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?

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!

I like my romantic ideals a bit less anti-romantic, actually.

It is because I am so committed to romance novels, and teen romance in particular, that I must register some objections. Why are so many of the romantic ideals in these books so… unromantic?

[Spoiler alert for HARRY POTTER and THE HUNGER GAMES]

As Exhibit A, take HARRY POTTER and THE HUNGER GAMES, and specifically their codas. Both of these books end by jumping into the future to show us that the protagonists really do stay Together Forever with their teen sweethearts, which I guess is meant to prove that it really was true love after all.

Which: have some confidence in the stories you told us, Rowling and Collins, because some bland factual knowledge that the characters are still together in 20 years doesn’t add anything to the emotional resonance of what I already experienced those characters experiencing together. I gather that the logic is that the significance of the relationship lies not in its meaning in the present, but in what it turns out to amount to in the future. And what exactly is romantic about that?

By the same token, I don’t see how a compelling story of those characters changing later on and maybe not working so well anymore cheapens the story we already saw. The scene when Willow and Tara blow out their candle in New Moon Rising does not take away one bit of power from the way Willow smiles when she gets that Oz really likes her, because how could it? The romance isn’t in the future; it’s in all the moments.

Also. I’ve had enough of this “you’re just what I was always waiting for” business that’s in every third teen romance*, mostly when the author doesn’t seem to have any idea what else a romantic hero might say to express their feelings, because the image it gives me is of a giant checklist that you create early in life of all the traits you seek in a person, and serendipitously there comes the creature that you have reductively decided to want. But is not the whole idea of romance that someone is always surprising to you, and this matters precisely because you never stop being curious enough about them to try to puzzle them out? And also that through their relationship, both parties to it become something a bit different than what they already were?

I feel like romance is an emergent property of a relationship, not something you can shellack on top of a story by offering proof (through declarations or longevity) that it must have been there the whole time. And I also feel like my idea of what romance is is the much more romantic one, in the sense that it’s so inherently idealized, and so it puzzles me that people drawn to writing romance don’t seem to share it.

And in truth I feel a bit plaintive here, because the fact is, I was built for romance stories. I cried and cried for Dawn and Tim, people. Why am I finding so little romance in my romance novels?

* And yes, I do make an exception for The National. Obviously.

Sarah Dessen must read Underage Reading…

… at least, that’s what I felt when I finally read LOCK & KEY yesterday. I seriously wondered whether parts of the book were planned as replies to the criticisms (not made only here!) that everyone is white… in North Carolina or that mysteriously perfect boyfriends solve the girls’ problems while the girls often seem to have relatively little to offer.

Of course, if that is what Dessen’s doing, it was a funny strategy to reply to the criticism that not everyone in the world is a small business owner by having a central character this time around be a very large business owner.

(She also has a bazillion small cameos by her past characters, which I enjoyed until there were so many of them that I started to feel I was reading a fan-fiction.)

Seriously, I liked LOCK & KEY. It has many of the defining trademarks of the Dessen genre: metaphors without subtlety and chapter-ending platitudes, which I don’t mean in the insulting way it sounds, because I usually enjoy them very much; side characters who tend toward one-note demonstrations of a personality type we’re meant to learn from, and that one I do mean to be insulting because it annoys me; a girl whose sense of self is defined by her relationship with her mother and sister.

I liked that, once you could see by page 10 what the main character’s transformation was going to be, Dessen actually got the most obvious parts of it over early; she pulled off an ending that managed to complete the protagonist’s journey without every page in between feeling like we were treading water until a magical triumph — what The Intern calls a T-Bomb.

However. As we’ve discussed, while I can enjoy different aspects of a Dessen novel, there is one reason and one reason only that I continue to read them all, and reread several of them. Frequently.

That reason is really well-done scenes of high school romantic fantasy, and here? I wasn’t quite feeling it. It’s not that the male lead wasn’t a real catch, because in real life? Such a catch. It’s that there were maybe three scenes where the two’s relationship suddenly escalates and the excitement of reading is how strongly you can identify with the protagonist’s joy and hope and fear. Three such scenes in a book of over 400 pages.

This is why I read romance, people. It’s why I read Dessen. She is very talented in many, many ways, but great range is not among them. If I read something by Laurie Halse Anderson, it’s probably not going to be like anything else I’ve read by her; M.T. Anderson, even more so. Other writers, like Sarah Dessen and John Green, have defined a genre. They’re genres I enjoy, which is why I read everything they write. I think Dessen wrote a very good book in LOCK & KEY, but I don’t think she upheld her end of the genre bargain I’d thought we’d made. And that made me a little disappointed.

