Innocent Not Guilty

I finished reading Monster, by Walter Dean Myers, this morning before I dragged myself out of bed. It's the story of a 16-year-old kid accused of taking part in the murder of a drugstore owner. Myers tells the story from the point of view of Steve Harmon, the accused boy, but Steve manages to distance himself from his own story by presenting most of it in the form of a movie screenplay. "I think to get used to [prison] I will have to give up what I think is real and take up something else," he writes in the beginning, "I wish I could make sense of it. Maybe I could make my own movie" (4).

It's innovative storytelling; it allows Steve to describe the action in terms of impersonal camera angles and abbreviated courtroom scenes. He reserves his own feelings for handwritten notes in between scenes, but even in these moments he seems unsure of his emotions, his expectations, and even the degree of his involvement in the crime for which he stands accused. Steve is a classic example of an unreliable narrator; his own involvement in the story gets in the way of his ability to tell us the whole truth. Because the prosecution rules that anything Steve might have done to assist in the robbery of the drugstore qualifies him for felony murder, he deliberately fudges some of the facts of that day, and is forced to wrestle with his conscience over innocence, guilt, and all of the ambiguous territory in between. Meanwhile, the stories of other inmates parallel Steve's struggle. One man, a failed jewelry store robber who managed to lock himself into the store he was robbing, claims total innocence:

He waited for two hours while people came and tried to get into the store before he called the police. He said he wasn't guilty because he hadn't taken anything out of the store. He didn't even have a gun, just his hand in his pocket like he had a gun. (142)

If a person intends to commit a crime, or assist in a crime, but they are unable to pull it off as expected, are they still guilty of the crime? I run into this ambiguity all the time as a teacher. Say a student looks at a text message during a major test. The message may have nothing to do with the test he or she is taking- in fact, I've read the kind of texts that get sent, and it's not likely that the message has anything important to say at all- but I can't be sure of that. Using a cell phone in any class is a violation of a campus-wide rule, but in the context of a test, whether intentional or not, the violation becomes not only improper use of an electronic device but cheating on top of it, and punishable by a grade of zero.

The student will likely protest, and say that I can't prove that they were cheating- they may have been just checking the time on their phone- but like almost everything in this world, the act of cheating cannot be clearly defined in terms of "black and white," you did or you didn't; there may be varying degrees of the crime, but there is a single consequence (Unfair? Clearly, but also rather effective). Likewise, in Steve's case, while he may not have wittingly involved himself in the murder of the shopkeeper, it seems likely to all of the adults around him that he was, to some degree, involved in the robbery that ultimately ended a man's life. And if the prosecution can convince the jury of that, Steve stands to spend much of the rest of his life behind bars.

Monster ends on an ambiguous note- it isn't all wrapped up in a pretty bow, and even Steve seems unsure of who he is, of his innocence or guilt (there's a reason why defendants are pronounced either "guilty" or "not guilty"- who of us is really innocent?). "I want to know who I am," he says, "I want to look at myself a thousand times to look for one true image" (281). For those of you looking for a quick read among the summer reading options, Monster certainly qualifies- but be prepared for the questions it leaves you with to haunt you long after you've closed the book.

Heroes with Static Faces

I was hoping to get back on track with blogging last week after being incommunicado for most of the beginning of July, but then my computer stopped working on Wednesday. Its hard drive crashed, and my laptop was in the shop for the rest of the week. I'm trying to distract myself from thinking about all the files I lost, so I'll continue today with an entry about Orson Scott Card''s Ender's Game, as promised.

I wrote a lot in my last entry about how the most successful science fiction authors, in my opinion, don't forget that their characters are human, and therefore as vastly complex as the shiny chrome machines and futuristic societies that receive the focus of traditional sci-fi. To really capture my attention, a novel-whether sci-fi or fantasy or western or "realistic"- must make me care about its characters. Ender's Game, sadly, falls short of that mark for me, but I'm not sure it was for lack of trying.

The novel is told from a slightly modified third person limited point of view; that is, the narrator is outside of the story, but can tell the thoughts of one character (Ender Wiggin, in this case), for the most part. Occasionally, the narration floats into the inner thoughts of other characters, or reports on conversations and events in which the main character does not take part. I'm not sure why Card chose to float around like this; the things that happen outside of Ender's experience don't seem particularly vital to the telling of his story; it may have been more effective to settle into a traditional third person limited point of view, or even the first person, with Ender telling his own story. As it's written, a lot of potential suspense in the story is left out because we know what's being done to Ender long before he figures it out.

When Ender does finally reach certain conclusions, it's anticlimactic and not surprising in the least, not only because we've seen it coming from every other angle, but because Ender's character has hardly changed at all over the course of the novel. The Ender who says the following words to his sister on page 238 is little different (though perhaps slightly more self-aware) from the Ender who defeats an elementary school bully 231 pages earlier:

I've been thinking about myself...Trying to understand why I hate myself so badly...It took me a long time to realize that I did. Do. And it came down to this: in the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him...And then, in that very moment when I love them...I destroy them.

