Sometimes I really love the internet.

For reasons like this.

h/t Feminist Philosophers, a usual.

Caletti does Dessen, or: The one rule of humiliation

I tagged this as Book vs. Book, but it’s really Book vs. Oeuvre, because Sarah Dessen, to me, is her own genre.

SimonPulse emblazoned the front cover of Deb Caletti’s THE SIX RULES OF MAYBE with an SLJ blurb comparing it to the best of Dessen, and a glance at the back shows that all of Caletti’s books have Dessen-esque covers in overall look even if they lack the emphasis on disembodied body parts.

“Their marketing strategy is to trick you into thinking you’re buying a Sarah Dessen book,” I told Emily (we were at Books of Wonder; I’d never read Caletti). “Works for me.”

And I know why the SLJ blurb said that: it’s that narrative mix of emotional over-articulation, rendered in very deliberate, almost trite, imagery, blended with quick and astringent judgment, so you understand right away that the smart girl who’s narrating is knowing and wry, but not so knowing and wry that she doesn’t think her high school experiences are worth metaphors. And it’s that cadence where the sentences come long and then short, like it’s all flowing out of that girl faster than she can control until she’s pulled up short by her own realizations. I thought nobody did sentence-level pacing like Dessen; Caletti sure comes close. Well. It’s tone and pacing and character fused, because it always adds up to a girl who is looking, looking, looking, and wanting, and there’re reasons why these books, despite their fundamental similarity, never get old for me.

So that’s all to the good, and Caletti maybe isn’t edited as well — multiple passages, especially early, feel overwritten in a way that Dessen rarely does — but at her best she’s quotable as hell in the way of Meg Rosoff or John Green.

But I actually think Caletti does the big picture better than Dessen usually does, and it’s because she lets her protagonist fail harder. Here’s the core piece of my favorite scene:

I wanted to open that smile up wider, to see the Hayden of the afternoon back again. But I suddenly couldn’t think of anything else to say, and the smile was retreating. He was retreating. I could feel the moment of connectedness passing, my chance being lost. I wanted to play and volley and be back in that place we had been together before, that great place. I needed something, something quick — I grasped and caught something silly and lighthearted. Silly and lighthearted would do.

“So, Hayden Renfrew. What was your most embarrassing moment?”

It sounded workable until I said it. As soon as the words slipped out I knew I had done something horribly and terribly wrong. A humiliating misstep. I felt it all in one second of pause. The night, the cigarette smoke lingering in the air, the heaviness of his thoughts — my words were inappropriate and idiotic. Oh God, why had I said that? Why, why, why? And why couldn’t you take back a moment sometimes? One little moment? Is that asking so much? God, I suddenly sounded thirteen. My red shorts and my white tank top felt young and shameful, my feet in my flip-flops did too. I felt so ashamed of my painted toenails in the streetlight.

The rest of that scene and what comes of it is perfect. And you can see everything here: that Dessen probably would’ve written this scene better, with more economy and precision (and certainly less pleading*), but also that probably she wouldn’t have written this scene, because while each of her characters is allotted her one emotional failing to work through by the book’s end, their humiliations are never really their own. They get humiliated by their mothers or their sisters or their boyfriends’ mothers, but not by their own sudden recognition of their immaturity. That’s what Caletti gets right. She gets growing up, the way it feels to look with contempt (long before affection) at where you’re coming out of, and the way you mostly can’t see very clearly what you might become, and when you do glimpse it it might be with shame and terror.

There was that whole dust-up last year about how dark YA can be, and I always figured that books in the Dessen genre, serious subjects though they all have, were imagined as the counterpoint. But maybe if you do it right, if you let the characters fail and flounder in the humiliation that they made themselves — if you don’t just let your characters feel inadequate, but you let them actually be inadequate to what’s ahead of them — then this little corner of YA can be darker, and richer, than it seems.

* I mean, that’s really pretty awful, right?

