What Really Matters is What You Like, Not What You Are Like

High Fidelity
by Nick Hornby
p. 1995

My first full book of 2014 is Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, the story of Rob, a guy in his mid-thirties who owns a record shop and has just been dumped by his long-term girlfriend, Laura. This latest in a long series of rejections in Rob’s life sends him on an internalized tailspin that eventually leads to contacting his top five exes in a quest to figure out what exactly went wrong in his life.

High Fidelity is my first foray into Nick Hornby’s work and I suspect I will be seeking out more. Hornby has a refreshing style—hilarious and relatable. Rob Fleming is a fantastic protagonist, too, even when I want to strangle him, and I wanted to strangle him a lot. That’s just the thing, Rob is not a perfect person, far from it, but he possesses this strangely pathetic self-loathing that is just too perfectly realized to not be relatable. Sure, maybe we haven’t messed things up as poorly as Rob has done—or maybe we’ve done worse—either way, Rob’s downward spiral, though at times cringe-worthy, is wholly engaging. You want to see Rob’s road to self-realization, you want to see if he’ll actually get there, because if someone as screwed up and self-centered as Rob Fleming can make peace with himself, maybe there’s hope for the rest of us.

High Fidelity is definitely a dated story. Obviously the idea of owning a profitable record shop in this day and age is laughable, even more so than it was a couple decades ago, but for the more obvious reason that the technology has become obsolete. The resolution—Rob’s reentry into the world of deejaying—also kind of falls flat by today’s standards, though maybe it wasn’t so laughable when it was written. 

More importantly, Rob and his record store cohorts (which he can barely call friends, though they’re probably the best ones he’s got) cram every minute of this novel with pop culture references and being a good two and a half decades younger than Rob and his friends, I understandably failed to comprehend most of them. You can pretty much guess at their meaning based on context, but I can’t help but feel like I’ve missed out on something—like someone is purposefully making references that go over my head while I’m standing in the room.

At the story’s start, Rob is of the mentality that “what really matters is what you like, not what you are like.” This thinking is, of course, erroneous, but not far off from the things that dictate our pop-saturated culture today. It would be interesting to see what Rob would look like if his story were taking place right now, but no doubt he wouldn’t get three pages without being declared the biggest ‘hipster’ alive and the story would get buried unless it took the parody route and played Rob off like a tool. The only reason this story—and Rob as a protagonist—works is because it was written before ‘hipster’ entered the vernacular and thus lost all meaning.

For all the story’s faults, its dialogue was realistic and its style was catchy and you can’t help but feel for Rob in spite of his faults. When Laura’s dad passes away after a long illness and she tearfully calls Rob up (initiating their slow drift back into each other's orbit), Rob’s monologue when receiving the news is one of my favorite bits in the story:

“I think about people dying all the time, but they’re always people connected with me. I’ve thought about how I would feel if Laura died, and how Laura would feel if I died, and how I’d feel if my mum or dad died, but I never thought about Laura’s mum or dad dying. I wouldn’t, would I? And even though he was ill for the entire duration of my relationship with Laura, it never really bothered me: it was more like, my dad’s got a beard, Laura’s dad’s got angina. I never thought it would actually lead to anything. Now he’s gone, of course, I wish... what? What do I wish? That I’d been nicer to him? I was perfectly nice to him, the few times we met. That we’d been closer? He was me common-law father-in-law, and we were very different, and he was sick, and... we were as close as we needed to be. You’re supposed to wish things when people die, to fill yourself full of regrets, to give yourself a hard time for all your mistakes and omissions, and I’m doing all that as best I can. It’s just that I can’t find any mistakes and omissions. He was my ex-girlfriend’s dad, you know? What am I supposed to feel?”

The end of the story implies that Rob has become a better person through the experience of reconnecting with his exes; I’m not certain I agree with that, and the final state of his relationship with Laura feels off to me, but I kind of like that it’s hard to decide if Rob’s really a changed man or not. It gives the story some ambiguity and makes you really think about how you’d have handled it all in his shoes.

