neatly sorted, healed other end. Matti remains contradictory, vulnerable, and sometimes utterly overwhelmed. But he finds words for himself. And people with whom he can stay. The kissing doesn’t solve his problems. The cracking doesn’t stop. But does that become growing up?