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."