The Joke That Hid the Hurt: On Calvin McShane, Humor, and the Armor That Works Too Well

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This post discusses key emotional themes and character developments in The Wake of Expectations, including material from later sections of the book. While it avoids direct plot spoilers, it may affect how you experience the story if you haven't read it yet.

Some readers experience The Wake of Expectations as a light, funny coming-of-age story—something like a literary echo of the teen comedies of the 1980s. And I’m glad when they do. It’s meant to be funny. It’s meant to capture that spirit of youth.

But it’s also meant to capture the pain that often hides beneath that spirit.

Across reviews and beta feedback, two responses come up often: (1) This is laugh-out-loud funny. (2) This is about a kid in pain.

I humbly submit: they’re both right.

Because that’s the thing about Calvin McShane.

He doesn’t hide his pain in the way you might expect. He tells you, at times, quite plainly that he’s hurting. But then he shrugs it off. He cracks a joke. He blames himself, even when it’s clear he doesn’t fully believe it. He spirals into reflection, only to pivot into something philosophical or ironic. You know he’s struggling—but he makes it very easy to keep your distance.

And when a reader doesn’t see the pain right away—that’s not a failure of the book. It’s not a failure of the reader, either.

That’s the armor working.

And here’s the deeper truth: the armor isn’t just for the reader. It’s for Calvin, too.

He’s not trying to fool you into thinking he’s okay. He’s trying to fool himself—because he believes that pretending might actually make it true.

And ironically, the more closely a reader identifies with Calvin—the more simpatico they are—the more likely they are to buy into his self-deception.

Calvin McShane is a prototypical ’90s adolescent male. Raised in the era of sitcom sarcasm and emotional detachment, he was taught to feel deeply but express selectively. Earnestness was embarrassing. Vulnerability made you a target. You could be thoughtful—but not too serious. Self-aware—but never self-pitying.

So when Calvin tells his story, he does it the only way he knows how: with misdirection. With humor. With enough charm to keep things moving before anything lingers too long.

But the feelings are there. And the reader who stays with him—who listens past the jokes—starts to pick up on just how much Calvin is carrying:

• The failed connections

• The gnawing insecurity

• The belief that love, if offered at all, must be earned by becoming someone else

There are moments when he gets close to admitting the full weight of it. But then he pulls back. He intellectualizes it. He blames his timing. Or his youth. Or his selfishness. Or his decency.

And late in the book—almost offhandedly—he admits he once contemplated doing something horrific.

It’s not performative. It’s not sensational. He says it almost like he’s confessing a bad dream.

But it’s there.

Not because he’s secretly malevolent. But because he’s someone so lost in trying to reconcile who he is with who he thinks he was supposed to be, that the thought—just for a moment—felt like control.

That’s Wake. That’s the slow, spiraling undercurrent beneath the comedy.

Part of the reason The Wake of Expectations can feel, on the surface, like not much is happening is because Calvin isn’t narrating events in the traditional sense. He’s not charting dramatic plot points or overt turning points.

He’s not so much explaining what happened as he is exploring how it felt—and why it mattered.

Like Seinfeld—the show about nothing that was really about everything.

That shift—from action to emotion, from story to meaning—is easy to miss if you’re expecting a conventional narrative arc. But once you realize the stakes are internal, the whole book reshapes itself.

There’s a metaphor I’ve used before that feels relevant here:

Reading The Wake of Expectations just for the humor is like making love to a pretty girl you just met without ever getting to know her. Sure, it’s fun. You don’t need to know her to enjoy her that way. The contours of her body. The softness of her skin. The sweetness of her lips…

But if she’s got a brain in her head and a heart in her chest, there’s probably a lot more waiting to be discovered—if you stay. If you ask. If you care enough to look past the surface.

Calvin, like the book itself, might come off as just clever and entertaining at first. He is—and it is—hopefully, those things. But if you give him time—if you stay with him long enough to hear the pauses between the jokes—you’ll realize what he’s really saying:

That he never felt like he was enough. That he’s trying to forgive himself for something he can’t name. That he’s desperate to be known—but terrified of what will happen if he is.

So if you come away thinking Wake is light or comic in tone, you’re not wrong. Calvin’s voice is funny. The jokes are part of the experience.

But for some readers, the moment will come when the jokes stop being just funny—and start to feel like a kind of grief. A kind of apology.

And maybe the real tragedy of The Wake of Expectations isn’t what happens to Calvin.

It’s that he spends so much time trying to make it seem like nothing happened at all.

Javier

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