Ender's basic story, the understand-defeat-love-destroy cycle he refers to, repeats itself at least four times over the course of the plot, and it's an engaging dilemma- not unlike Gene's love/hate/ultimately-destructive relationship with Finny in A Separate Peace- but after the second time it gets rather predictable. It's boring when the protagonist always wins; and it's irritating when he beats himself up for how he wins, but never thinks to change the way he deals with a challenge.

That said, the final chapter, "Speaker for the Dead," with its tonal shift, takes a step toward redeeming the novel for me (though whether I would have made it to the final chapter if I didn't feel like I had to is up for debate). It remains to be see whether it piqued my curiosity enough to seek out the book's sequels.

Despite some shortcomings, I think Ender's Game deserves its place in the speculative fiction canon, if not for its literary merits then for its legions of (often superior) imitators. With its focus on a gifted child hero destined to save the universe, it's hard to read the book's war game scenes without recalling the quidditch matches of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, or even the pod race of Star Wars Episode I (to be fair, all of the above owe a great debt to Joseph Campbell's monomyth, as defined in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces).

Additionally, as so-called "hard science fiction," Ender's Game does its job: Card's vision of a future in which population restriction laws are strictly enforced (Ender shouldn't technically exist, as he is a third child in a society where two is the limit) and the human race is reeling from two wars with an alien enemy gives readers a speculative lens with which to view the present in a new light. Over the course of the novel, Card addresses ethical dilemmas as diverse as overpopulation, competitive education, and preemptive war; and while to my mind he rarely arrives at satisfactory conclusions (Ender's tactical victories could serve as a defense treatise for any number of offensive wars, and according to Wikipedia the novel has been used as a textbook at the Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia), I appreciate his willingness to examine them.

Next up: Monster, by Walter Dean Myers.

The Sounds of Science

One of the fun things about this project, for me, is giving myself the opportunity to go back and pick up novels I missed the first time I was in high school. With most of the books I've read so far this summer, this hasn't been an issue; King Dork, Speak, and The Lovely Bones all came out after I'd graduated (1996, for those of you who are counting); but Ender's Game, published as a short story in 1977 and expanded as a novel in 1985, was one that, for years, had just skirted the edge of my interest.

In high school I shied away from the science fiction and fantasy genres because, lets face it, I didn't need to be seen as a bigger dork than I already was. I'd grown up reading the Chronicles of Narnia and had flirted with the sort of "sword and sorcery" brand of fantasy (beginning with my dad's dog-eared copies of the Lord of the Rings trilogy) in late elementary and early middle school, but had put those aside in favor of so-called "realistic fiction" by the time I was a freshman, and sci-fi and fantasy fans were all grouped together in one Dungeons-and-Dragons-playing, comic-book-buying untouchable lunch table. This was before the general public caught onto the literary merits of comic books, when collections like Frank Miller's Dark Knight and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' The Watchmen were just beginning to be called "graphic novels."

In short, in high school society and the world at large, science fiction was considered a few rungs below serious literature, and so I had little need for it. Ironically, by far my favorite author in high school and well after was one who dabbled in sci-fi conventions in almost everything he wrote: the recently departed Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Somehow, despite his penchant for the fantastic and futuristic, Vonnegut was never labeled with the particularly sticky sci-fi tag. You will not find his books alongside the Saturn's rings and space station chrome of Isaac Asimov's or Robert A. Heinlein's work. I think a part of that had to do with the time when he was writing, when most "genre fiction" put a lot of its emphasis on form: westerns were about shootouts, fantasy was about magic, and sci-fi was about whirring and buzzing and blinking machinery, at the expense of fully realized characters with internal struggles and dynamic character arcs. Vonnegut's characters, ordinary human beings in extraordinary circumstances, were the focus.

Much of today's speculative fiction (a supergenre that includes both sci-fi and fantasy) seems to have taken a cue from Vonnegut in this department. And former literature snobs like me have embraced the shift. Witness my media consumption of late: high on my Netflix cue is the second season of Battlestar Galactica, a show that develops its characters better than almost anything on television; I spent Monday afternoon at a matinee of the Fresh Prince's refreshing and challenging Hancock, then stopped by a corporate bookstore to leaf through the first volume of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 (for my money, BtVS remains one of the top five best-written shows ever to appear on American television); and I finally got around to reading Orson Scott Card's Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel, Ender's Game.

But I've already gone on far too long today. I'll let you know how I think Ender's Game measures on the "characterometer" tomorrow. But tell me: am I right about this? In the battle between plot and character, which should take priority? Are so-called "novels of ideas" just as worthy of praise as character-driven novels? Also, I'm still fairly unschooled in the world of modern speculative fiction (though I do have a soft spot for Ursula K. Le Guin); does anyone have a good fantasy, sci-fi or graphic novel to recommend?

