Easy Conversation

Friday I wrote about what I perceived as a lack of "round" female characters in young adult fiction, with the assumption that I'd counter that post with examples from my recent reading of female-oriented novels, including Speak and The Lovely Bones. But having completed Bones over the weekend, and with its poetic language still echoing around in my head, it looks like Speak will take a back seat in a follow-up entry.

But first I should acknowledge the rather obvious common thread in both Anderson's and Sebold's novels (and this isn't, I think, a spoiler for anyone who has heard anything about either book): they both are told from the point of view of a protagonist who has been raped. Sebold, in a 2002 interview with powells.com stated that one of her goals in writing both The Lovely Bones and Lucky, a memoir of her own experience with rape, was for the word rape "to be used easily in conversation." Often the issue seems to be swept under the rug, or not deemed appropriate for polite conversation. But for the two young women who give their voices to these novels, it is both a defining moment in their lives and their initiation into sexuality. Themes in both Speak and The Lovely Bones address the issues of how to acknowledge what happened and how to "pick up the pieces," particularly when it comes to sexuality and trusting the men that surround them. When Susie, the murdered narrator of The Lovely Bones, looks down on her sister's first sexual experience, she says, "In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows" (125).

Susie and Melinda (the narrator of Speak), it should be said, have vastly different stories- surely no two stories of sexual violence are identical. They're also written for slightly different audiences: Speak is specifically written for young adults (though not only for young women!), and The Lovely Bones, though told by a fourteen-year-old narrator, is decidedly not a young adult novel; if any of you are put off by graphic imagery, you may want to stick to something a little lighter. But read together, they begin to form a picture of not only the experience of sexual violation, but of its lasting effects.

The Virgin and the Barbie Doll

I may have said this before, but one thing I regret about my first go-around with young adult literature is that, with rare exceptions (To Kill a Mockingbird being the first that springs to mind), the books I read were from a decidedly male point of view. Even Mockingbird, with its ambiguously-named author (Harper Lee) and its tomboy protagonist, seemed hesitant to express a feminine perspective. The male authors I read generally seemed unconcerned with developing three-dimensional characters that were young women (I'm not counting mothers, aunts, or other adults). Their portrayal of teenage females tended to fall into one of three categories: objects of affection and/or obsession, underdeveloped sidekicks, or ghosts.

I imagine that the "object of affection" category was a pretty safe bet from a commercial standpoint; for a good percentage of boys- particularly the kind that tended to have their noses in books- this is exactly what girls were: fantasy. Unapproachable. Objects. Sometimes, as in William Wharton's Birdy, the narrator doesn't even bother to give the girls names- just "the cheerleader" or "so-and-so's girlfriend." Frank Portman gives his girls names in King Dork, but they still more or less function as sex objects, and the narrator's "groups of three" theory about female friendships is rather cartoonish. On one hand, I can't blame a male author- particularly when his narrator is supposed to be a teenage boy- for sticking to what he knows- but on the other, it seems to me that one goal of an author ought to be to expose the reader to something he or she doesn't know or hasn't thought about. Birdy and King Dork succeed as novels for other reasons, but certainly not for their enlightening portrayal of women.

One of many Catcher in the Rye elements King Dork borrows- and his narrator all but confesses to the parallel- is the character of Holden Caulfield's precocious little sister, Phoebe- though he insists that "she's nothing like [his] sister, Amanda" (94). Nevertheless, Amanda seems to pop in to Tom's story in moments where he needs wisdom or encouragement, or simply a slap on the back of the head to remind him of who he is. Otherwise, she's absent, presumably waiting offstage for her cue to enter again. We don't get a whole lot of insight into what makes Amanda Amanda, but then again, this is Tom's story. She's sort of a second-tier sidekick, with just enough character- a comment here, a gesture there- to make her lovable. When I first read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, I feared that Hermione would be stuck in a similar role for the whole series, but was pleasantly surprised to find her character arc as dynamic as Harry's or Ron's over the course of seven books. I think Ginny Weasely eventually filled that part. But here's the thing: I find myself loving those sort of idealized little sister characters- Phoebe and Amanda and Ginny, as unrealistic as they may be, and I think that's the point; just as boys want to read about inaccessible dreamgirl types, they also long for an unthreatening, pure, and approachable symbol of femininity. It's like a literary version of what Freudian psychoanalysts call the Madonna/whore complex (I tried to find a good link for you on this, but the best my searches came up with was this article about Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers, which is perhaps telling, but not entirely pertinent).

