Ignorance is Bliss

The Giver
by Lois Lowry
p. 1993

Lois Lowry’s take on a futuristic Dystopia, The Giver, is one of those books I just can’t believe I never read in my youth, because it would have been right up my alley, not to mention it has left quite a legacy, so much of one, in fact, that it has finally been made into a movie to be released this year (something I did not know about prior to reading the book). You can be sure that many more people will be talking about it into 2015.

At 12, our protagonist Jonas has entered the phase of maturation when every person in his Community must be given a role to fulfill. Nobody has the ability to choose what they want to do for the rest of their life; in fact, nobody has the right to choose much of anything, as the rigid rules of the Community dictate things like who you are to marry, how many children you are allowed to have, even when to die. Even trivial things like what age you are allowed to ride a bicycle or own a stuffed animal or wear a coat with buttons are determined by the Elders who run the Community. Yet everyone seems content with the system, convinced that they are perfectly happy with the life that is chosen for them.

With such strict guidelines in place, it is no wonder that the whole Community is aghast when young Jonas receives an unusual assignment—the apprenticeship of The Giver, of which there is only one. I won’t bore you with the details of Jonas’s apprenticeship. If you’re reading this, you’ve either read the book already or are perfectly capable of reading it in a single uninterrupted afternoon (and it would not be hard to do so, as it’s the kind of book that implores you not to put it down). Suffice it to say, Jonas’s experiences with The Giver open his mind to a world and a history that his and all of the neighboring Communities could never know of, and forces him into a role of adulthood heretofore unknown.

The Giver is not just a great young adult novel, but a great Dystopian novel, and would serve very well as a young and curious reader’s introduction to the genre. As per necessity, the book is not without a bit of darkness, but then so is life, and a young reader could benefit from the more adult perspective. In any case, The Giver is not too graphic or too dark.

Apparently there are a couple sequels or companion books I will be checking out some time this year. I alternately look forward to and loathe the upcoming movie adaptation. Lowry’s book is one that has become a cult favorite, and it deserves justice on the big screen, but it could easily get caught up in the shallow eccentricities of tween book-to-film adaptations today.

Come As You Are

About a Boy

by Nick Hornby

p. 1998

While staying at someone else’s house, I raided their teenage daughter’s bookshelf for something that struck my fancy and came up with Nick Hornby’s About a Boy. Since I was only there for the weekend, and I’m too lazy to track the book down elsewhere, out of necessity, I read this book in a single day. I specify the ‘necessity’ because, while I liked it, it’s not exactly a book I’d describe as ‘a constant page turner.’ I could have put it down, and would have, if it had been in my possession, because the speed at which I read makes me unfit to read 300 page books in a single day, but I wanted to finish it in one go, so I did. The simplicity and flow of Hornby's language thankfully allowed me to do so.

About a Boy is my second outing with Nick Hornby. Earlier this year, the first book on my 2014 roster was his earlier novel, High Fidelity, and you can really see the similarities. One of About a Boy’s two primary protagonists, Will, might as well be the same person as High Fidelity’s Rob (both likely extensions of Hornby himself), and in fact they do exist in the same universe, as Will refers to Rob’s record shop, Championship Vinyl.

Will is a 36-year-old bachelor who is content with his freewheeling, childless, unattached ways, who decides that a great new way to meet women is to target single mothers. He does this by going to single parent groups and posing as a single father, fabricating a child and a life to go with it, in order to get closer to women. It almost works, but backfires when, instead of meeting women, Will finds himself saddled Marcus Brewer, the 12-year-old son of Fiona, a depressed single mother to whom Will is not attracted. Early in the novel, Fiona attempts to kill herself by swallowing a bunch of pills, and Will is present when Marcus stumbles upon the aftermath. While Fiona has her ups and downs, Marcus realizes he has to do a bit of growing up on his own, and sets out to hook Will up with his mother, so that she is not so alone and Marcus has a male figure in his life outside of his estranged father.

Marcus and Will’s friendship develops over much of the book, the point of view alternating between the two. Marcus continues to show up on Will’s doorstep, despite the latter’s reluctance and his mother’s downright rejection of their unusual friendship. A subplot involving Marcus’s infatuation with a teenaged punk, Ellie, who is in love with Nirvana singer, Kurt Cobain, and thinks Marcus is a funny/weird little boy, is the catalyst for the novel’s climax, colliding with Marcus’s dilemma with his mother in ways that are predictable to the reader, but not to the characters, of course.