Ocean Eyes

I’m back from a lovely two week road trip through the American Southwest. Actually, I’ve been back for a few days, but it’s taken some effort to get back on board with writing. Not that I’ve slowed in my summer reading adventures; I finished A Separate Peace while staying at my brother-in-law’s house in El Paso, and I’m about three quarters of the way through Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. We also listened to about twenty hours of Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides, on audio as we drove cross country- plus I’m midway through the second season of HBO’s The Wire, and I'm listening to the new Mates of State album over and over. All of this input has made it difficult for me to go back and say what I liked about The Lovely Bones.

Here: I liked all of it. Loved it. I’m engaged to it, and we’ve set the wedding for sometime in the Fall.

Most of all, I was struck by the time that Sebold took to fully develop almost all of her characters- male and female. In an interesting twist of convention, the dead narrator of The Lovely Bones is able, from her perch in a personalized Heaven, to see into the hearts and minds of everyone she left behind on Earth, making the point of view a sort of mix between first person and third person omniscient: first person omniscient. Usually, with first person narration, we get a complete picture of the narrator- maybe, if we’re lucky, another larger-than-life character (I think of Finny in A Separate Peace, or Dean Moriarty in On The Road). But Susie, the narrator of Bones, invites us not only into her own world, but that of her surviving family, her friends, and the man responsible for her death. As the novel progresses, the story become less about her murder and more about how those around her go on with their lives.

Most powerful for me are the descriptions of Susie’s mother, Abigail, a woman trapped- even before Susie’s death- in a life she never meant for herself. Early in the novel, Susie recalls a photograph she took of her mother once when she wasn’t looking:

When the roll came back from the Kodak plant in a special heavy envelope, I could see the difference immediately. There was only one picture in which my mother was Abigail. It was that first one, the one taken of her unawares, the one captured before the click startled her into the mother of the birthday girl, owner of the happy dog, wife to the loving man, and mother again to another girl and a cherished boy. Homemaker. Gardener. Sunny neighbor. My mother’s eyes were oceans, and inside them there was loss. I thought I had my whole life to understand them, but that was the only day I had. Once upon earth I saw her as Abigail, and then I let it slip effortlessly back- my fascination held in check by wanting her to be that mother and envelop me as that mother (43).

I've had revelations like this about my own mother- it comes up more now that I'm an adult; I see a longing in her eyes when she talks about her life before the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood, and I wonder if she's thinking of that loss, of the infinite other ways her life could have turned out. I don't know what the specific dream may have been that she turned her back on in order to build a family, and like Susie, my need for her to be my mother overshadows any real desire to find out. In Abigail's case, the dream is of furthering her education, of teaching literature at the the college level- all of which she abandons with the unexpected arrival of a third child:

If I had paid attention, I would have noticed signs. Now I see the shifting, how the stack of books on my parents’ bedside table changed from catalogs for local colleges, encyclopedias of mythology, novels by James, Eliot, and Dickens, to the works of Dr. Spock. Then came gardening books and cookbooks until for her birthday two months before I died, I thought the perfect gift was Better Homes and Gardens Guide to Entertaining. When she realized she was pregnant the third time, she sealed the more mysterious mother off. (151)

Good characterization, to me, makes you think of someone you know: the punk rock boys in King Dork were familiar and real; I could see half a dozen of my freshman girls in Melinda's lack of expression in Speak. Great characterization makes you think about yourself. Reading the part of Abigail, I found myself examining the domestic trap she'd wandered into and wondering if I helped construct such traps in my own life. In my role as a son, as a brother, as a husband, as a teacher, how do I facilitate the dreams of the people close to me? Am I an opener or a closer of doors? Even if my mom's only dream ever was to be a mom, do I at least validate that? Or do I take it for granted? This final passage, in particular, made me more conscious of how I pitch in around the house:

She had become aware of what she did. She cut carrots and celery into edible lengths. She washed out thermoses and lunchboxes, and when Lindsey decided she was too old for a lunchbox, my mother caught herself actually happy when she found wax-lined bags that would keep her daughter’s lunch from seeping through and staining her clothes. Which she washed. Which she folded. Which she ironed when necessary and which she straightened on hangers. Which she picked up from the floor or retrieved from the car or untangled from the wet towel left on the bed that she made every morning, tucking the corners in, and fluffing the pillows, and propping up stuffed animals, and opening the blinds to let the light in. (158)

It's so easy, even in what I consider a fairly progressive marriage, to fall into the gender-specific patterns of household labor that have dominated for centuries: he mows the lawn and comes in to watch baseball, she cooks dinner and serves it to him on the couch, picks up his dishes, rinses them, puts them in the dishwasher, cleans the kitchen and unloads the dishwasher...

It's rare that I feel this convicted while reading a novel- it also happened a few times while I was reading Speak: how many times during the 2007-2008 school year did I simply pass by students who didn't speak up during class? How much did I miss out on by not taking time to ask a few simple questions? Great literature (and film, and television, and music) strives not only to entertain us, but to promt us to somehow improve ourselves. Keep reading.