The vagaries of memory… in a narrator?

Two books I read recently in my ongoing LGBT reading challenge — Nancy Garden’s ANNIE ON MY MIND and Julie Anne Peters’s LUNA — employ the same interesting technique: the narrator-protagonist is really telling you the story, as evidenced by their struggling to remember particular details.

It’s more pronounced in ANNIE ON MY MIND, where the narration repeatedly includes passages like,

I remember we were both watching the sun slowly go down over one end of the beach, making the sky to the west pink and yellow. I remember the water lapping gently against the pilings and the shore, and a candy wrapper — Three Musketeers, I think — blowing along the beach. Annie shivered.

Sometimes — I can’t find a good example — Garden has the narrator Liza trying, and failing, to remember details that are important to her (who put their hand on the other’s arm first), even while she remembers other things that don’t matter. You get a strong sense that the story is her actively constructing her memories for you.

And you get a sense that she’s really explaining things to herself, as much as to you, when she adds narrative commentary like, “But maybe — and I think this is true — maybe we also just needed more time.”

When Garden isn’t highlighting the imperfections of Liza’s memory, or her struggle to make sense of it, she’s sometimes drawing attention to the fact that she does remember, as in this passage:

I nodded, trying to smile at her as if everything was all right — there’s no reason, I remember thinking, why it shouldn’t be — and I sat down on the edge of Annie’s bed and opened the letter.

Which, for me, pulls up that recognizable feeling of knowing something is wrong but pretending to yourself that it isn’t, far more than if Garden had simply told us that that’s how Liza felt. For some reason, the fact that she remembers feeling that way matters.

It actually reminded me of nothing so much as a moment toward the very end of the pilot episode of MY SO-CALLED LIFE. Angela and her mother reconcile after their fight over her hair (which she has dyed “crimson glow,” and which her mother says looks like it “had died — of natural causes”). The scene ends with Angela’s voiceover narration, “I fell asleep right there — I must have been really tired.”

MSCL does not, in general, have WONDER YEARS-style narration, where older Kevin Arnold is looking back; most of the narration is real-time. And partly, this was the pilot and they were probably still figuring out the limits of their template, but it always stands out to me as, I think, the only example of Older Angela thinking back. And it’s funny because it’s such an utterly banal thing to remember!

I think that’s what I liked about the technique in both of these books… it’s a convention of fiction that the narrator has this obscenely good memory, and you accept it for the sake of getting the story. Garden, and to a lesser extent Peters, break that convention and make their narrators into …people narrating, instead.

Rainbow Boys, or: Proof that I can love reading a book and complaining about it in equal measures

For a book that I couldn’t put down for two days, I sure had a lot of complaints about Alex Sanchez’s RAINBOW BOYS.

I think Sanchez has a profoundly tin ear for dialogue, especially considering all the praise heaped on this book. Mixed in with recognizable teen slang — “poop” as an adjective or a cutesy interjection, for example — are a constant stream of lines that no teen — or person, really — would ever utter.

This is compounded by an odd lack of specificity in a number of key scenes. Like, on page two we hear about our first of three protagonists, Jason, having made the big step of calling a gay teen hotline… and “asking questions for hours.” Well, what did he ask?! I just met this character! I’m trying to get into his head, and Sanchez is making things entirely too vague for that to happen.

Related to that, I had the darndest time figuring out when the book was set. I wrote recently about books that are set at a very particular moment in the recent past; I gather that RAINBOW BOYS is set in the early-to-mid ‘90s, but only by piecing together some little details like the boys making each other cassette tapes (yet having some CDs), one boy having his own computer but this being an impressive fact (yet the boys instant message), and a passing mention of “protesters picketing Congress for AIDS funding.” (If only!) But most of the book was in the more timelessly generic world of most YA novels, so I still don’t know why Sanchez set his nearly two decades ago; the story would’ve worked as well with the kids trading mp3s. If there was some sort of 1990s Zeitgeist here, it went over my head.

