My very final thoughts on MY BIG NOSE AND OTHER NATURAL DISASTERS. Something else Sydney Salter does that’s unusual — besides her brief, if beloved (by me), embrace of the scatalogical for girls — is to have main character Jory be interested, or potentially interested, in many different guys at once.
Not like a love triangle, where she’s interested in two guys and has to choose (or maybe was interested only in one at first but realizes he’s The Wrong One). More like… endless possibilities. Like every guy she meets is being scoped out as a potential boyfriend/crush object, and they might stay in that category for a while.
It struck me because it both felt very true to life, and also very rare in teen fiction. Usually all a character’s romantic hopes and dreams will be invested in one or, at most, two people at a time — and if two, they’ll feel it as a conflict. Jory, on the other hand, does have the one guy who she’s had a huge crush on forever, and the guy she ultimately ends up with, but there’s also this other guy, who seems kind of promising, but then it doesn’t really work out…
Why is this so rare? Is it because romantic conventions dictate that protagonists’ affections not be too promiscuous, or because fiction conventions dictate that the ultimate end of these books — the hero getting what she wants (and maybe realizing along the way it’s different from what she thought she did) — is cleaner if the major roles are filled by only one character?
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June 1, 2009 at 4:36 pm
I’m not sure how much of it is convention, how much is avoiding having the character seem promiscuous, and how much is just keeping the story simple. Real life is so much messier than a lot of fiction. And unless the author is trying to make a point about how that contant scoping-out is part of the character’s personality, or it’s key to the story, then it might be seen as a waste of space to introduce lots of characters that never really go anywhere. I’m going to have to start paying attention to this now…
June 2, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Yeah, “keeping the story simple” is, ironically, a much simpler way of what I meant by fiction convention — it’s like highlighting the character’s emotional journey by stripping away all the extraneous elements of it.
Which makes me want to think more about what those other guys are doing in Salter’s book, what they’re contributing to Jory’s journey. What would the book have looked like without them? Would it have lost much?
I’m going to be paying attention to this in books now too…
June 2, 2009 at 6:20 pm
I’m going to agree with Jess, and also add that authors are lazy–we don’t want to have to create a billion unique, true-to-life individuals for one story when, say, three will do. (I’m half joking here, it’s more what Jess said!)