YA? Why… not.

So I mentioned that Jennifer Donnelly’s THE TEA ROSE was nearly the only YA book I brought on my vacation (it’s true! I’ve been reading adult fiction up the wazoo!), and iloveamandabynes, AKA my long lost camp roommate, said in comments that she’s been reading it and hadn’t even realized it was YA. Which made me remember that Donnelly also writes for adults, and just because the book looks like YA — the cover and, especially, the page and font size — don’t make it so. In fact, a cursory look at the quotes on the cover would’ve made it obvious that this is clearly not being sold as YA.

…As would’ve simply flipping open to the first sentence: “Polly Nichols, a Whitechapel whore, was profoundly grateful to gin.” Um, yeah. I know YA’s gone through some dark phases, but no.*

The thing, though? I’m still in the first five pages, but this is so written like YA. Check out this paragraph:

Not come to the river? she thought, admiring the silvery Thames as it shimmered in the August sunshine. Who could resist it? Lively waves slapped impatiently at the bottom of the Old Stairs, spraying her. She watched them inching toward her and fancied that the river wanted to touch her toes, swirl up over her ankles, draw her into its beckoning waters, and carry her along with it. Oh, if only she could go.

Seriously, adults read this stuff? …I mean, adults who don’t primarily read books for teenagers. Which, apparently, qualification needs making. **

* By the way, has anyone ever seen an authorial narrator — as opposed to a character — ever refer to anyone, in any YA book, as a “whore”? I’d be stunned but now I’m curious.

** By the way ^2, I would love to hear y’all’s thoughts on whether it’s true that more adults read YA now (it certainly feels true, but given that I’m an adult YA blogger, I kind of think my anecdotal evidence may be selective…) and if lack of plot in adult literary fiction is why. Grossman’s response to critics is here.

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.

A historical fiction of now

I’ve been thinking a lot about historical fiction, because I’ve recently read two books set in 2003.

I said before (though I’m not sure if I explained it well) that the intentional dated-ness is one of the things that really worked for me in SUNRISE OVER FALLUJAH: we know, if not “the end” to that story, more than the characters do. Walter Dean Myers doesn’t have to show us Birdie learning that there are no WMDs, because we know; it makes his belief more poignant.

(And actually, this makes me think that a very powerful story could be written that goes farther in this direction, and doesn’t have the characters experience the kind of disillusionment that Birdie does undergo in that story. This would really exploit the asymmetry of knowledge between the characters and the readers. Anyone have a good example of a story like this — doesn’t have to be about Iraq?)

More recently (by which I mean yesterday), I read Peter Cameron’s SOMEDAY THIS PAIN WILL BE USEFUL TO YOU. Emily and I have talked a few times about books set in New York, about which we’re bound to have strong opinions one way or the other; this one rang true to me. Partly that’s because, while it’s set in a far wealthier slice of New York than I usually intersect with (and an eminently parodiable one at that), it just happened to hit the details of my own haunts. This passage made me sit up and cheer:

I wouldn’t become part of the evil empire that is NYU if you paid me. (NYU has single-handedly ruined most of the Village, including the dog run in Washington Square: they built this huge building that casts its shadow over the park, so that areas of the dog run are perpetually in shade.)

I went to NYU, and hated it (great profs; lousy place), and they have ruined big chunks of my neighborhood, and they are an evil empire. Sing it, Cameron.

But besides my own personal joy at seeing my enmity printed in bestselling book form, what I think worked about Cameron’s portrayal of New York was its specificity. When he described the protagonist’s feelings about a specific intersection I’ve walked by hundreds of times (LaGuardia and Houston), I couldn’t remember the details he described from my own wanderings, and I lacked the same associations this character had, but I got it. Not just because the narration was describing the city, but because the way this character described the city made me understand who he was. His character was bound up in it being precisely downtown New York in 2003, and vice-versa. That’s why it felt like New York, not like name-dropping New York.

I can’t get behind this mode of storytelling — this retelling of our own recent past — unreservedly: I saw, for example, that David Levithan’s new book is set on and after 9/11, and I cringed. I’ve had enough of that, thank you.

But in general, I’m intrigued by setting YA books so distinctly in a time we’ve just been through. Compare it to, say, Sarah Dessen’s studied timelessness: her characters are barely digital (keep in mind, I haven’t read her two most recent). I feel like a lot of YA authors are living out their own adolescences in their books, or some warp of their adolescence with their lives now. But contemporary teenagers’ lives aren’t necessarily the intersection of universal teenage angst plus, say, cell phones the way a thirty-something author might use them.* Like, how does it change teenage dating that everyone has a cell? I was extraordinarily privileged to have my own phone line in high school, and let me tell you, my high school dating life was different because of it.