I remember seeing the John Cusack film version of this years back and kind of liking it, and in celebration of reading this book, I watched it again, only this time I kind of hated it. I think it was a poor adaptation of this book. They got most of the action right, and Cusack is actually the perfect choice to play Rob, but the whole thing felt a lot less charming than the book. Maybe it’s the conversion trip across the ocean that did it, maybe it was the script or acting, or something else. The book just feels more genuine.

Take the Money and Run... But It's Not Going to Help

No Country for Old Men
by Cormac McCarthy
p. 2005

No Country for Old Men is my second foray into the work of Cormac McCarthy, the first being the apocalyptic father-son drama, The Road, a few years back. Compared to The Road, No Country for Old Men is like My Little Pony, but I do not say that to disparage the latter; it’s still a very serious and contemplative book in its own right, I only mention this to give some insight on my expectations of the book prior to reading it.

No Country for Old Men is what happens when an average joe stumbles upon an incomprehensible fortune and suddenly becomes the most wanted man in Texas. Llewelyn Moss knows he’s asking for trouble when he stumbles upon the aftermath of a deadly shootout between drug dealers on the Mexican border and a suitcase full of millions left unattended, but he decides to play his luck and take the money home, prompting a whole menagerie of people it’s best not to mess with to give chase. Hot on Moss’s trail are a tormented old sheriff, Ed Tom Bell, who only wants to see Moss home safe to his loyal young wife, Mexican cartel members, and two rival hitmen, mouthy former military man Carson Wells and laconic and exotic Anton Chigurh, who is probably meant to be mysterious and fearsome, but comes off more as an inhumanly evil caricature.

As in The Road, I have to commend McCarthy for his economy with words. He has a way of saying very much with very little and possesses a sort of southern sagacity that is very effective. The monologues given by various characters are chock full of quotables, though they are not very realistic depictions of dialogue.

Some times, though, I feel as though McCarthy is too judicious with his vocabulary, as he has chosen here to leave out all forms of punctuation distinguishing dialogue exchanges. Without quotation marks, it’s often hard to tell when someone stops talking and starts thinking, and in long exchanges between two characters, I sometimes had to go back a few paragraphs, to the last time an indicator was used, to remember who was saying what. This gets a bit tedious after awhile, and emphasizes the exact reason why we traditionally employ transitional phrases in writing.

My other, lesser issue with No Country for Old Men is that there doesn’t seem to be a point to it all. Lots of stuff happens off screen, so to speak—important stuff, and there are too many threads full of sparsely developed characters. The style in which it is written suggests that maybe all of these threads will converge at the climax and we’ll see what it all means... but they don’t. They never come together, the bad guy wins, the ‘good guy’ learns nothing he didn’t already know, and you get the feeling that everything that made these characters potentially intriguing happened long before we met them.

And maybe this is one of those stories where you’re not supposed to learn anything, where there’s not supposed to be a point, where life is random and unfair and doesn’t mean anything (now that I think about it, the Coen brothers were the perfect people to adapt this novel to film), but, well, those kinds of stories have always been hit or miss with me anyway.

I do recommend this book though, on the whole. It makes for an engaging leisurely summer read, which sounds contradictory, but is really just my way of saying you'll be on the edge of your seat while reading it, but when you are done, you'll put the book down and probably not think about it much after that. As I’d said before, even if there is nothing else to sort through, the dialogue is rich enough to keep you rooted to the page... even if half of that is spent just trying to figure out what is going on.

An Unconventional Prophet

The Complete Persepolis
by Marjane Satrapi 
p. 2000

Persepolis is a bit unlike most of the other books I’ve read this year, not only because it is a graphic novel, but because it is an autobiographical account by the author, Marjane Satrapi, and covers a topic that not many westerners see a whole lot of in their day to day lives: life growing up in Iran from the point of view of a young girl. My friend Kristy lent me her complete Persepolis, which includes the first two volumes of Satrapi’s story. It covers her childhood and young adulthood during the war between Iran and Iraq, the Islamic Revolution, and Satrapi’s adolescence as a student in Austria.

I had the opportunity to read another of Satrapi’s graphic novels, Chicken with Plums, about six years ago for a college course. I wish I could remember the details better but I could not keep the copy I employed for class and admittedly all that is left is the vague impression of being impressed. Thanks to this and all the good press I’ve heard about Persepolis (particularly after the film version was released in 2007), I had reasonably high expectations going into this endeavor and I do not feel I was disappointed.