Roundup: Girls, Boys, and Toys

Allow me to break your heart:

• “Smart like Daddy, Pretty like Mommy”
• “Too Pretty to Do Homework” (Now, if they’d called it “Too Busy With Other Things to Do Homework,” they would’ve had a point) — and follow-up: the bright pink “Allergic to Algebra”

…Now allow me to put it back together again:

• One girl’s rant
• And one teacher’s strategy

UPDATED: This Jimmy Kimmel clip is absolutely hilarious — especially the girl who gets the half-eaten sandwich! — but the family whose idea of “terrible presents” is to give their kids presents for the “wrong” gender makes me very sad.

The boy at the top of the stairs

I bought Padma Venkatraman’s CLIMBING THE STAIRS a while back thanks to rave reviews, and pulled it off my shelf a couple nights ago.

(The one benefit of a recent roommate’s departure, even though I miss her and her troublemaking cat: she cleaned; I found piles of unread books. The benefit of having recently canceled the internet in my home: I read said books instead of blogs.)

At first I didn’t get what the reviewers were so excited about. The setting–World War II-era India–was interesting, but some of the dialogue felt forced, and it seemed like Venkatraman was setting us up for a fairly obvious morality play.

Then she introduced the love interest. Then I got it.*

(SPOILER ALERT for what follows.)

The best thing about CLIMBING THE STAIRS is that it could so easily have fallen into Sarah Dessen Syndrome–the label I stole from YA Lit and Death for when the romance is built on the preternaturally perfect and mature teenage boy solving the heroine’s previously intractable problems with his unnatural sensitivity and emotional insight, ’cause we all know that’s how high school relationships work–but it chooses to go somewhere totally else.

Venkatraman has Raman, the boy, repeatedly fail to understand why the protagonist Vidya is suffocating under the restrictions of her freedom, why she lives in terror of marriage and being subject to a husband’s control. And every time he doesn’t get it, Vidya gets angry and calls him on it. And he’s bewildered, and then he thinks about it, and then he learns.

And yeah, I fell in love with him too.

And also, the main reconciliation scene? Top-notch. This is what teen romance is for.

* Incidentally: I said this line spontaneously yesterday while recounting to friends at the bus stop–I live in a college town; you run into people you know at the bus stop; it’s weird–what I’d read the night before, and we started speculating about whether you could liven up seminars by having a point in each class where you say, “And now let me introduce the love interest.”

Like, are the “new cultural approaches” to the sociology of poverty the Romeo to the study of institutionalized racism’s Juliet, and maybe those crazy kids would be able to make it work if only their families would quit carrying on an old war that no one even remembers what it’s about anymore, but people are going to die, ok, because Romeo can’t keep it in his pants and thinks he’s meant to be with every next girl, and Juliet’s a little desperate and starved of guys like Romeo’s attention, but maybe they’d be able to look back on it later and laugh about that youthful romance that they both learned something from if only her parents would stop flipping out every time Romeo turns up on the balcony? Or are they actually the little punk-ass rebel at school, who seems all subversive and so you cut school with him and think everything he says is, like, so deep, and then it turns out he stole all those cheap lines from a Vincent Gallo movie and he’s been sleeping with your sworn enemy on the side, and your grandma’s all, “I told you so,” only now your grandma’s named Steve Steinberg? Like that. I would offer extra credit to any student who wrote a convincing romantic short story about our class material, but I’d dock them points if the ending were contrived, or, worse, if it didn’t really sell the romance. ‘Cause, you know, I have pretty exacting standards and I expect students to rise to them.

This is a favorite pasttime among several of my grad student friends: come up with the tics we plan to cultivate as faculty to provide our students with endless amusement, speculation, and class bingo/drinking games. If I ever learn that one of the bizarre faculty behaviors we go into hysterics over is similarly affected, that professor will have my undying admiration. But the truth is, I probably don’t need to cultivate anything. We play this game because from our perspective, hilariously crazy behaviors are something we’d have to artificially decide to engage in. But it seems inevitable that just letting our own personalities shine through will provide fodder enough for student scorn.