The most extreme case of an author avoiding three dimensional depictions of young women occurs when the author simply constructs a world devoid of females altogether. William Golding's Lord of the Flies comes to mind as the most striking version of this, with its plot centered around a group of British schoolboys whose plane crashes on a desert island during World War II. Ta-da! No girls. Much less fantastical is a book like A Separate Peace, which takes place at an all-boys' school and so has little use for female characters, other than occasional mothers or faculty wives. I'm okay with this- particularly because, with sex objects and angelic little sister types out of the way, it opens up the possibility of a more emotionally nuanced portrayal of boys. When Phineas admits for the first time to Gene that he is his "best pal," Gene struggles for an appropriately masculine response:

It was a courageous thing to say. Exposing a sincere emotion nakedly like that at the Devon school was the next thing to suicide. I should have told him then that he was my best friend also and rounded out what he had said. I started to; I nearly did. But something held me back.

It could be argued that, by eliminating girls from the equation, authors like Golding and John Knowles are playing it safe, not risking the inadvertent creation of two dimensional female characters. But it seems that sometimes, as in A Separate Peace, the absence of half-formed girls allows for more fully-formed boys.

I'll try to talk more about the female characters I've discovered in Speak and The Lovely Bones, both written by female authors, when I'm back here on Monday. But tell me: have I missed some well developed young ladies in books written by men? Is my characterization of the girls in the books I've discussed unfair? Give me some feedback.

From a Distance

Last night I made a listmania! version of the summer reading list; it is the inaugural link in the "places to go" section at the bottom of the page. I also stayed up far too late reading The Lovely Bones. Alice Sebold pulls off an interesting trick: she begins the book with what most people would read as the climax: "I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973" (5). My first thought was Great. Is she now going to subject me to 323 pages of resolution? But in spite of myself, I couldn't help but continue reading. I'm through chapter seven and I'm struck by the realization that I should have known all along, having just wrapped up the ninth grade study of Romeo and Juliet: what compels me to read The Lovely Bones is nothing more than dramatic irony- I know who killed the narrator, Susie Salmon, and where and how he did it; the suspense comes in watching as the truth is slowly revealed to the living characters.

I'm concurrently re-reading John Knowles' 1959 classic A Separate Peace, in which the adult narrator, Gene, tells of one dramatic summer in his career as a student at Devon Preparatory School (modeled after Philps Exeter Academy, in New Hampshire).

Looking back now across fifteen years, I could see with great clarity the fear I had lived in, which must mean that in the interval I had succeeded in a very important undertaking: I had made my escape from it. (2)

It wasn't my intention, but this current pair of novels contrasts well with King Dork and Speak in the category of what I'll call "narrative proximity." While both Tom and Melinda narrate their stories relatively soon after they've occurred, Gene (of A Separate Peace) and Susie (of The Lovely Bones) speak from a distance- Gene from adulthood and Susie from beyond the grave (which is not the same thing, thank you). How does this affect the validity of what they have to say? Should we put more stock in an account told years after the fact, with time allowed for reflection, or should we favor in-the-moment renditions from narrators still under the immediate influence of the events they're detailing?

