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?

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.

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.

Gifts and grief, and girlfriends who matter.

Ursula K. LeGuin’s GIFTS was yet another book for which my reading experience was massively distorted by assuming the story was building to one thing and… being wrong.

And I mean that for more than half the book, I was enjoying what I thought was “foreshadowing” related to the ending that I thought had been announced to us. And embarrassingly enough, I don’t think LeGuin was trying to mislead us and then provide a twist; I think I just misunderstood.

GIFTS is a great book, though, for at least two reasons. One is that it has some of the best description of grief that I have ever read. For example, this paragraph, from a longer passage that’s all extremely well done:

So I call it in my mind: The dark year.

To try to tell it is like trying to tell the passage of a sleepless night. Nothing happens. One thinks, and dreams briefly, and wakes again; fears loom and pass, and ideas won’t come clear, and meaningless words haunt the mind, and the shudder of nightmare brushes by, and time seems not to move, and it’s dark, and nothing happens.

(This kind of metaphor fits the character, by the way; it’s not like a lot of lesser YA where you have a kind of inarticulate protagonist who’s suddenly spouting all this poetic wisdom about whatever philosophical point the author’s trying to make.)

The other thing that I appreciated about GIFTS is that the love interest is a real person. There’s a lovely scene where said love interest, whose name is Gry, offers a theory about the gifts at the heart of the book (and it’s a fascinating theory that I didn’t anticipate). And our protagonist Orrec narrates:

I knew from her voice that she was saying something important to her. It had to do with her use of her own gift, but I wasn’t certain what it was.

This stood out to me because it is astoundingly rare that love interests in teen novels have their own struggles, rather than being preternaturally patient and infinitely wise vehicles for the protagonist’s journey. The blogger Ames has described the particular pattern where it’s an all-knowing boyfriend as Sarah Dessen Syndrom (you can tell this made a big impression on me because I’ve remarked on it several times, which might reflect defensiveness about the deep and bizarre joy I get from Dessen’s books). LeGuin, here, does a very nice job of keeping the focus on Orrec’s struggle while making us certain that neither Gry nor Orrec is thinking only about him.

It made it a deeper romance, in the sense that I didn’t just want the two to end up together because I cared about one of them and had been told that’s what he wanted. Like, when I read Dessen’s THE TRUTH ABOUT FOREVER, I feel very strongly about the protagonist Macy getting the love interest Wes. But it’s only because I’ve grown to care about Macy, and it’s clear that’s what she wants (and, I mean, understandably; Wes is the ultimate fantasy boyfriend, the humble, artistic hottie who sees Macy like no one else does. It’s a bit absurd, actually).

Here, I felt something different. I cared about Orrec and Gry, and I believed that their best shot at life was together. I believed that being together would let them figure out the considerable challenges they faced. Isn’t that the essence of romance? I feel sickly sentimental just writing it. Yet for someone who reads teen romances with alarming voraciousness, I’m finding this a rare surprise.

Friday “Why?”: Why do girls get to have a face or a body but not both at the same time?

Last week I read GETTING THE GIRL, an early book by Markus Zusak *. Here’s the cover of my GETTING THE GIRL and an alternate cover of the same book:

These, obviously, are examples of the YA trend of cover cropping (HT: 100 Scope Notes). My question: WHY?

I mean, GETTING THE GIRL is actually all about a character who, unlike his brother, sees the girl-in-question’s humanity and personality rather than just her body. And yet.

Sarah Dessen has made a virtue of these covers, of which she’s very enamored. I read an interview with her where she talks about how she’s insisted to her publisher that her covers never show a girl’s face because she thinks “any girl” should be able to see the cover and feel like it’s her. Which kind of re-raises my frustration with her sense that all girls are white and thin (and, actually, blond, if they’re going to be one of her protagonists), but not my point at the moment.

My point is: I get why they use these covers; they work on me. I mean, I love these covers; they make me pick up the book:

… But they also kind of creep me out.