Nirvana and Kurt Cobain, in a weird way, are an element of this novel that sort of possess it. For the reader, it sets us in a specific timeline, so I can see why references to it are left out of the 2002 movie version and this year’s 2014 TV show. To them, it would seem anachronistic and unfitting for the characters. Unfortunately, the alignment with the novel’s main events sort of guide the characters to realizations about themselves, so it’s a shame that element was lost. I guess that’s what you get when you guide a novel based on pop culture of the time; the TV version will just have to find another way to tell the story. [On an inconsequential side note, I unknowingly read this novel exactly one week before the 20 year anniversary of Cobain’s suicide.]

About a Boy is a title with more than one meaning. It’s supposedly a reference to Nirvana’s song, “About a Girl,” it’s ostensibly about a boy—Marcus—and his coming of age tale, but it’s also about the maturation of a much older ‘boy,’ Will himself, who realizes through the precocious Marcus that he has a lot of growing up to do himself. Young Marcus often seems like the smartest person in the room, as the adults he is surrounded by can’t seem to get it together. It’s a bit of a cliché, but not unwelcome. Adults and their problems must seem really incomprehensible to kids; sometimes a child’s simplicity is all we need to reevaluate our opinions.

Thanks to Marcus, what everyone comes to realize is that life is too complicated to do it alone. As a strange, friendly but bullied boy, Marcus had no choice but to fly solo his first twelve years. Will and Fiona and Ellie and the others do have a choice, but choose to alienate themselves. About a Boy teaches us that all we really need in life is a community, someone to rely on, someone to be there when someone else is not, because life will be hard, no matter how you try to insulate yourself from its troubles, but it’s a hell of a lot easier when someone’s sitting next to you.

A for Angsty Adolescent Assholes

A for Anything
by Damon Knight
p. 1961

A lot of fifties and sixties science fiction often revolved around ‘what if’ questions and Damon Knight’s A for Anything poses the question: what if you had a machine that produced duplicates of any physical object—even people? It’s a question that sets up Knight’s world and a whole slew of philosophical questions; the only drawback is that Knight does not really answer any of them.

I suppose there is a thin line between writing a book that compels the reader to examine these philosophies and one that just posits the questions without ever intending to answer them, so as to let the reader do all the work. You could argue that Knight’s intention was the former, or perhaps he got lazy and it’s the latter. I guess it doesn’t really matter in the end.

A for Anything’s first 3 chapters (comprised of 33 pages) hint at a very different type of novel, one that details the immediate aftermath of such an invention—referred to only as a ‘gismo’—falling into the average person’s hands. In chapter one, some random guy gets the first gismo in the mail anonymously. In chapter two, we learn everyone is talking about them and wants one but no one knows where they came from and chapter three hints at a changed world as the darker nature of man’s insatiable materialism takes hold.

Then you get to chapter four and everything is different. We have jumped in time to the ‘present’ world of the story being told. My book says it’s the year 2049; Wikipedia says 2149. I really hope that my book had a typo and it actually is supposed to be 2149 because less than a century seems way too short for life to have changed so dramatically, especially since characters refer to pre-gismo times as ‘ancient’ several times, and tell stories of their ancestors as if they were speaking about knights of the round table.

Thanks to the advent of the gismo, the world has evolved (or devolved, depending on if you view this world as a Utopia or Dystopia) into a society divided by powerful clans, dependent on slave labor, provided by ‘duped’ humans. It’s not quite clear which humans are being duped; I suppose we can assume that everyone who isn’t related to someone who has a gismo is a slave. In any case, slaves outnumber the ruling families fifty to one but inconceivably, revolt has never been an issue before.

Our ‘hero’ is the sixteen-year-old privileged heir to his clan, Dick Jones, and his name is... stunningly appropriate. I kept waiting for the part where Dick grows up, learns to control his anger, gets a few lessons in impulse control and possibly, gradually, learns the error of treating humans (even duped ones) like slaves and joins them in overturning society... but that doesn’t happen. Dick remains, well... a dick.