The Most Retarded Character Arc Anyone Ever Heard of

So I've finished both King Dork and Speak. I'm sure this isn't the last I'll say about them, but here are some thoughts as I move on to reading The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold and re-reading A Separate Peace by John Knowles:

I found that Anderson's choice of having her narrator speak in the present tense was quite effective, and made the climax scene all the more suspenseful- we're not reading it from a "safe place," knowing the narrator will survive because she's the one telling the story. One of the most haunting lines, for me, was "Maybe I'll be an artist if I grow up" (78). That if killed me, and compelled me to keep reading.

Portman, on the other hand, has Tom narrate King Dork in the past tense, from a more or less conventional viewpoint. As we follow him through the first semester of his sophomore year at Hillmont High, we receive constant reminders, like this one, that he is safe and sound in the present:

I'm regretting how sloppy I've been with my notebooks, now that I'm trying to go back and remember exactly when everything happened. I mean, I write down all of our band names, which ends up being a kind of record of events, but I hardly ever put any dates in there, and even though it was only a few months ago, the timeline seems a little fuzzy.

The past tense, first person narrative is a tried and true device in young adult ficiton- off the top of my head I come up with The Outsiders, To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye (again), and A Separate Peace- but I like the way Portman plays with this and other conventions. Along with giving periodic shout-outs to classic coming of age novels (including Catcher and A Separate Peace), the narrator claims to have "the most retarded character arc anyone ever heard of" (302), and essentially refuses to offer much of a resolution at all.

This last part, I have to admit, frustrates me. Maybe it's just because Liana bought me the New Annotated Sherlock Holmes for my birthday, but it's difficult for me to walk away from a novel that, since the first page, has been presented as a mystery with none of my questions satisfactorily answered. On the other hand, I get what Portman's trying to say about how sometimes things just happen, and they can't be linked together and explained in a 100 page denouement at the end of a Harry Potter novel.

Some might say the structure of Speak is too neat- how it begins and ends with the school year, how the rising action builds to its necessary climax at just the right moment, how the tree symbolism (more on this later) is woven delicately through the story and ties it all up in the end- but it's good storytelling, in my book. But so is King Dork, despite its hesitance to conform to the conventions of "good storytelling."

The Anti-Cheerleader Clan

I started reading Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson, when I was a little over halfway through King Dork. It takes some added concentration, but I think reading a couple books (or more) at once enhances the effect of all of the material- it leads you to insights that you'd surely miss if you were just following along the path provided by one author. It's a little like clicking on hyperlinks on the internet, or like the state of consciousness right before sleeping, when your mind hops from one idea to the next to the next with such speed that you have to backtrack in order to remember what you were first thinking about.

I've occasionally lost track of what's happening in each book- is "Hairwoman" Tom's English teacher or Melanie's? Who's in the Bay Area and who's in upstate New York? And I confuse their sarcastic-loner-Holden-Caulfield-influenced voices here and there. Witness, from page 30 of Speak:

When the pep rally ends, I am accidentally knocked down three rows of bleachers. If I ever form my own clan, we'll be the Anti-Cheerleaders. We will not sit in the bleachers. We will wander underneath them and commit mild acts of mayhem.

Their feelings about the vast majority of their peers- "normal people," as Tom would call them- are nearly identical. The dead giveaway in this passage, of course, is that Tom would never bother attending a pep rally, and would opt instead for stealing audio equipment from the band room. When I allow myself to see that these details don't matter so much, that the two novels can serve as sort of funhouse mirror images of each other, when I find myself playing literary matchmaker and setting up Tom and Melinda on an exploratory burgers-and-milkshake date, I am able to relax and enjoy the parallels- what we English teachers call Universal Themes.

As in a lot of bildungsroman, or coming of age novels, the major themes of Speak and King Dork say something about conformity, and both reach their climax at moments when their protagonists decide strongly against conforming (I'm being purposely vague here, if you hadn't noticed, because I'm trying not to reveal specific plot points). Is this decision surprising for either of the protagonists, or have we seen signs leading up to it all along? What are the consequences of their nonconformity?