Oh, Harry

So, I think its only fitting that I re-start this whole blogging business with a continuation of the facebook conversation that convinced Elizabeth and I that we REALLY needed to start to blog again, like SERIOUSLY – which was about this article on Harry Potter (spoilers – although honestly, if you haven’t finished the Harry Potter series AND haven’t been spoiled AND care, you are a rare specimen and I would like to hear from you the story of how you came to be in this situation): http://globalcomment.com/2011/in-praise-of-hermione-granger-series.  Which I loved, and agreed with on many points, but which I also think misses the mark in a couple places.

 

This paragraph is where I think it really went off the rails:

Dumbledore, memorably, falls in love with a younger man in the third    installment. Other female characters were introduced, and developed beyond stereotype; we learned to value McGonagall as much as Dumbledore, to stop slagging Lavender Brown off as clingy and gross because she actually wanted her boyfriend to like her, to see the Patil sisters and Luna as something other than flaky, intuitive, girly idiots. Unbelievably, even Ginny Weasley got an actual personality.

First of all, the part about Dumbledore feels gratuitous to me.  Mainly because most of the teachers are presented as sexless, and generally without lives outside of school – or if they have them, we never see it.  Now, as I think about that, its interesting because one of my favorite things about My So-Called Life is that the parents are real people, with sex lives, and lives in general beyond what the kids see.  And I would argue that maybe one of the shortcomings of the book is that the teachers are only teachers – multidimensional, complicated personalities with histories, but not people with regular lives.  We’re given the impression that none of them have spouses or children or lives outside of Hogwarts.  But given that choice, its not strange that Dumbledore falls into that pattern. 

 

Second, on Lavender: one of the (many many many) things I love about Book 7 is that some of the characters we had seen in one-sided ways (in part because we see other kids at school, especially non-main characters, generally through Harry’s eyes) are presented with respect and with more dimensions in a way that makes it clear that a) they are not as one-dimensional as they might have seemed to us/Harry b) that maybe they never were that one-dimensional, and c) that everyone has grown and changed which makes sense as they’re teenagers.  Is the portrayal of Lavender while she’s dating Ron problematic? In some ways, yes. But its also realistic, and since there are a variety of female characters shown in a variety of ways, Lavender doesn’t get to me as much.  Same goes for the Patil sisters, and even earlier for them – I think the way get appropriately mad at Harry and Ron at the Christmas Ball in book 4, and then deal with the situation by saying screw you guys and going off to have fun is great.  Are they gossipy and in certain ways a stereotype of teenage girls? Yes.  But they’re also intelligent and self-confident.  Its not that simple, and I appreciate that.

 

Third, are you seriously suggesting that Ginny Weasly didn’t get a personality?  She’s awesome.  By mid-series, she knows herself well and has grown into that in a realistic and self-analytical way.  She’s very confident, obviously very smart, has a wicked sense of humor and no shame.  I think the way in which she stands up to her brothers when they get upset about her dating life is excellent and frankly a rare portrayal of a teenage girl who’s got a very clear sense of her own right to date or not date whomever she pleases based on her own desires and comfort levels.  Throughout the series after Book 2, Ginny deals with being consistently underestimated not by getting discouraged or losing confidence, and not by feeling a need to prove herself, but by simply doing her thing and letting other people catch on (or, you know, be on the recieving end of a bat bogey) themselves.  She’s one of my favorite characters and I don’t know how you can say she has no personality.

 

The other thing I really disagreed with in the article is the part about the house elves.  I actually appreciated that Hermione’s campaign to free the elves was complicated and called into question by her failure to, you know, consult with the elves.  I love that she’s portrayed as right on the point of this is slavery and its wrong, but at the same time chided for employing a model of benevolently freeing them from above without their knowledge, consent, or action, because she thought she knew best.  That’s not liberatory; that’s not how oppressive systems change or should change; and had it magically worked, I would have found it both unrealistic and politically problematic.  I wish this story line had gotten more developed from there, but I’m glad that at least this piece of it was treated as it was.

