On Aristotle and Dante Dive Into the Waters of the World

On Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World 

I wrote a post about the book/movie Aristotle and Dante Discover the Mysteries of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz and decided to read the sequel to it Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World. I loved Mysteries but was more conflicted about Waters.  The book starts of exactly where the previous left off with Ari and Dante in the back of his truck in the early morning with Ari needing to wake him to go home.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Ari goes from about 0-60 in 1 second flat on the gay front which I find a little fantastical. It has shades of Pleasantville where all of a sudden with his drab black and white world, now filled with color. That's OK, I guess. But all of a sudden Ari gets the sex part too. That he really wants Dante, and Dante really wants Ari but we've known that for ages since Dante is not confused about his desires, and least of all sex.

So why don't the just screw in the desert that they go out to all of the time? I mean their first time in the book is cute, and don't blink or you'll miss it, but even if they were too in shock the night they finally kissed, surely they wouldn't have been the next time. I mean, generations grew up with cars being how you got laid and Ari has the benefit of having a truck. So to me that's sort of a plot hole.

The next part I wasn't comfortable with is that his mom outed Ari to his sisters. But what was downright weird in the entire exchange they seemed incurious about who Dante was. Maybe his mom didn't want Dante to go, but I can't imagine that his sisters would have wanted anything more than to meet Dante who would have of course completely charmed them. Instead it turned into a sort of preachy moment about family.

That actually brings up that though there were some preachy moments in the first book, this one was full of them. I already said that the movie got it wrong about AIDS being in news all of the time, but the sequel tried to make amends to ignoring it in the first and it was sort of flat and preachy to me. I'm not saying he should have ignored the elephant in the room for us totally, but I think he tried too hard to make up for it, and it just didn't work. In fact, it would have been far stronger had he downplayed that aspect and then had Ari seen the die-in on the Champ de Mars opening his eyes as to how fucked up the situation was.

The entire book is really about Ari's coming out of his shell, but it comes at the expense of Dante and their relationship's development, which is what I mostly wanted to know about. Who is Dante, the lover? His boyfriend? The person that woke Ari up?

Instead we get a lot of the ancillary characters like Gina and Susie becoming part of his life and the sort of preachy and cringy, in my opinion, needing to tell us how wonderful women are. While it's not misogynistic, per se, it hearkens back to putting women on a pedestal which I found off putting. There's a lot of "our parents are really wonderful and people too", which I found repetitive.

Like trying to set the AIDS thing right, Waters tries to set the transsexual thing right too and in my opinion gets it wrong in the process. Just as wrong as it would be for Ari to misgender Bernardo's prostitute had that been established, it was wrong for him to presume they identified at a woman. Again, my rage is mainly directed at the assholes who hounded him about that and how he felt like he needed make a hamfisted answer to them. He should have just ignored the hysterical bullshit. They wouldn't be enlightened back then. Period.

As I said, their relationship kind of took the back burner to a lot of this book even though it faced an existential threat since they were going to different colleges far away from each other. That really should have been the central drama, but I think it got sort of short shrift. The entire way it played out was pretty weird. We already know that Dante is touchy about Ari not caring enough or willing to fight for them in his eyes, and we get more of that, but just to end things because of the when he gets his scholarship and Ari thought it was a good idea doesn't make sense to me. Ari is the love of his life and he's going to end things on fit of pique? More in a bit.

Ari's loss of his father after they finally really got each other was very touching though. Those damn ciggies. Don't do it kids. Him doing the obit and eulogy seemed very Ari even if Ari didn't think it was very Ari. We all knew he had it in him. The final bit of business that came before his dad dying was meeting Bernardo. It was a touching scene with his dad when they camped out and his dad telling him he may well have been conceived there. But any innocence Bernardo may have had was completely gone by the time he visited him in prison. He was extremely homophobic too which wasn't much surprise, but it gave Ari resolution even if it wasn't the resolution he hoped for.

Now for the ending. Dante went to Paris on a scholarship for the summer after he blew Ari off because he didn't tell him not to go. Ari was devastated and decided to go to Paris to confront him where of course they met at the Louvre at the Raft of the Medusa which was Dante's favorite. It was alarming because there were only a few more pages by then and it ends by them saying that this would be their honeymoon. I mean, what the fuck? Did they breakup or not? It was really unsatisfying where the first book's end was really uplifting this left me wondering whether they'd give the long distance thing a go or not. 

It was to the point that I started thinking about it. This high school romance thing always a built in stop sign when they graduate and what happens that many/most authors shy away from because it's not the easiest. But it gave me an idea that maybe I could try to imagine BAS didn't want to imagine. I managed to contact him on Twitter (fuck off Elon) and he said that he was probably done, so I guess my attempt was as valid as anybody else's. It turned into a 400+ page tome and was really my first time to actually complete something resembling a book. I don't know whether I'll ever publish it or not (that is, make it available in some form even if free) because first attempts are almost always trash. 

You can read my write up about here if you like. It was an interesting learning experience and gave me the courage to write something that was wholly mine too that I'm in the process of editing. Another learning experience, that's for sure.

I'm sure that this post comes off as being totally down on Waters, but I don't intend that because I did enjoy it and have reread it several times. But it had big shoes to fill after the first book and movie. Should it have been written? Yes. I was a perfectly good sequel in its own right unlike the piece of trash Husband Material that most definitely shouldn't have been written. I would have been most happy if BAS said that he'd make it a trilogy to see what happened to them, but alas that seems not likely to happen. In mind, they do make it though, because we want them to make it.