Another parallel, and one they share with a number of novels on the list: both books take as their templates the so-called "school story" of Victorian England: they take place over the course of the school year, and most of the action occurs at the school itself. Both King Dork and Speak begin on the first day of school; King Dork occurs over a semester, ending in December, while Speak ends on the last day of school. The Harry Potter series is another example of a school story, with each of the seven novels representing a school year.

So why is this model so appealing to writers of young adult fiction? Why not have a story take place in the middle school year, or the middle of the summer? I have my own ideas about what the answers might be to those questions, but I'd like to hear what you have to say. Comment or something.

What is Lit Crush?

First things first: the epigraph at the top of this page- the one about wishing an author was a "terrific friend of yours"- is the sentiment of one Holden Caulfield, the teenage narrator of The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger. I was reminded of that particular quotation while reading a blog entry by one of my favorite online writers, Noel Murray of the A.V. Club. Murray confesses that, upon first reading Catcher, he, like thousands of disaffected adolescents before and after him (including me), considered Salinger to be this potential terrific friend, until he learned of the author's "prickly reclusiveness" (Salinger has lived the life of a hermit in New Hampshire since the 1951 publication of Catcher, publishing his last short story in 1965).

In day-to-day life, there's a word for this sense of intimate identification with a person who knows little or nothing of your existence: it's called a crush. I've taken to calling that yearning for a terrific author friend (or, alternately, a terrific fictional character friend) a literary crush or- here it is- a lit crush. A (by no means exhaustive) list of my past and present lit crushes: J.D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut, Flannery O'Connor, Joseph Heller, Alan Moore, Ursula Le Guin, Gabriel García Marquez, John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, David Sedaris, J.K. Rowling, William Faulkner, Graham Greene, Miguel de Unamuno, Shushaku Endo, Annie Dillard, Philip Pullman, and Italo Calvino.

During freshman final exams last week, I looked up from my last minute grading to see Carman engrossed in her copy of The Catcher in the Rye. I smiled, and when I got her attention I think I gave her a thumbs up sign or something. I was so proud. Then, having been reminded of the sophomore accelerated reading list, I pulled Frank Portman's King Dork from the top of the stack of reading list books that I'd yet to read. Page twelve made me sink a little in my swivel chair; the narrator, Tom Henderson, called me out- it may as well have been by name.

I should mention that The Catcher in the Rye is this book from the fifties. It is every teacher's favorite book. the main guy is a kind of misfit kid superhero named Holden Caulfield. For teachers, he is the ultimate guy, a real dreamboat. They love him to pieces. They all want to have sex with him, and with the book's author, too, and they'd probably even try to do it with the book itself if they could figure out a way to go about it. It changed their lives when they were young. As kids, they carried it with them everywhere they went. They solemnly resolved that, when they grew up, they would dedicate their lives to spreading The Word.

It's kind of like a cult.

They live for making you read it. When you do read it you can feel them all standing behind you in a semicircle wearing black robes with hoods, holding candles. They're chanting "Holden, Holden, Holden..." And they're looking over your shoulder with these expectant smiles, wishing they were the ones discovering the earth-shattering joys of The Catcher in the Rye for the very first time.

I hung my head in shame, and showed the passage to Carman. But it should be pointed out that Tom's aversion to Catcher is more than a little ironic- not least because his narrative voice (albeit with updated swear words and more explicit sex and drug references) is nearly identical to that of Holden Caulfield. He wears his influences like a merit badge.

I like King Dork so far. I've added Portman to my lit crush list. I set up imaginary scenarios where I'm sitting on the BART on my way to the airport (Portman lives in the Bay Area) and an oddly familiar stranger notices that I'm carrying around a battered, broken-spined copy of King Dork. He introduces himself and asks how I like it. And I tell him that I'm enjoying it so far, especially all the, you know, irony and allusions to canonical coming of age literature- and I mention that I'm a sophomore accelerated English teacher. We laugh about his not-so-sympathetic portrayal of teachers in the book. I tell him that, just like Tom, I count Graham Greene's Brighton Rock among my favorite novels. He admits that that part of the character was autobiographical. We talk about getting matching Brighton Rock tattoos.