Meanwhile, you sometimes are invited to fetishize the girl’s face instead:

For all that I expressed puzzlement at John Green for covers featuring girls’ faces on books that seem ostensibly to be for boys, I give him huge props for using normal-pretty, instead of model-pretty, girls:

* who you might know from his book THE BOOK THIEF, which won a million awards including the National Book Award and is one of the best books I’ve read in many, many years, a Holocaust novel narrated by death and the only one I can think of that humanizes the German populace, but not the point of this post.

’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.

An assortment of thoughts on Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wintergirls

This cover? Is so beautiful.

Now that my town is acting like winter is done (though considering that I live in Wisconsin, I mostly think it’s trying to fake me out), here are some thoughts about Laurie Halse Anderson’s WINTERGIRLS, about a severely anorexic high school girl whose best friend has just died.

[All quotes are from an Advance Reader's Copy, which means they may be different in the final version you get from a bookstore or library.]

Things I noticed:

• I found the subjective experience of reading WINTERGIRLS to be quite odd, because of how strongly I felt my loyalties divided. Lia, the protagonist, goes to great lengths to hide her anorexia from those in authority who could make her eat — especially, her dad and stepmom — and at times is quite clever about it. I have a very strong identification with anyone cleverly trying to get away with things; it’s probably part of the juvenile mindset that keeps me reading young adult fiction even as I age ever farther past its target audience.

  So I kept rooting for Lia to keep on getting away with all her schemes; the schemes, in fact, may have been the main thing I identified with in her. But then, of course, I as a reader would step out of this identification, and be aware of how getting caught might be the only thing that would save her life. This dual awareness, in and out of her head, is always a strange experience for me, much like when I find myself rooting for a novel’s villain because they just seem more interesting than the hero.

• Anderson continues to excel at expressing the alienation of being a high school student. She has a cynical take on school that I love reading, and I expect those who are still stuck in high school love more. Here’s a representative quote:

My English teacher flips out because the government is demanding we take yet another test to assess our reading skills, because we’re seniors and pretty soon we might have to read or something.

What I think is interesting in this and similar quotes (and I totally thought I had a better example, except now I can’t find it) is that Anderson’s expression of high school angst often involves adopting a seemingly adult POV, commenting on the situation of the kids. This, on its face, is violating a convention of fiction for young readers, except that I also totally remember thinking like that (and feeling very adult doing it) as a teenager.

Things I liked:

• Anderson does something I didn’t expect, but loved, when she has a groping-toward-recovery Lia imagine her future:
  

  I’m angry that I starved my brain and that I sat shivering in my bed at night instead of dancing or reading poetry or eating ice cream or kissing a boy or maybe a girl with gentle lips and strong hands.

  It would have meant so much to me to read something like this when I was in high school, announcing the possibility of life with women or with men with just as little fanfare as Anderson gives here, but I never, ever did.

• Meanwhile, she managed to avoid what the blogger Amee calls “Sarah Dessen Syndrome” with her character Elijah, just when I thought she was going to succumb to it.
• Anderson also uses her sense of irony well in one of the book’s “stylistic quirks,” the repeated use of strikethrough text to convey both Lia’s initial reaction and her rejection of it:
  

  No, I am never setting foot in this house again it scares me and makes me feel sad and I wish you could be a mom whose eyes worked but I don’t think you can. “Sure.”

  At some of these times, I viscerally identified with Lia. Like in TWISTED, Anderson does depressed well.

Things I didn’t like:

• The thing is, depressed is not always that much fun to read. I spent more days reading this almost-300 page book than I did Libba Bray’s almost-800 page THE SWEET FAR THING later that week, even though I think WINTERGIRLS was better.
• There were also times that I didn’t feel like I could really get in Lia’s head at all. Nicki at the blog Dog Ear made some interesting criticisms about Lia supposedly being a reader, but not thinking like one. I liked the book more than Nicki did, but it’s true that Lia has virtually no interests — that’s part of the point — and that makes it harder to care about what happens to her. I’m not sure how else you can convey a character as depressed as this, but maybe that’s just another reason why depression is not necessarily my favorite thing to read about. Maybe I identified with Lia the most when she was most destructively hiding her illness because that’s the only time she ever did anything active.
• Also, some of Anderson’s “stylistic quirks” meant to convey Lia’s mental state didn’t work so well for me. In particular, Anderson repeats this refrain, set off in the text to indicate Lia’s thoughts:
  

  ::Stupid/ugly/stupid/bitch/stupid/fat/
  stupid/baby/stupid/loser/stupid/lost::

  I like the idea of Lia having a self-loathing refrain — it fits the kind of obsessiveness I think we needed to see from her — but the text didn’t really work to convey it for me. It was moments like this where I agreed with Nicki that it felt like we were being continually told about Lia’s messed-up mind rather than really feeling it. It’s also possible that this just isn’t my style of book; I tend to like my narratives literal.

