The Gravity of Us
By Phil Stamper
Bloomsbury, 2020

Cal Lewis Jr., the narrator of Phil Stamper’s utterly winning debut YA novel The Gravity of Us, is far more comfortable being a purveyor of news rather than a subject of it; his ongoing video series of news uploads for the platform FlashFame have made him, as one character in the book semi-sarcastically comments, a viral superstar (and as Cal himself notes, he feels much less helpless in the face of the daily news cycle when he’s curating it himself, in however small a way). But in the odd nature of online celebrity, he’s still anonymous to the broader world.

And this veneer of control, the vibrational discrepancy between the online and offline persona that’s been well-known to stage performers for millennia and that’s been steeply intensified in the era of the Internet, is the looming preoccupation of Cal’s personal life:

A shiver runs through my body as the truth breaks through. Sometimes, it feels like the only thing keeping me stable is the shield I put up. Cal the performer is always put together. Cal the friend is always there to fix your problems. 

I try, but I can’t even picture the real Cal. The one without a carefully planned video schedule and content calendar, the one who has a clear vision of his future, the one without anyone to turn to.

But this relatively comfortable balance between the private and the public - a high school student living with his parents in Brooklyn and eagerly awaiting an internship at BuzzFeed - is shattered when Cal’s father’s long-shot application to join the team of the impending Orpheus V mission to Mars is approved. 

Suddenly, the family is moving to Clear Lake, Texas. Suddenly, they’ll be sharing a sanded-off and camera-ready version of their lives on the reality-TV “Shooting Stars” publicity show NASA is using to publicize the mission. Suddenly, Cal’s New York internship is off the table - as is his FlashFame channel, since “Shooting Stars” has legal boilerplate that makes on-air Cal basically their property. In other words, the greatest opportunity of Cal’s father’s life is a disaster for Cal himself. 

The one silver lining is the heart of The Gravity of Us: even when Cal was reluctantly watching “Shooting Stars” and sneering at its gloss, he was noticing Leon Tucker, the “supremely hot” teenaged son of one of the program’s other astronauts. Moving to Texas and essentially living on the “Shooting Stars” set while his father trains with the Orpheus V team brings Cal into direct contact with Leon, and, this being a YA novel, the chemistry is instantaneous:

Leon stands, and for a second, we just smile at each other. There’s a peace in being alone with him, even when we’re not saying much. The nuanced expressions, the rising pulse rate, all bring a rush, a high all over my body.

“But the line between sweet and creepy is especially thin when crushes are concerned,” Cal reflexively thinks, “and there’s only so long two people can stand in silence before it gets weird.” This watchful grounding note sounds throughout the novel’s first half and makes all the more powerful the later moment when Cal realizes with a delirious combination of joy and dread (that “high all over my body” sensation) that he’s genuinely, uncontrollably in love. 

Stamper makes it all electric reading; this is a buoyantly impressive debut. There are a number of concessions to typical YA laziness, concessions that are, given this author’s skill, entirely unnecessary. It’s slightly disappointing that Cal’s best friend in Brooklyn is as one-dimensional as a sheet of wallpaper; it’s slightly disappointing that Leon, it turns out, has been watching and, er, admiring Cal on FlashFame as long as Cal has been liking the look of Leon on “Shooting Stars”; it’s slightly disappointing that Cal’s parents are clueless in exactly the right ways necessary to advance the plot, and so on. 

But these are only slight disappointments, even in the aggregate. The book’s main strength is also its most lasting impression: Stamper has perfectly captured the sheer breathless vertigo of first teen love. Here’s to many more such missions.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.