 

The rest of the article, though I think is totally on-point.  In particular the critique of the whole “Chosen One” thing is dead on – my biggest issue with the books was always Harry’s inability to get over himself and recognize the bigger picture. At various points he’s called out on it, and it keeps seeming like the perspective will shift definitively, because its made really clear to the reader that at least by book 5, people aren’t fighting back to defend Harry, they’re fighting for their own reasons, for principle, for their families, etc (except maybe Dumbledore, and of course Snape is a particular complication). But then the same basic “oh no, I can’t have everyone else sacrificing themselves for me” “they’re not doing it for you!” conflict just keeps getting rehashed and is more annoying each time.  Harry’s own understanding never quite gets there, which is frustrating and which also raises the question of whether that’s intended to imply a flaw in him, or that in fact it is all about him in the end.

 

My favorite parts of book 7 in particular are about what everyone else does, and how its always clear that the trio’s saga, while important and the primary focus of our story, is just a piece of a much larger picture, that lots of people are fighting and working in different ways for different reasons.  That even includes Ron and Hermione, who are partially in it out of loyalty to Harry, but primarily because they believe Voldemort is evil, because they are fighting for a principle, because they care about their familes, their friends, themselves, and their world.  I hadn’t thought of it as a flaw steming from having started from the “chosen one” trope, and I’m still not convinced that trope can’t be twisted in a really interesting way to have there be a “chosen one” who’s not the be-all end-all and understands that.  I think you could have a story where there’s a person who’s able to do something or play a role that no one else can for whateve reason (like, say, having horcrux lodged in your forehead), but where they’re just one of a bunch of people each with their own piece that they and only they can do, or where that makes them unique and important, but is only one piece of what’s needed.  I thought Rowling was going there with all the stuff about being the “chosen one” not really being all about fate, but she never quite made it.*

 

*This theme comes up again for me in very similar ways with the Hunger Games series - there’s a little teaser for you on that post, which is coming soon!

My Big Fart, And Other Natural Disasters

… is totally the way I will remember Sydney Salter’s book, which in actuality is named MY BIG NOSE AND OTHER NATURAL DISASTERS. (Blog readers may recall this as the book I called out for its curly hair blunders, in what is now our most-read and most-linked post here at Underage Reading; Salter gets cool points for having a good sense of humor about the whole thing.)

I actually really didn’t like MY BIG NOSE much at first. It’s going for this breezy, contemporary tone, but I found a lot of the writing sufficiently generic at the line level that it just felt forced. The characterization, especially early on, also comes in really broad strokes in a way I found off-putting. Like, check this out:

“It’s going to be the best summer ever.” [... Hannah] fanned herself with her certificates for Outstanding Community Service, Super School Spirit, and Best Poetry. “We can relax and really discover our passions.”

“Like getting into college? Getting real work experience?” [offers the character Megan]

Who talks like that? The answer is no one.

Partly, I think the book suffered from uncertainty about how far into parody it wanted to descend. There were some priceless details; here’s one — the protagonist’s social-climbing mom is talking about a book club the higher-status moms hold — next to which I wrote, “This is almost a satire, and if it were it would be awesome”:

Mom leaned back, clutching a pillow to her chest. “I’ve been trying to swing an invitation to that book club for over a year. I read all the books just in case I get invited and people talk about previous selections.”

…But it wasn’t a satire; it gave us awesome shit like that but then also wanted us to take these characters seriously. I struggled with that.

However. MY BIG NOSE grew on me quite a bit as it went along. In part this is because it handled well some things — sexual violence, homosexuality* — that usually make an appearance in teen books only when they are The Point. Here, as in many teenagers’ actual lives, they are important parts of the pastiche of what our main character and her friends experience — and Salter takes them as seriously as they deserve — without being the dominant features of our hero’s life. This felt to me both convincing and refreshing.

The best part of this book, though, for me, was a so fully awesome scene that inspired the title of this post. It is a very extended, deeply hilarious depiction of what happens when our hero goes to yoga class while forced onto her mother’s cabbage soup diet. The gaseous results are reported to us in detail. In a book for girls! So rare!