Overall, I think WINTERGIRLS is quite an achievement. Anderson is one of my favorite contemporary authors, and there’s stuff in here I think she did incredibly well; it made me think a lot. (Insert your own joke about how that really is an achievement here.) But I can’t quite imagine picking this one up to read again, like I can virtually all her other young adult books. Almost a week after I finished reading it, I don’t feel like it’s stuck in my soul the way some of her other books are, months or years after being read. Ultimately, I think I just don’t love Lia enough. I wish her the best, but that’s all.

The soundtrack of my bookcase

Vampire Weekend (picture from Contemporation)

This Lullaby: same story, same voice

Some songs are really young adult novels in disguise. Like Vampire Weekend’s “Oxford Comma” (which I love) will always evoke for me THIS LULLABY by Sarah Dessen. It’s the combination of his seeing, but not getting, her disdain for his inability to observe the social rules she does (in this case, the rules of grammar), along with his calling out her dishonesty. I mean, isn’t that just Dexter singing to Remy right there? All the things I love the most about the book are right there in that song, namely, the characters. Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma, indeed.

Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl,” on the other hand, is a book that I desperately wish existed, so that I could read it and love it just as much as it would deserve. It pains me with its tale of one misfit having been outgrown by the other misfit she loves. On my list of best songs of grief *, this ranks high, and the loss in it is not even a death, it just feels equally irrevocable and tragic.

Come to think of it, what is it about some bands — the Killers come to mind — that make them inescapably teenage? Is it the bombast? The ability to pull off unbearable cheesiness (“And the sky is full of dreams, but you don’t know how to fly”… really, now? Yet inexplicably, I like that song)? ** Whereas other bands might be equally poppy but somehow ring adult to me (the National, the Gin Blossoms maybe)?

Bombaaaaaaaast

Carl Wilson, in kind of a weird essay, complains about indie music’s “sexlessness”; is that what I’m picking up on? Because a sort of coyly passionless obsession with sex kind of does sum up a lot of teen fiction (this is what I think BITCH got right with its neologism “abstinence porn”). And the presence of passion and absence of coy may indeed be what makes the National seem like it exists on another life course plane; it’s the cleverness I love in indie rock without all the twee. You just feel like those guys have actually experienced something. (Plus, unlike practically every other band I can think of, they sing about friendships in as serious a way as they do romantic relationships, which I think is awesome.)

Which brings me back to YA books, because of course, these are books for and about people who haven’t actually experienced much. I don’t know what it says about me that I listen to the National and feel like it’s filling a void in my cultural life by expressing the real ambivalences of being an adult, and yet the books I feel drawn to are all intended for 14-year-olds.

This is not generic.

Maybe just that I don’t think I should be forced to choose between, on the one hand, the intricacy of adulthood, where you have made and continue to make decisions that actually matter, and the weight of all the choices you’ve already made gives all this specificity to your own life, so that it’s not really interchangeable with all the old universal stories any more; and, on the other, the intensity of adolescence, where even the most generic sentiments seem like they have special meaning just for me right now.

And, of course, that I’m still enough of a teenager at heart to turn a blog post about music and books into a rumination about “what it says about me.”

* I told you I like to categorize pop cultural products along precise, some would say bizarre, dimensions.

** Since I earlier wrote a footnote about fairy tale songs, I will now use this footnote to rectify that I did not, at that time, mention the Killers’ “A Dustland Fairytale.” Like every Killers song, I don’t quite get it, but like surprisingly many of them, I love it. But I mean, if you set a very melancholy, yet nonetheless highly romantic, set of fairy tale images to music, my liking it is not so much in doubt. We’ve been over this before; I have a fairy tale thing. It’s a way of life.