I even had issues with parts of the plot — namely, an alcoholic father who was so cartoonishly villainous that I just didn’t buy it.

But it’s the plot that kept me turning the pages and ensured that I will be reading the first sequel when I get the chance. On top of a romance with exactly the kind of little escalations, misunderstandings, hurt feelings and elation that I devour like candy were tons of nice little touches… like unrequited love for a best friend, unprotected sex (a plotline handled extremely well), and the not-so-easy feat of three lead characters who were quite distinct, each of whom I believed in and cared about.

Jennifer Hubbard (who, coincidentally, is the person who recommended RAINBOW BOYS to me, in a blog comment) has written about how hard it is to pull off a novel jumping between time periods or narrators, because each piece has to be as interesting as the others; Sanchez manages that admirably.

This is, in short, the book for which our “Flawed does not preclude interesting” category was designed. Let’s hope that the writing improves with the sequels, and that the beautiful romance and pathos keep on coming.

A teen romance of epic proportions… without vampires

Perry Moore’s HERO is easily one of the best books I’ve read lately.

Along with some excellent plot twists, there are a couple major plot holes — Moore hangs a lantern on one by having the hero comment in passing on the fundamental stupidity of the villain’s plot — but I barely noticed because I was having so much fun reading it.

Like a few other books I’ve read lately, it’s a non-graphic novel set in a version of the present in which superheroes and their organizations have for decades been a recognized part of America’s political and cultural landscape. The protagonist, Thom, is the son of a disgraced former hero and a mom who’s disappeared. And he’s got a couple of secrets…

Here are some things I loved about this book:

• The characters. They’re working class, and their problems — from poverty to oppression to, you know, needing to save the world — are very real. Moore does a particularly good job with the hero’s father, whose principles and limitations are both portrayed to excellent effect.

  One of Moore’s best tricks is to repeatedly have his narrator-protagonist imagine what other characters’ experience of something (e.g., the moment when they make an unpleasant discovery) must have been. It could easily have been abused, but as Moore does it, it’s a nice way to create a vivid sense of some of the book’s other characters, while also conveying our hero’s sense of empathy. It helps that Moore employs this only for particularly painful moments. What’s a better way to make you care for a character than helping you imagine in detail the indignities they face?

  There were some unexpected sucker-punches (in the best way) — including one passage that I loved for indirectly making the parallel between LGBT civil rights today and interracial marriage in the past.

• The voice. I wasn’t surprised to see that Moore works in movies, because I thought a lot of the dialogue and fight scenes were crafted with a future movie option in mind (“‘Mind control.’ Dad sighed and shook his head. ‘I hate mind control.’”) — then I wondered if, actually, the book is just written like a comic. I haven’t read enough comics to know.
• And, of course… the romance. Moore follows a superhero trope where we readers know right away who the real-life love interest is when he puts his mask on, but the main character takes a million years to catch on. (My dad and I used to watch LOIS & CLARK together when I was little, and our favorite episode was when a villain asked Lois if she was “galactically stupid” for never having noticed that Clark… is… Superman.) What kept this from being tiresome is how utterly savorable the romance was.

  Here’s just one passage that made me fall in love with our hero, and thus cheer him on in his efforts to find love of his own:

  We drove in silence. I didn’t like the empty space. I wanted to tell him that I’d take him to dinner and get to know him, and that even though I didn’t have a lot of money, I’d find a nice pizza joint and we’d both have fun. I wanted to tell him to drive us straight to the beach and we could check into a motel and talk all night and walk by the ocean until the sun came up.

  But I guess if you don’t really feel that for someone, you shouldn’t say it. I wasn’t saying it to him, and he wasn’t saying it to me, either.

  I had those feelings for someone else.

  That’s what I’m talking about, people. If you haven’t read this one, consider doing so at your earliest opportunity.