It’s kind of like how masturbation is a staple of realistic-genre books for teen boys, but if I ask you about female characters masturbating, what will you say? That’s right, DEENIE. Which was published in 1973. Cheers to Salter for, thirty five years later, taking another little step forward in popular culture portraying girls as possessing bodily functions.

* By the way, one way that blogging has changed my book reading is that I am more accountable to my predictions about where a book is going (even when they’re pathetically off base). It was on page 101 of this book that I noted, “I think I had called [character] = gay before this, but now I am WRITING IT DOWN.” Sixty six pages later we get the scoop for real. I mention this because, now that I am in the habit of writing down my predictions, I’m wondering how many books I feel like “Oh, I saw that coming!” about, but only because I predicted like twenty different mutually exclusive plot developments, one of which actually occurred. Now we will be able to track this. Stay tuned.

Paper Boys

If we’re going to talk about John Green’s PAPER TOWNS, we’d better get the obligatory MY SO-CALLED LIFE comparison out of the way first. (I mean, besides the MSCL comparison I already made.)

Brian Krakow was a nerdy guy, in love with/obsessed with the female neighbor he’d had a childhood friendship with, whose therapist parents really didn’t help:

Bernice: [offscreen; we never see Brian's parents] Brian, honey? Are you ignoring me, sweetheart? If you are, it’s okay. Just tell me.
Brian voiceover: My mother is a behavioral psychologist.
Bob: Bernice, if you left him alone, maybe he’d break out of this prolonged latency.
Brian VO: And my father is a Freudian psychiatrist.
Bernice: Our child is not in latency!
Bob: Keep living in denial, Bernice.
Brian VO: Which basically means that they fundamentally disagree on, like, everything.
Bob: Bri? Everything all right?
Bernice: Feel free not to respond!
Brian VO: At Angela’s house, they probably, like, laugh, and eat unbalanced meals, and talk about things that don’t have deep symbolic meaning. They’re probably like this normal family.
[And, because this is television, that leads us into an ironic segue]

I have kind of a thing for nerdy boys, and this picture of Devon Gummersall (as Brian) looking so young and earnest is striking me as disturbingly adorable. This is not my usual reaction to Brian.

Quentin “Q” Jacobsen, the PAPER TOWNS protagonist, on the other hand, is… exactly what I just said.

The psychologist parents who really don’t get it is such a cliche (I assume it far predates MSCL; anyone got examples?), but Green does it quite well with the parents’ small role. I particularly enjoyed this bit:

My dad put his arm around me. “Those are some very troubling dynamics, eh, bud?”

“They’re kind of assholes,” I said. My parents always liked it when I cursed in front of them. I could see the pleasure of it in their faces. It signified that I trusted them, that I was myself in front of them.

This is a great parody, in that it’s a very small detail that I absolutely can believe, and can build a mental picture of these folks around. But a nice thing Green does here is go beyond just parodying Q’s parents; he uses their characterization to develop our sense of Q, and the stakes for him of the choices he’ll be making in the book. When Q takes the major step of deciding to do something that he thinks will be helping his friend, which involves staying out all night, he lies to his parents and says he’s going to the prom:

He told me not to drink, and I told him I wouldn’t, and he said he was proud of me for going to prom, and I wondered if he would be proud of me for doing what I was actually doing.

This is a very economical, and in my opinion, very well done way of conveying Q’s development of his own moral compass, without any fuss.

That kind of quick characterization is one of the things John Green excels at. Another is metaphors.

Some of these are at the line level:

• “A small, olive creature who had hit puberty but never hit it very hard, Ben had been my best friend since fifth grade, when we both finally owned up to the fact that neither of us was likely to attract anyone else as best friend.”
• “Chuck Norris’s tears can cure cancer, but unfortunately he has never cried.”

It’s shit like this that’s made me have to fight myself to keep the Wednesday Words from becoming one big John Green marathon.

But PAPER TOWNS as a whole is also organized, in a way you don’t understand right away, around finding the right metaphor for death. The setup involves a nine-year-old character confidently describing her explanation of a man’s death: “Maybe all the strings inside him broke.”