Friday “Why?”/Why I Love It: Why do we love the books we love?

Today’s post about inexplicable book love inaugurates two series: the regularly scheduled Friday “Why?” and the whenever-the-heck-we-feel-like-it Why I Love It.

Sometimes the depth of my love for a book is inexplicable, even to me.

I felt this way about TWILIGHT (the first book more than the subsequent ones, which I liked a lot less). The characters annoyed me; I felt like we were constantly told that Bella was tough, but only saw her being sniveling and moonish. Edward struck me as a condescending prick. I agree with every feminist critique.

Yet I was completely captivated by the story as they fell for each other and Bella pursued the mystery of the Cullens. The week after I read the book, I reread the first 300 pages — up until when they were definitively together. Ironically, once the actual suspense plot emerged in the form of threat from other vampires, the story was over for me; the story I’d fallen for was Bella and Edward falling for each other, and from this point on I thought the book consisted entirely too much of them talking about their great love for one another. Ugh. But despite the contempt I sometimes felt for the book while I was reading it, I clearly got something out of it. I’m a slow reader, and rereading 300 pages is not something I do lightly.

This, in a way, is how I feel about my favorite Sarah Dessen novel, THE TRUTH ABOUT FOREVER.

The Truth About Forever

TTAF is a flawed book, much more so, in my opinion, than THIS LULLABY or JUST LISTEN (which I think is objectively her best book*).

The main problem with it is that several of the characters are completely caricatured. When I read it, I adjust it in my head so that one character (Jason) suffers from serious Asperger’s syndrome, while another (Monica) is mildly retarded; it’s the only way I can make sense of their behavior. (And that’s not even getting into Macy’s coworkers at the library.)

Sometimes the inexplicable characterizaton is Dessen stretching her love of metaphor too far. That’s my take on one character (Delia)’s refusal to fix a big freakin’ hole in her driveway, because “some things are better left unfixed,” or some such nonsense. No… that would be false. The crater in your driveway is better off fixed, and Dessen’s better off when she’s not sacrificing believable characters to make her point.

Worse yet, for me, I feel like Dessen stacks the deck at the book’s climax. Without giving away specifics of the denouement, let’s just say that when a character needs to finally make a choice that the entire book has been building toward, Dessen makes the path she’s already won the readership to even more blindingly obvious by having someone act like a complete ass. Not necessary.

So why do I call this my favorite Dessen novel? Because I feel compelled to re-read it every nine months or so, and I love it every time. The appeal of this kind of book, for me, is the fantasy of the guy falling for me; with Wes, it’s an attractive fantasy. And what Dessen, like Meyer in TWILIGHT, utterly masters in TTAF is the slow build from crush to relationship — with plenty of small advances along the way. It’s these small moments — the unexpected escalation of the flirtation — that are what I read and re-read for.

One of the TTAF reviewers on Amazon complains that Wes is utterly bland; one of my favorite book bloggers even calls his ability to solve Macy’s problems, all while lacking a personality of his own, “Sarah Dessen Syndrome.”**

They’re not wrong, but maybe for me that’s the point; he’s the perfect foil for a book that’s really about Macy. What’s appealing about Wes is that he falls for Macy. But Dessen makes it fun by not dwelling on telling us about Macy’s feelings of unlovability; instead, she lets us feel Macy’s roller coaster of continuous humiliation punctuated by amazement at the growing realization that this guy actually likes her. It works for me.

I think that’s also why THIS LULLABY didn’t do quite as much for me, especially the first time I read it. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoyed it just fine, and expect to for years to come. But the point of this book is in large part imagining quirky Dexter falling for you, and the thing is — I’ve had that kind of quirky boyfriend. And frankly, mine was better.

* excluding from consideration Lock and Key, which I’m not reading until the paperback comes out in April; Dessen is one of the authors that provokes my pronounced book-buying fetish.

** This same blogger’s “Sarah Dessen Syndrome 2″ (from the same post), namely the guy bugging the girl until she realizes he was right all along, her emphatic “Not interested!” did mean nothing, and he’s perfect for her!, is something I find a lot harder to tolerate. This is my biggest issue with THIS LULLABY.