The Haters

About The Haters

The Haters is Jesse Andrews's 2016 novel, published by Harry N. Abrams. It follows Wes and Corey, two best friends and aspiring musicians who arrive at jazz camp convinced they are better than the other students. They are terrible at jazz, it turns out. But they are very good at not belonging, and when they meet Aria, a girl with a guitar and a theory about music and zero interest in finishing camp, the three of them take off in Aria's car to figure out what happens when you try to be a band for real.

The road trip that follows takes them through the South, through small venues and uncomfortable sleeping situations, through increasingly strange encounters, and through the specific turbulence of three teenagers in close quarters with significant egos and no adult supervision. Andrews has an exceptional ear for teenage banter — the novel's dialogue is fast, layered, and genuinely funny, full of the particular kind of razzing and mutual scrutiny that characterizes close friendships between people who haven't quite acknowledged that they're close.

Wes narrates. He is self-aware enough to know that he's often wrong but committed enough to being difficult that this knowledge doesn't slow him down much. His obsession is figuring out what makes a band a band — whether the music comes first or the dynamic, whether Aria is a genius or just someone who has very strong opinions about everything. The novel doesn't answer this question in any clean way, which is one of its better qualities.

Music, Sound, and the Book's Argument

The Haters is, unusually for a novel, deeply interested in what music actually sounds like and what it does to people. Andrews writes about sound in ways that are evocative rather than technical — he is not explaining music theory but trying to render the experience of a particular kind of noise hitting someone unexpectedly and rearranging something in them.

Aria's theory of music — which Wes is perpetually arguing with and perpetually affected by — is that most music is for the audience and that what she wants to make is music that's for the musicians, that comes from something private and unmanaged. This is the novel's central tension, and it's more interesting than a simple road-trip premise suggests: what does art cost when it's really yours, and what happens to it when other people start to claim it?

The novel is loosely connected to Andrews's debut — Me and Earl and the Dying Girl — not through plot but through the continued investment in young men who are funnier and more feeling than they want to admit, embedded in male friendships that are more important to them than they can say.

Why The Haters Has Been Banned

The Haters has been banned or challenged in 45 school districts across 11 states, including Alaska, Florida, Iowa, Tennessee, and Virginia. The challenges cite the novel's language — it is profane throughout, in the specific way of teenagers who are performing toughness for each other — and its sexual content.

Andrews's novels are consistently written in voices that sound like teenagers actually sound: foul-mouthed, deflective, obsessively self-aware in some registers and completely blind in others. That authenticity is part of what makes the books work, and the language is part of honoring the reality of the experience the books depict. The challenges to The Haters reflect a preference for a tidier version of adolescence than the one Andrews is writing about, which is to say a less honest one.