Satrapi’s narration and art has an extremely minimalistic style. The narration is probably due in part to a loss in translation, but the subject matter Satrapi covers carries no less weight. The stylistic choice works incredibly well for the story, because so much of it is from the point of view of a child and children possess a remarkable wisdom their adult peers lack. Viewing through the lens of a child offers a much wider perspective of the restrictions and complexities growing up as an Iranian woman. And so much about this topic was unknown to me that it was an eye-opening experience.

At fourteen, due to the rising tension in her country, Satrapi’s parents send her away to study in Vienna, Austria. There’s a moment as Satrapi is leaving home, never knowing when or if she would ever return, when you feel simply gutted. It took me completely by surprise and when I was wiping away the tears I never thought I’d shed over a comic book, I realized that the minimalist art approach really works for this story. Like the traditional Iranian woman—who is forced to hide so much of herself behind a veil—there is so much there beneath the surface that begs to be seen, and Satrapi offers such an intensely personal take on that.

The second half of the book has a different feel, focusing more on Satrapi’s awkward, lonely adolescence and highlights her inability to feel like she fits in anywhere. It focuses more on the woman little Marjane grew into and the outside influences that shaped her. There is a return to her home but you get the feeling that the story is not really done, and seeing as the real life Marjane Satrapi is still out there doing what she can to bring awareness to the rest of the world, I have no doubt there will be more story to tell.

America's Answer to Battle Royale

The Hunger Games

by Suzanne Collins 
p. 2008

I will admit I never heard of The Hunger Games until I heard they were making it into a movie. I’m going to pin this one on the fact that it was not exactly aimed at my demographic, not to mention I was too preoccupied with slogging through Game of Thrones to notice any other books. Having every intention to read the book before catching the movie, I read this one on a flight in order to prepare myself and I’m glad I did because I found it superior to the movie for a number of reasons.

First, the book: Hunger Games is a very quick read. For most readers it will take a single afternoon. Being a slow reader, I took a bit longer, but at no point did it feel tedious or tiresome to me. The action is well balanced throughout and by the time the story comes to an end, I find myself eager to finish off the series to see where this concept goes. It seems silly to suggest this given the immense sudden popularity of the series, but for those who are not familiar with the storyline, Hunger Games is a futuristic, post-apocalyptic story of North America divided into 12 districts, collectively called Panem and ruled by the Capitol. As punishment for rebelling long ago, the Capitol forces two members of each district (a boy and a girl) to compete in the annual Hunger Games, a brutal, arena-bound fight to the death where only one victor emerges to bring glory back to their district. Children between 12 and 18 are the competitors and their names go in the pot every year, increasing exponentially the older they get, among other factors. Our heroine, Katniss Everdeen, of District 12, has her name in the running 20 times on her 16^th year, but shockingly it’s her 12-year-old baby sister, Prim, who lucks out when her name is chosen. Katniss selflessly volunteers in her place and enters the competition, despite it being virtually a death sentence, as her district, among the poorest of the twelve, hasn’t produced a victor in decades.

As far as relatable characters go, protagonist Katniss is somewhat cold, but it’s well established that she has to be in order to survive and keep her family alive. People in her situation cannot afford to be nice. I can’t say I relate to her enough, but I understand her at the very least. She is overprotective of her sensitive younger sister and unforgiving to her sensitive mother ever since their father’s death and mother’s subsequent breakdown that almost destroyed the family. Katniss’ best friend (and probably more) Gale is a cool character, but he isn’t given much to do in book one, which centers primarily on the Games, which Gale is not a part of. His character is progressed solely through Katniss’ eyes and even through her delusions it is obvious he cares for her as more than a friend.

Katniss’ partner (as far as he can be called such in a fight to the death) from District 12, Peeta Mellark, is a somewhat sensitive but strong baker’s son with whom Katniss shares a connection from the past, a connection that Katniss regrets because it compels her to feel like she owes Peeta something and Katniss loathes owing anyone anything (quite the charmer, that one). I rather liked Peeta, but I feel sorry for him because his obligatory relationship with Katniss (forced on by circumstances surrounding the Games) felt painfully one-sided and Peeta feels doomed to be friend-zoned. I hope he gets someone who likes him for more reasons than just obligation in the future books.