It’s the kind of inexplicable thing that you can imagine a nine-year-old finding perfectly sensible, but it languidly takes on a whole new series of meanings over the course of the story. This climaxes in a two page explicit monologue about the metaphor by one of the characters, and amazingly, instead of finding this unbelievably pretentious and annoying, I think it’s actually kind of beautiful.

…So here’s the thing, though, with John Green. I wrote the above in early March, and I’ve been sitting on this post ever since, and the reason is that I just can’t pin down what I really think about the man’s books.

On one level, I feel like Green really gets a certain kind of kid, and it’s the kind I actually hung out with (and was) in high school. His books have a very contemporary feeling, compared to many I read in the ’80s (and reread now). Like, any book involving boys this age is going to have boys talking about sex; yet few older books would have a line like this one (the ludicrous character Ben is speaking):

“Bro, I saw your mom kiss you on the cheek this morning, and forgive me, but I swear to God I was like, man, I wish I was Q. And also, I wish my cheeks had penises.“

You’re just not too likely to find that, outside of, say, Melvin Burgess’s DOING IT (which is also, incidentally, the one of his books that I’ve actually enjoyed; but then, I have a strong aversion to the lurid drug abuse books that became so much in vogue with Burgess and, Christ, Ellen Hopkins, who’s still hitting this pipe like it’s crack and she’s one of the lost souls in her own damn unreadable novels).

I think this is why John Green’s books speak so strongly to a lot of people — there’s no denying that the man’s got some seriously enthusiastic fans — the books and the videos and the blog posts are expressing a subculture that a lot of smart, verbal, well-educated and somewhat alienated middle-class kids experience and rarely see represented in the popular culture targeted at them — because most books are either too sanitized or not smart enough or both. Green’s got the nerdiness and the crudeness all rolled into one. God, I would have thought these were the coolest thing in the world when I was 15.

It’s also Green’s biggest problem: if you don’t happen to be one of the kids who’ve been waiting for a book with just this tone, all the cleverness comes across more as cliquishness. That’s why, even though I do like the books, I feel complaints like this one, from an anonymous commenter at bookshelves of doom:

It’s not that I’m averse to his characters, it’s just that while I read his books I find myself thinking, this is funny, right? I should really be laughing here. I wonder why I’m not? Why AREN’T I? Is something wrong with me?

I think sometimes the characters themselves seem to try so hard to be original, funny, and above all, carry-the-theme-at-all-costs-even-if-their-actions-don’t-make-sense, that I feel preached at, and it seems I’m reading the same novel over and over.

I went to nerd camp when I was 13-15 (after years of bouncing between normal camps I hated), and one reason I loved it is that there was a palpable feeling of relief, among the friends I made, at being there instead of at home. Kids who were closeted at home came out at camp; we made up strange rituals and minutely documented their history like self-conscious anthropologists of ourselves; we dressed like lunatics and talked fast and loud and made up ridiculous songs about crayons and international relations and bizarre sexual practices we pretended to understand.

And some of my friends talked starry-eyed about how here was a place without cliques and judgment, and it was no different than in any other setting where someone declares confidently that there’s no real in-crowd: it just tells you they’re of it.

John Green has succeeded in building around him a fervent base of kids who, I gather, think they don’t quite fit in in their schools’ mainstream culture, but get to feel like The Cool Ones for reading and loving his books. He is my nerd camp. Although I have no doubt that he genuinely enjoys and respects his readers, it’s also a brilliant marketing strategy.

And it’s off-putting to those who just don’t quite get it — not because they have different taste, but because they can tell that what’s really being felt by his fans is that they’re not as cool because they have different taste. I’m supposed to find this funny is not ever a particularly fun impression to get, and it might be even more annoying when it seems to come with the self-satisfaction of being above that sort of thing. That’s one way to look at the John Green Phenomenon. But another way is: aww, man, can’t the nerds just have their day?

COMING UP: I somehow actually managed to write all this without returning to my obsession with girls and boys and John Green, but that will be rectified in an upcoming series of posts. Hence the new category “Boys, girls, and nerds.” Oh yes, I have so much to say.