I tell him about how I was in a band in high school that was heavily influenced by his band, The Mr. T. Experience, and how I owned all of their records (This is only a white lie: my best friends Chris and Matthew were in a band called Nickel Foods that sounded an awful lot like the pop-punk of MTX; I was in a one-man-band that changed names every week and opened for them at house shows, and sounded more like Woody Guthrie. Chris and Matthew owned all of the MTX albums). He says he'd love to hear my stuff, maybe collaborate on some tunes one day. I say that'd be cool.

These days, I suppose one could perpetuate the fantasy of a literary crush (or musical crush, or cinematic crush) via the magic of myspace ("friend me, famous person!!!"), but I don't bother with that racket. Maybe one day I'll go into a long-winded explanation of the evils of myspace. But for now, this is where I'll talk about what I'm reading over the summer, and hopefully get some feedback from a few of you as you're delving into the list as well. Feel free to comment- particularly if you've got a literary crush of your own.

I've had a request to post the list, so here it is- along with each book's current status within my own attempt at summer reading.

Alvarez, Julia. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. 1992. I've only read pieces of this one- I imagine I'll get to it later this summer.

Anaya, Rudolfo. Bless Me, Ultima. 1972. Again, not yet. But I'll be in New Mexico, where this one takes place, later this month, so it might be a good thematic read.

Anderson, Laurie Halse. Speak. 1999. I just bought this one, and I've begun reading it while I'm reading King Dork.

Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. 1969. I'm borrowing my wife's copy for this one. I've only read Maya Angelou's poetry.

Anonymous. Go Ask Alice. 1971. I bought this a long time ago at a used book sale and never got around to reading it. I think it might match up well with Speak, from what I've heard.

Card, Orson Scott. Ender's Game. 1985. This is a re-read. I first discovered it when I was a scifi-obsessed middle schooler.

Chbosky, Steven. The Perks of Being a Wallflower. 1999. I'm buying this one today, if I can find it at the used book store.

Cormier, Robert. The Chocolate War. 1974. This one's a classic I missed out on because I was snobby about the books I chose to read, and refused to pick up anything that was actually aimed at "young adults." I'll look for it today.

Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. 2003. I read this a couple of years ago, when everyone was telling me I had to, since I was working with developmentally disabled adults. If I remember correctly, it was a pretty quick read, so I'll pick it up when I'm feeling too exhausted for something longer.

Kidd, Sue Monk. The Secret Life of Bees. 2002. Mrs. Quinn says this one is phenomenal. I haven't gotten to it yet.

Kincaid, Jamaica. Annie John. 1985. I "read" this one in college- which means that I may have missed much of the joy of it because I was too busy trying to craft the perfect English essay out of it.

Knowles, John. A Separate Peace. 1959. Sophomore year, 1993-1994, required reading. I still have trouble spelling separate.

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. 1970. I've only read Morrison's short stories, but they knock me out.

Myers, Walter Dean. Monster. 1999. Again, haven't read it, but will. Soon.

Peet, Mal. The Keeper. 2003. I started this one, then lent it to a student who never brought it back. Commander Adama on Battlestar Galactica says to never loan a book; it's always a gift. I'll find another copy before summer's over.

Portman, Frank. King Dork. 2006. See blog entry above. I'm almost finished.

Potok, Chaim. The Chosen. 1967. I've read this twice, in high school and college. Classic.

Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. 1951. Every teacher's favorite book. I've lost count of the number of times I've re-read it.

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. 2003. I've read this one once, and seen the movie (which is quite faithful). I'll probably read it again and rent the film for fun.

Sebold, Alice. The Lovely Bones. 2002. Looking forward to this one- I've heard only good things.

Wharton, William. Birdy. 1978. My dad got really angry at me for reading this in high school. It holds a special place in my heart just for that.

Happy reading, and come back soon.