Guiding the pair through the politics surrounding the game is District 12’s only living victor, Haymitch, a drunk who takes some verbal beating from the kids to finally shape up and become a true mentor, as well as pseudo-publicist, Effie Trinket, and stylists Cinna and Portia. There is a strong dissociation in the buildup to the Games because of the fakeness and politics surrounding them. To Katniss, and the readers, it’s inconceivable that a bunch of children could be sent off to fight for the death, but to some of the districts and especially to the Capitol, fighting in the Games is an honor, so a lot of the public attitude towards them is positive, almost deferential. It doesn’t come across as the death sentence and giant human rights violation it so clearly is. If I had one problem with the plot of these books it is that it just strikes me as highly unlikely that self-respecting parents would ever allow something like this to happen, no matter how many years in the future we travel, how oppressive our government is, or how far our nation has fallen. I understand the Capitol smacked down and obliterated the last district (the fabled District 13 that I do not believe is truly gone) that rose up, but I just can’t quite buy that adults would stand by and allow this to happen. The only reason I let it go is because I know this is a novel targeting young adults, and young adults would rather read about kids their age than adults, even if it is more conceivable that Hunger Games competitors would be 16 and up. A Hunger Games with adult competitors is an entirely different kind of book than Collins wrote, and most definitely darker. 

I won’t go into too much detail about the Games themselves, but they were exciting enough, with some interesting twists and turns leading up to the end. I was actually pretty surprised that all the other kids outside of District 12 died. I figured some sort of uprising was coming and that the rules would be upturned, but I kind of thought more kids would survive the fallout than just Katniss and Peeta. Sort of disappointing, because I liked Rue and Thresh and Foxface, but I suppose without Rue’s death, the emotional impact would have been lessened. They got fairly brutal for a young adult novel, but I still would have enjoyed these as a kid because I generally liked dark tales.

I don’t really want to spend too much time discussing the love triangle either, because that was tedious, but necessary, I guess. The intimacy between Katniss and Peeta was awkward to the point where I almost had to skip over it, but I understand why it was there. Collins wanted to get across the “Big Brother” aspect of the Capitol’s hold over Panem’s citizens. Many of Katniss’ actions are guided by how the public will perceive them, because someone is always watching. Even before the Games, Katniss’ everyday life is influenced by who might be watching and judging her actions. She is a very guarded character all around. Poor Peeta is left in the dark about her true feelings and because I have a soft spot for nice guys, I feel really bad for him as a consequence.

The movie did an okay job at translating the story to screen, but it should have been much better. Their chief problem is that Katniss is a character who internalizes everything. This isn’t a problem in the book because it’s told in first person, but in the movie Katniss comes across a lot colder simply because you can’t know what she’s thinking or what her facial expressions mean unless you’ve read the books and know what you’re looking for. The movie should have done a better job of translating Katniss’ dilemma to screen and it just failed to do so.

One thing that the movie adapted well is the background explanation for the Games and Panem. Since it couldn’t just exposition dump on viewers without coming off as tedious or convenient, the movie gave us a wider view of the Capitol and the gamemaker. Some people resented so much screen time being wasted on characters that essentially had no impact in the book, but that’s just the thing: they did have an impact; we just didn’t see it. Lending screen time to these tertiary characters was a clever way of explaining the world our heroes live in without just telling us. And let’s face it: if they didn’t cut away to scenes outside of the arena every now and then, it would be two hours of Katniss running around looking distressed as she tried to stay out of sight, and that was bound to get old.

Showing us more of Panem was about the only clever thing the Hunger Games movie did, however. Lots of crucial characterization was skimmed over, seemingly important scenes and characters left out, and the whole thing came off rather whitewashed, as if trying to appeal to families and younger audiences. Come on, filmmakers, this is a movie about kids brutally murdering each other for sport while everyone is forced to watch; why bother skipping on the gore? I figured they would pan away to avoid showing some of the deaths, but  they utterly copped out on the brutality of the trackerjacker death/hallucination scene (in exactly the way I predicted, i.e. showing Katniss running around while everything was blurry), cut out the connection between the kids and the muttations entirely, and waved a hand at Peeta’s brutal wounds, which furthered both his and Katniss’ characters in the book. The demographic this series is aimed at can handle heavier stuff. If they can’t, then they shouldn’t be watching. It just lessens the emotional impact of a story when you let Hollywood censor it.