My point is, there’s something else being portrayed in books like Dessen’s, that’s sold like it’s some universal adolescence, but it isn’t (and I’m sorry to always use Dessen as my punching bag, because I love her books, but they are also to me the best representatives of a category of book I can’t quite wrap my head around, or understand why I enjoy so deeply). The “timelessness” is really an experience that never quite existed for anyone: it’s, perhaps, what teenagers living in the ’80s would’ve been like in an altered reality that made pop culture more like today’s (or more cynically — especially since many of the lead characters and love interests in these books are more emotionally mature than half the adults I know — it’s what Gen X women, not just the YA authors but the growing number of adult women YA readers like me, project backwards to reimagine adolescence). And I wonder if the girls who are attracted to Dessen’s books are exactly the girls who are most inclined to try to fit their lives into some idea of what universal girlhood looks like, if that’s part of their appeal.

I’m not getting anywhere thinking more about this… opinions?

* And because I am, to my great surprise, an aspiring demographer, I will tell you that this phenomenon — where the experience of being a particular age at a particular time is something much more specific than just the effects of the age (universalized to any time) plus the effects of the time (for people of any age) — is called a cohort effect. UnderageReading: puzzle over book, name-drop tv show from fifteen years hence, snark, define jargon, call it a day.

Fiction cognition

The comments on Monday’s complaint about the hero in WATERSMEET facing insufficient consequences for her mistakes have gotten me thinking about the cognition of reading fiction.

Early in our blog, Emily posted about a study finding that fiction readers’ vicarious experiences of characters’ emotions can be observed in the brain. Emily was puzzled about why this is surprising, and so am I: we know that the subjective experience of reading fiction involves identifying with characters; we know that subjective experiences are reflected in the brain somehow; isn’t this finding inevitable? Or at least, wouldn’t it be far more surprising were this not the case?

Today I’m having a different thought on fiction cognition, inspired by also agreeing with what what Emily commented on the WATERSMEET post: I don’t begrudge other people their good fortune in life (well, except those people I already… grudge), but I hold fictional heroes to a higher standard of needing to earn my respect and their good tidings.

And I think this is common; TV writer Alex Epstein, whose blog and books I think are very smart, often stresses that luck and coincidences in storytelling need to work against the hero, not for them. Otherwise it feels like the hero (not to mention the author) is getting the easy way out.

I’ve always thought this was one of those ways in which the rules of fiction simply diverge from relating what would actually happen in life; I’ve remarked on THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN crossing a bit too hard into the “life really works this way sometimes” side of “semi-autobiographical” at the expense of it’s story. The logic of fiction ain’t necessarily the logic of the world.

One reason, I think, is a simple violation of expectations: good stories set up a challenge, two things that both seem necessary and yet incompatible, and then surprise you with how they resolve the contradiction. You read a story trusting the author that you’re going to get such a twisty, hard-fought resolution; letting the protagonist off easy violates this expectation by resolving (part of) the conflict without any such surprise.

If you'd tried as hard as me... actually, you still would have lost, mofos.
(Picture from http://www.flickr.com/photos/wv/)

Now, though, I’m wondering if something else is going on in Epstein’s advice that coincidences and good fortune can happen, but only in the villain’s favor. My first year of college I read a fun book about cognitive biases by Thomas Gilovich, HOW WE KNOW WHAT ISN’T SO. One point of Gilovich’s that stuck with me: he argues that our tendency to judge other people’s failures as reflecting their lack of effort and skill, while chalking up our own disappointments to bad luck, isn’t just egotism. It comes out of something real about our experiences: we have access to our own effort, and so any disappointment seems to occur in spite of this and therefore must be bad luck. Whereas with other people, we don’t necessarily see the efforts they put in, and their failure in and of itself is evidence that this effort must have been insufficient. (Maybe we’d even say that our arrogance is caused by, as much as it causes, asymmetries of information like this?)

Which brings me back to storytelling. I’m thinking maybe one reason we can accept bad luck for protagonists but good luck for villains only is that this is how we experience the world as being for ourselves. So, it’s not quite right that fiction just needs to be set up differently than real life; it’s that fiction needs to be like we experience life, not like it actually is. Emily’s post was about getting into characters’ heads; maybe the characters also need to seem like they’re in yours.

What do you guys think?

