It can be easy to slip into the belief that you’re all on the same journey when you see the same people everyday at school, have been to their house, come from the same place. Only in the years after school do you begin to excavate the depths you didn’t know about or didn’t understand. Grady Chambers’s debut novel, Great Disasters, gingerly ferries the reader through that drift of adolescence and young adulthood for six young men growing up in Chicago in the early 2000s. Graham Katz, the first person narrator, wishes he could be an omniscient one, but only has the limited benefit of hindsight.
Graham’s interiority is relatably neurotic and makes the reader wonder how differently his friends might tell the same stories. Much of the book orbits Graham’s friend Ryan. In particular, Ryan’s high school romantic relationship with Jana and his choice to enlist to fight in the war in Afghanistan in lieu of going to college. Graham is working his way forward and backward making sense of how he and the friends he was once so close to took disparate life trajectories.
Chambers excels at articulating the intimacy and tension of this friend group, how masculinity shapes their dynamics. The narrator specifically notes in the very first line of the novel, “In those years we lived like sisters,” tapping into a shared cultural idea of closeness that has been rendered far less attainable for men. Graham expresses his tenderness through close observation and admiration for his friends in his storytelling. Outwardly, they tease each other relentlessly, sometimes taking it too far. Despite proximity, or perhaps because of it, there is a lot left unsaid, especially once the boys leave high school.
Underage alcohol consumption is a major pastime. It’s mostly fun and games, but Graham is aware of what it precedes. There is, “… congeniality where we’d later find confusion; easy conversation where we’d later find silence; an ease in ourselves, whereas years later we’d finish a sixth drink, then a seventh, and stare inward in silence and bewilderment.” The intoxication temporarily eases the dread and other negative emotions that dog both Graham and Ryan. It makes you wonder how many teenage boys start drinking to suppress profound anxiety. Alcohol drenches the pages of this novel in the way it does our culture—ubiquitous, assumed, socially necessary.
Graham is constantly in awe of the people around him and the ways that they seem to make things happen in their lives, to know what they want and to pursue it, whereas he characterizes himself as “a person who receives their life rather than seeks it.” His friends end up with spouses, children, careers, and direction. The three most significant women during this period, Jana and two ex-girlfriends, are all defined in his memory by being more decisive than him. He is quick to assign agency to other people while he fixates on his own stuckness.
Discussion of defining historical events like 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are elliptically gestured at in a distinctly youthful pre-internet manner. There was a mainstream narrative to look to and look away from, there are protests and debates, but it is all abstract and removed. Ryan’s enlistment punctures this illusion of distance, but only slightly.
How and when did everyone else seem to manage to make peace where Graham couldn’t? His own introspection and reflection feed into “a suspicion that [his] decisions were beginning to grow out of [his] control, or that they could lead to something irreversible or that [he]’d never be able to forget.” Realizing one wrong move could ruin everything can inspire grace but it can also inspire paralyzing fear. Despite recognizing “our parts in that pageantry we’d learned, a pageantry that most of us continue to act out, in one way or another, our entire lives,” when it comes to relationships and growing up, Graham struggles to locate the courage to break out entirely. Perhaps his focus on Ryan and Jana is because of how they stand out as an early example of people knowing themselves and what they want. The reader watches through his eyes as everyone and everything seems to pass him by. He sifts through memories, mostly chronologically, sometimes half-remembered, hoping distance is a sufficiently clarifying force.
Graham’s passivity made me think of Joan Didion’s “On Self-Respect,” about taking responsibility for one’s own choices. Those lacking in self-respect end up, as Didion puts it, “unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for each screening.” Even when he tries to make a small stand, calling out classism or disagreeing with friends, Graham falters. Preoccupied with disasters he’s on the sidelines of, whether personal or national, afraid to risk inciting one, Great Disasters begins to feel like Graham’s director’s commentary on that home movie.
The novel aches with the ambiguous grief of growing apart from friends: divisions fomented more by distance than conflict, running into an old friend and wondering whether you would even like each other if you met today. High school memories are vivid, shared, and more solid. After that, the cast of characters shifts more rapidly. Memories are lonelier. Recollection becomes a solemn negotiation between past Graham and present Graham. Graham yearns to tell a collective story that never existed, and in doing so avoids authorship of his own.
FICTION
Great Disasters
By Grady Chambers
Tin House Books
Published September 30, 2025