But the worst misstep the movie made is perhaps the most innocuous. In the book, at one of Katniss’ low points, she is sent a simple gift of bread by District 11. At this point in the story, Katniss has learned to find her own sustenance and does not need the bread, but it is a touching gift all the same because it’s an unprecedented token of thanks tacitly understood by both parties. It gives Katniss the motivation to keep going and some closure regarding Rue’s death, not to mention a deep insight into the minds of the rest of Panem outside of the games. It’s perhaps one of the most poignant parts of the book, so it came as a surprise when movie-District 11’s response was to start a riot (made all the more offensive since the movie decided that District 11 was apparently the black district). It’s disheartening that a movie felt compelled to choose the violent and sort of racist reaction over the simple, sincere one. This is about the point in the movie that I lost all hope for it being a decent adaptation, but that hope was on its deathbed already.

The Hunger Games was a decent movie to someone who hasn’t read the book, but not a good start to the summer movie season (that glory should proudly go to The Avengers) much less to the inevitable movie trilogy this will spawn. I still look forward to reading the other two installments of Collins’ book, but I don’t, as yet, look forward to seeing any more of the awkwardness that is this movie. People who have read the entire trilogy can proceed to laugh at me for saying this, but I hope we don’t have to sit through two more installments of the tedious Peeta-Katniss-Gale love triangle. All these damn preteen books these days have them, often at the expense of personal character development. Kids can be invested in a story without projecting themselves into love triangles with beautiful people that everyone pretends are average-looking. It’s not making self-esteem issues any better; it’s just distracting from the better story.

'Twilight With Aliens' Seems to Be the General Consensus

I Am Number Four
by Pittacus Lore
p. 2010 


It doesn’t happen often that I decide a movie is better than the book it’s based on. I may find it equally impressive (like Lord of the Rings or Palahniuk’s Fight Club), entertaining in vastly different ways, and I certainly find many literary counterparts vastly superior to their film adaptations (none stand out more than the Harry Potter series), but when it comes right down to it, I liked I Am Number Four’s movie attempt better.

I zoomed through this simplistic book—about a teenage alien living a secret life on Earth while running from those who destroyed his planet—in a couple days, at a friend's behest, so we could see the movie and compare. For some reason, my friend fretted that the movie would ruin the book, but after absorbing those 440 pages, I still couldn’t figure out just what would be ruined… nor could I shake the feeling that I just read the alien equivalent of Twilight.

It’s not a bad assumption. Co-authors Jobie Hughes and James Frey (of A Million Little Pieces fame, a.k.a. that book that turned out to be mostly fake that made Oprah look foolish for endorsing) published the book—already touted as the first in a coming series—under Frey’s new company, Full Fathom Five, a veritable book workshop designed to pump out novels that siphon off a bit of the success of those vampy series by appealing to young adults of the female persuasion. Neither Hughes nor Frey get their name anywhere on the book, having published it under the pseudonym Pittacus Lore, who is also a designated figure in the story’s mythology, the unseen godlike figure with all the answers. I’m willing to bet Pittacus Lore is more Frey than Hughes, seeing as the contracts Full Fathom Five authors had to sign were highly exploitative, but then, isn’t the whole business of writing down to adhere to a fad just one giant exploit anyway? So, tipping their hat to true talent and the written craft, Hughes and Frey struck out to market their half-assed wares with cheap techniques, and books everywhere died a little inside.