A for Anything caught me off guard with its stylistic choices. With such a powerful ‘what if’ guiding the story, a world of the future so changed from our own, and a host of philosophical and ethical questions raised about the issues of of slavery, one would assume this book would include a lot of talking but instead we are treated to a surprising amount of action. Dick’s tale starts with a lethal duel with his cousin and he continues to feud with people he meets at ‘Eagles,’ the militaristic base he is sent to for his secondary schooling. The ending seems kind of tacked on, as Dick somehow becomes involved with an uprising completely unrelated to the slaves, which is quickly squashed when the actual slave revolt sneaks in first and ruins everyone else’s plans. Dick, despite being exposed to plenty of ethical debates, never chooses a side on anything (apart from his own, of course), and yet his actions and opinions seem to be highly regarded. Weird.

I can’t say I disliked A for Anything. I felt more engaged in the action than in other old sci-fi novels I’ve delved into. It is a bit of a departure from what I’ve been reading lately—namely post-apocalyptic fiction that deal with the everyman. Knight’s story takes place in an established world, long after the so-called ‘apocalyptic’ event, and is not necessarily suggesting that the world is all that bad. I’ve spent a long time since I put the book down wondering if Knight was suggesting the world was a Utopia.

I guess I just expected more from the story than I got. The most interesting characters are quickly discarded, often unceremoniously, and their motivations are never clear. Furthermore, with all the debates on morality and Dick’s impulsiveness and anger—not to mention the novel’s traditional set up as a coming of age story—I really expected Dick to be the first to learn the error of his society’s ways and rise up with the slaves but the slave leader of the revolt is portrayed as being a bit villainous. Yet, I still sided with the slaves, because I was more invested in their fate than Dick’s teenage angst. In spite of the promise of its premise, A for Anything is a story about growing older, but not necessarily about growing up.

Superstud: Adventures in Embarrassment Empathy

Superstud
Or How I Became a 24-year-old Virgin
by Paul Feig
p. 2005


Here is a term I have just invented to describe my feelings about this book:
Embarrassment Empathy - when you're just so embarrassed for a character on page or screen that you have to hide your face until it's over because it's all too much to bear. (For TV fans, this may also be referred to as The Michael Scott Effect)

Superstud is the follow up to Paul Feig’s first autobiographical novel, Kick Me. Like Kick Me, it revolves around the comically awkward and often cringeworthy aspects of growing up that we all unfortunately experience. Feig, a native of my very own Royal Oak, Michigan, holds a special place in my heart, but I would have read this pair of novels regardless, as Feig’s is a career I have followed my entire adolescence, whether I realized it or not.

Superstud follows a lot of the patterns that its predecessor used, in that each chapter reads like its own anecdotal short story, but may be referenced in later chapters. I still laughed out loud, I still felt appropriately horrified at teenage Paul’s social missteps, and I still resonated with his awkwardness, but on the whole, I wasn’t as impressed with Feig’s sophomore novel as I was with Kick Me. Perhaps it was because Superstud covers the teenage to young adult portion of Feig’s youth as opposed to the earlier years. Watching someone stumble and fail hilariously is a lot easier to handle when they are a kid who probably doesn’t realize what they’re doing; watching that person repeat their mistakes on into young adulthood is so much worse because now you know they probably realize everything they’re doing wrong and still can’t get it together. I found myself cringing and sinking my face into my hands a lot more while reading Superstud than I did reading Kick Me. It just felt too uncomfortably aligned with my own awkward adolescence.

The content was a bit more alienating to me this time around, as nearly a third of the novel focuses on Feig’s misadventures in teenage masturbation and accidental boners, which I understandably lack familiarity with. It was a bit much, and all right up front, as the entire first section of the book is named after it, but I suppose male readers would find the whole ordeal a lot funnier than I would.

There were also some stylistic choices I thought fell a bit flat, namely Feig’s narration of finally losing his virginity, which is written out as if they are biblical passages. I got the intention, but I wasn’t feeling it the way it was written and got a bit tired of it a couple pages in.

That said, Feig’s super awkward comedy of errors that made up his youth would translate really well to the big screen. Someone really ought to snatch these books up and make a comedic film out of them. I’d watch it (even if I had to hide my face to bear the embarrassment empathy) because Feig’s torment is just too relatable, and if you can’t look back on that awkwardness and laugh about it (and Feig certainly has no problem doing this, as evidenced by his bare all attitude) then you’re gonna have a hard time moving forward.