Children’s voices

I’m in the odd position of loving children without being very good with them. You know how there are those adults who really get how children think? I’m not one of them. But Beverly Cleary sure is.

(So is Emily, judging by her ability to articulate what she likes about SMASHED POTATOES. Plus, children always like Emily. I’m kind of like my dad: I tease kids in the one way I know how, and they either like it or they don’t, and if they don’t we’re both stuck.)

I was thinking about this lately because a few recent reads have had these little snatches of expressing something about childhood or adolescence. John Berger, observant as always, offers these small asides of descriptions in FROM A TO X, the adult novel I can’t stop talking about because I’m so proud I read one — like, “He already had a man’s voice but not the pace of a man’s voice.”

Or this one, which is now one of my favorite all-time descriptions of youth:

What the young know today they know more vividly and intensely and accurately than anyone else. They are experts of the parts they know.

There was a really good example in EVERYTHING I NEEDED TO KNOW ABOUT BEING A GIRL I LEARNED FROM JUDY BLUME, too. Berta Platas kind of mentions in passing an actual event from her own childhood:

I even sighed over Randy, the guy in homeroom who had a crush on me and gave me my first Valentine ever. I read it so many times that I can still recite the little Hallmark poem inside, and the signature, “Your friend forever which is Randall.” Sigh.*

Who could make up a Valentine like that? I mean, I guess a really good writer could. But I sure couldn’t. I love kids.

* (And yes, the inclusion of the “Sigh.” is an example of what I was saying about this book, about being startled by what strikes me as the sloppiness of the writing. It’s just kind of… all like that.)

Apparently, that storytelling isn’t a recitation of mundane occurrences dressed up with Deep Thoughts on What It’s Like to Be an Adolescent is one of the harder things to learn from Judy Blume.

I’ve been reading EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT BEING A GIRL I LEARNED FROM JUDY BLUME, edited by Jennifer O’Connell (who writes for adults in that name and young adults as Jenny O’Connell). Which, so far, has been kind of disappointing. Many of the essays — despite some notable exceptions — are almost astonishingly poorly written (considering they’re all written by professional novelists — though not, I suppose, essayists), and most are oddly didactic as well.

In that last vein, the most peculiar that I’ve read so far has got to be Jennifer Coburn’s meditation on “White Guilt,” ostensibly about Blume’s IGGY’S HOUSE. After a plot summary of that book, most of the essay consists of Coburn assuring us many, many, many times that her efforts to prove herself the most enlightened and anti-racist white person ever were misguided and condescending… and actually, I do respect her willingness to recount some of her more unfortunate activities in this regard.

It’s possible I would have judged the essay as a whole more charitably had it not explained early on that Coburn’s New York City upbringing suffered no lack of diversity; after all, as a sixteen-year-old she once shared a cab with a “Middle Eastern dignitary.” …Seriously. It’s the kind of statement that you feel must be intended as irony or satire, except surrounded as it is by more normally earnest statements about the ethnic mix at her schools, I think it’s… not.

The essay as a whole mostly just made me sad: here’s someone who’s obviously quite horrified by racism; we’re in a country where 1 in 15 Black men are in prison or jail and where the Black middle class is perhaps being obliterated, and the (published!) preoccupations of an anti-racist are… this?

One thing I am enjoying about EVERYTHING I LEARNED, though, is seeing some variety in what in Blume’s work spoke to folks. There’s a particular example that struck me, which, now that I’ve puzzled over Coburn’s essay for a lot longer than I expected, will have to be taken up in my next post…

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.

Some people fear committing to a romantic partner or a life plan. My phobia, on the other hand…

You know, one of the hardest parts of having a book blog, for me, is feeling locked into my opinions once I write them down. (I know, my life is so full of challenges.) But that’s not really how I relate to my books — certainly not ones that I like enough to keep thinking about them.

I bring this up because after I read FOREVER… on Friday, what I felt compelled to post was largely a complaint about the kinds of stories I don’t see often enough in young adult publishing. That’s mostly just because it’s stuff I’ve been thinking about, and maybe also because I was in such a bad mood when I actually read the book.

But since Friday, I’ve also found myself thinking a ton about all I things I love about FOREVER… Like how the boyfriend character, Michael, is a really convincing mix of unbelievably sweet and kind of manipulative. And how economical Blume is in developing most of the side characters into real people (though, what’s up with Sibyl, who goes through pregnancy for “the experience”? Uh…). And how it remains, to this day, one of the only YA books I’ve seen in which teenage girls’ sex lives are portrayed very positively (even though Emily and I have been kind of making fun of this in the comments to Saturday’s post).

It’s not that I don’t believe everything I said on Saturday; it’s just that I also believe a lot of other things about FOREVER… Like that it, seriously, is an amazing book that fully deserves the enormously strong positive feelings it elicits in many, many women (and at least a few men) across America.

This is one reason why I don’t usually do straight-up reviews on this blog. It’s a commitment to an opinion that I’m not always up for.

’70s culture doesn’t last Forever…

An older ('80s?) version of the FOREVER... cover

I had food poisoning yesterday, which totally sucked, and led to my not doing things I really needed to and instead lying in bed finishing Markus Zusak’s GETTING THE GIRL and re-reading Judy Blume’s FOREVER…, which would have been really fun had I not felt like crap.

And one of the things that struck me about FOREVER… (which, remarkably, I had not read since a boyfriend introduced me to it in high school) is how so very 1970s it is. I mean, check this out, you guys; this is a scene between the 17-year-old narrator Kath and her 13-year-old sister Jamie:

“What were you two doing in your bedroom? [...] I know all about sex.”
“Congratulations!”
“Were you fucking?”
“Jamie!”
“That’s not a bad word… hate and war are bad words but fuck isn’t.”

The FOREVER... I bought at WalMart last month

More generally, FOREVER totally inhabits this upper-middle-class liberal world that I feel like really existed in the early 1970s, when there was a women’s movement and the recession hadn’t really hit yet. And Judy Blume, who’s long been a lefty and who was already a big publishing star by this time, would have certainly been inhabiting this world herself.

And it’s funny to be reading it today, because on the one hand, I kept being struck by how much more political the characters were than in almost any books today. I feel this over and over again when I read YA books from the ’70s; the sense of social transition and the normalcy of political debate are just palpable. It’s a lot more fun than the blandly liberalized world of most YA publishing today, I think. (And, I mean… he names his penis Ralph. Does anyone not love this book — I mean, besides the people perpetually trying to censor it?)

But I have to say, I am sick to death of reading books where everyone’s parents have glamorous middle-class or upper-class jobs. (Renowned film critic! Philanthropist!) It’s a long-standing complaint of mine against people who’ve produced some of the literature and TV that rings emotionally truest to me in the small scale (Sarah Dessen; Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick); they only seem to write about their own world, in which everyone is some form of small-business owner, and near everyone is white, and after a while I just don’t believe in it anymore.

It’s hard to level that complaint against any individual book, but in a whole oevre it grates on me.* None of this changes that FOREVER… is a damn good story. Despite the artificiality I feel in the world being created by the publishing industry as a whole, I believe in Michael and Kath.

Although, not necessarily in how quickly they develop a sex life that many adults might be envious of. Just sayin’.

* I might also be particularly sensitive to this today because of how annoyed I was by one of today’s “Most Popular” articles in the New York Times, the latest in their never-ending series of uncritical lifestyle features on the thoughtlessly privileged, which features sentiments like, “Like most new parents, we just assumed our child would attend a private elementary school in Manhattan!”

UPDATE: Can you see this post? This seems to be the incredible disappearing post. I do not know why.