That’s not to say I Am Number Four is an atrocious novel; it’s not. It’s just… lacking completely in poetry or subtlety. In fiction writing 101, we are told to ‘show,’ not ‘tell,’ encouraged to describe a scene rather than narrate and do all the work for the reader. It’s strange to say this, because Four actually balanced dialogue and description quite evenly, yet somehow this dynamic duo have still failed to both ‘show and ‘tell.’ There’s just nothing memorable about the descriptions or the dialogue. Hughes and Frey spend too many lines describing blasé daily activities and awkward encounters in short, punctuated sentences that leave no impact:

“Our eyes stay locked. The crowd around us swells to ten people, then twenty. Sarah stands and walks to the edge of the crowd. Mark is wearing his letterman jacket, and his black hair is carefully styled to look like he rolled straight out of bed and into his clothes.
He pushes away from the locker and walks towards me. When he is inches away he stops. Our chests nearly touch and the spicy scent of his cologne fills my nostrils. He is probably six one, a couple inches taller than I am. We have the same build. Little does he know that what is inside of me is not what is inside of him. I am quicker than he is and far stronger. The thought brings a confident grin to my face.”

Two tiny paragraphs and… 12 complete sentences? What the? And the dialogue? In spite of the realistic addition of swearing, which I appreciated, as censorship has always bothered me in fiction, both written and live action, the dialogue just sounds so awkward, especially between protagonist John and vanilla love interest, pretty blonde ex-cheerleader/current-photographer, Sarah. Their maudlin melodrama is what first set off my Twilight radar. Here is an excerpt, when John and Sarah meet after being away for eight days over Christmas vacation:

“She has just been in a plane and a car for ten hours and she is wearing sweatpants and no makeup with her hair pulled into a ponytail and yet she is the most beautiful girl I have ever seen and I don’t want to let go of her. We stare into each other’s eyes beneath the moonlight and all either of us can do is smile.”

Egads! Sweatpants and no makeup? How could a girl even dream of allowing herself to sink to such hideous levels of dishevelment?! It’s a good thing Sarah’s just so naturally pretty that she doesn’t have to worry about a thing like obsessive attention to hygiene. This isn’t even the only time Sarah is referred to as pretty despite her ‘casual’ appearance. At a parade earlier in the book, ex-cheerleader Sarah is taking pictures of her former teammates and John notes, “despite the fact that she’s wearing jeans and no makeup, she’s far more beautiful than any of them.”

God forbid a girl wears casual clothing at a social event. And way to unconsciously reinforce the stereotype that a benchmark for ‘pretty’ is your social status. Sarah was so pretty, she beat out the CHEERLEADERS for goodness sake! And without MAKEUP! This much attention to cosmetic appearances was not paid to the male characters in Four. It’s shit like this, book, that lets me know without even looking that you were written by two guys.

Everything else about this book is easily digested, but every time I have to sit around for another chapter of Sarah and John Schmaltz Fest 2010, in which the pair walks around ‘flirting’ and glancing at each other significantly, I think I may hurl. Earlier I praised Four for it’s realistic swearing, but romance is where a little creative license is required. Nobody wants to read about two pretty 15-year-olds making doe eyes and expressing ‘I wuv you’s’, not even most literate teens. At least their relationship isn’t psychologically damaging or over-dependent. Sarah is so boring I nothing her, but I can’t hate her. She is willing to let John go by book’s end, and John will no doubt reexamine the relationship, given what his mentor Henri told him about their people and the lifelong bonds they form… with their own kind only. I appreciated this unconventional—if pessimistic—approach to young love. Teens should learn to reexamine their relationships more often. [Sadly, the movie did a complete 180 on this conversation, with Henri implying that Sarah could be ‘the one,’ despite her and John’s differences. This was one of the few things that bothered me more about the movie].

One thing I liked about the book that I didn’t realize until the movie left much of it out was the interaction between John and Henri. Though the writing was terrible enough that I never really got the sense of urgency in their mission, nor was anything said that will stick with me, I nonetheless admired their rapport. Henri is not John’s father; he is his guardian and mentor. He doesn’t sugarcoat, but everything he does is for John’s own good. A lot of their interaction in the book is done while exposition dumping and training in order to hone John’s alien powers, called Legacies. The movie just decided to avoid this by not explaining anything about their planet’s history and having John just suddenly… be awesome. At everything. Without even trying. This is the part where the movie loses me the most. Even aside from the fact that we’ve lost a lot of good bonding scenes, it makes it seem like John didn’t even have to try to gain his powers. And what better thing to teach kids than that barely trying will yield success? At least in the book, John earned his powers.