History, Historical Fiction, and I’m a Dork

Since starting this blog, I’ve altered my reading habits somewhat. I’ve always been a one-book-at-a-time kind of girl — I just can’t do the being in the middle of lots of books at once — but I’m now usually switching back and forth between whatever adult book I’m reading (mostly on the subway) and kids books (mostly at home evenings and weekends).  And since for adult books I mostly read history, I’ve been thinking a lot about why I read so little history as a kid.

My thoughts go something like this:

I love reading history, particularly histories with a radical or left-wing bent. And its because a well-written history about something I care about that happened is, first and foremost, an exciting and engaging story. Even if I know the outcome more or less, there are truly inspiring characters, people I can relate to, situations that may be set in a different  time and place but that resonate with my own experiences.  There are exciting plot lines with frustrating moments, upsetting moments, triumphant moments.* In short, a lot of the same elements that make for a good fiction story.

Now, what’s odd to me is that I read very little history as a kid or teenager. I did read a lot of those blue biographies of famous people’s childhoods.** And I liked the “If you were alive in the time of…” books, which apparently are still around with updated covers, and I should check them out. But mostly I read tons and tons of historical fiction. The interest in history was there – I always loved social studies and history in school, I was always interested in and inspired by what I knew of the history of the labor movement,*** women’s movement, and abolitionist & civil rights movements. Part of what I liked so much about historical fiction was learning the history. I think if they had crossed my path, I would have been interested in good non-fiction histories of those movements and periods of time. I also had a very deep interest in the holocaust, read tons of historical fiction on it, but very little straight history that I can recall until I was maybe 15.

So I guess what I’m wondering is, why didn’t I read more history as a kid? Were there just not a lot of good, engaging history books out there? Did I just not come across them? Or I guess because my only experiences of reading history at that point were from school textbooks, I might have thought of history books as boring, even as I felt the subject matter was interesting and enjoyed learning about it.

I’ve read a lot of good things about WE ARE THE SHIP, which I haven’t gotten a chance to read yet. Are there other good non-fiction books that folks have come across lately, or remember from childhood?

*I get such strange looks on the subway sometimes because I’m reading what must look like a big boring history book and I’m grinning and almost jumping out of my seat in excitement because something so awesome just happened. Like, I just read a great history of Solidarity in Soviet Poland, and when all the workers were heading to their factories with food and sleeping bags to lock them selves in I just couldn’t contain my enthusiasm. (Yes, I am a huge dork.)

**I was talking about these with my dad the other day and he noted that this series idealized historical figures to the point of becoming fiction. Somehow I didn’t note that at the time, which is surprising since the history I got in elementary school was relatively non-idealized. (For example, in fourth grade my class put Columbus on trial for crimes against the Native Americans. I got to be the judge, which was super exciting, and when the jury found Columbus guilty I got to name the sentance and I gave him an infinity of homework.) 

***Which I first learned about from old folk songs. Picture a 4 year old skipping around the house, singing along to The Weavers’ Talking Union, and pausing to ask, “Daddy, what’s a scab?”

When the train whistle blew that one time. And then again the next year.

Continuing discussion of Fran Cannon Slayton’s WHEN THE WHISTLE BLOWS…

The most unusual thing about WTWB is that it’s told as a series of vignettes, one each Halloween from 1943 to 1949. At first, I found this narrative style frustrating. After the most arresting vignettes, I didn’t want to skip ahead a year; I wanted to know the aftermath.

The storytelling method grew on me, though. When I thought about it, I always did know what happened next; the vignette style was an economical way of forcing me to imagine the inevitable conclusion.

The seven-year timespan also lets the book’s central relationships — between Jimmy and his father, and Jimmy and the railroad — develop in a natural way. I recently noted, when reading JACOB HAVE I LOVED, that I think it’s rare for middle grade or young adult books to cover long periods of time (finite series like HARRY POTTER being an exception). In fact, now that I think of it, taking place over a particularly long timespan is one of the things that makes even a book that takes place mostly in adolescence come across to me as an “adult book.” It must be something about developing an implicitly adult perspective, looking back on life.

Anyway: one consequence of this tendency toward compressed time is that the conflict sometimes has to develop and be resolved artificially quickly — or at least, books have to take place during periods of crisis, in which a timespan of a few months can carry a narrative arc for something as major as the evolution of a son’s relationship with his father.

WHEN THE WHISTLE BLOWS, on the other hand, is a more naturalistic kind of story, where the changes between some years are subtle; others, more dramatic; and the story as a whole unfolds lackadaisically without wasting time. It’s a nicely different addition to my bookcase.