[Major Spoiler]

And on the subject of getting gypped out of Henri, the movie killed him off much earlier than the book, on the way back from an information hunt in Athens rather than at the end of the final battle. In the end, it doesn’t really matter when Henri was killed, as it was infinitely predictable in both book and film that he was going that way anyway, in the age old rule of mentors and parental figures biting it early so that the young protagonist may finish growing up on his own. But still, movie, what a waste of Timothy Olyphant!

[End Spoiler]

Movie-Henri was just as cool if not cooler than book-Henri. He lacks the French-type accent book Henri supposedly had, in favor of Timothy Olyphant’s southern drawl, but on the whole, I think it’s a trade up. I just wish they had utilized him more. I found Sarah Hart infinitely more tolerable as played by "Glee"’s Dianna Agron. I guess I was biased, but then I don’t care much for Quinn Fabray; it’s Dianna that manages to exude this likeable pluck and vulnerability that lend more angles to a character that came off flat in the novel. It helps that we actually get to see her photography, a little window into her character. To say she’s a budding photographer in the book means nothing. It’s just a cheap device to make a pretty girl seem deep. It’s still a cheap device in movie form; it just flows better.

The best performance after Tim O., of course, probably came from the newcomer playing John’s only friend, nerdy Sam Goode, also the only actual 15-year-old in the cast. Novel Sam was likeable, if idiosyncratic. He was a conspiracy theorist with a missing dad and no friends until the mysterious new kid came along. His interest in the otherworldly is how he got involved in the main plot. The movie took Sam in a completely different direction, [Mild Spoiler] leaving out Sam’s interest in conspiracies and shoehorning him into the plot through happenstance, but I liked the change they made about Sam’s dad. In the movie, he made an attempt to bring the 9 chosen children from John’s planet together and failed, and when the kids go off at novel’s end, Sam seems to be taking on that role himself, a much more fitting and literary character movement than the novel gave him. [End Spoiler] Sam is definitely the kind of geek that most of us can relate to, on the outside, but totally enthused about looking in. And in a movie that you really ought not to take seriously, that type of outlook is appreciated.

Footballer and ex-boyfriend of Sarah, Mark James, was infuriatingly cliché, right up until his much-appreciated redemption act at story’s end. The movie followed this same pattern, though his role was diminished. And fellow Lorien evacuee Number Six had just about as much personality as she did in the book, which is to say, almost none, but with the potential to be more. She probably won’t get anything good, if Hughes and Frey remain at the helm, and she’ll likely be broken down by her physical aspects first and foremost, but at least she kicks more ass than Sarah.

[Major Spoiler]

Finally there’s the dog, dubbed Bernie Kosar after a football poster that hung in the room of John’s Ohio home when he arrived. Not for one minute while reading Four did I believe that Bernie Kosar was anything but an alien ally of the Lorien people. Of course, everyone else except John knew this too, but still, so many obvious things happen with the dog that John is oblivious to that he almost comes off as an idiot for not picking up on things sooner. And dear God was it ever maddening to keep reading “Bernie Kosar” in the book. Why it couldn’t be shortened to Bernie or BK is beyond me. Thank God the movie realized how stupid that name was and only mentioned it once, never bothering to call the dog by its name from that point on. It’s fight scene (in advanced form) at the end was pretty epic too, though Bernie seemed way cooler looking in the book.

[End Spoiler]

I Am Number Four and its ensuing sequels could be so much better in someone else’s hands. Someone not willing to sacrifice quality to cash in on a fad. The writing style is boring and spartan in its use of short, unembellished sentences. Too much time is spent explaining the things that don’t need explaining in good novels. Nobody cares that you did the dishes before watching a movie and holding hands with your girlfriend before going out and having a conversation with mentor dad on the porch. If the point of this scene is the conversation, then skip to the conversation. We the readers are capable of understanding a lot if it’s conveyed in a subtle manner. Frey and Hughes lack that subtlety, but it doesn’t matter, because they’re out to make a buck and they’re using a surefire model for success. Take one part boy with dangerous past, add in pretty ‘average’ girl, toss with geek friend, cliché nemesis, and wise mentor in small town America and voila: Young Adult Romance Adventure Novel. Enjoy your meal. You’re paying much more for it than you realize.