Prequels and Sequels

Among the books I read but don't always review are prequels and sequels to books I've previously enjoyed. Often I think well, I should have known better. Rarely am I disappointed enough to feel the need to complain in writing.

Recently, though, I've had a spell of disappointment in my reading diet. I read a prequel to a book I loved and found it was nowhere near as good. I read a self-published first novel by an author who had a good story to tell but needed a good editor. And then I read a sequel to a book I thought had explored some interesting and even important points of view on American politics, to find that the sequel presents only one biased, limited, and--to me at least, disturbing--point of view.

Orson Scott Card's novel Empire was both thought-provoking and a good story, so I could hardly wait to read Hidden Empire when it came out. But I should have waited... forever. Nothing can completely spoil Card's amazing ability to tell a story, but it's hard for me to enjoy a story when I don't like any of the characters. By the end of Hidden Empire I absolutely hated one of the main characters, a man I had liked and admired in Empire. He shoots down all of his former friends on a flimsy ideological pretext and then stands around shaking hands with himself and being held up by the author as a person to admire. Bullshit, Card.

I have always been willing to love Card's fiction (no matter how much of a wacko I think he is in real life), but now he's gone too far trying to turn his fiction into a sermon. I can be patient with that, like when Barbara Kingsolver did it in Prodigal Summer and next turned to writing non-fiction to produce the much better Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. But the sermon Card is trying to preach isn't even a good sermon. It's a parody of the Sermon on the Mount: "blessed are the self-righteous, for they will see their way clear to blowing all their enemies to Kingdom Come." If there's a non-fiction follow-up to that one, count me out.

Stotan! by Chris Crutcher, is a prequel of sorts to Whale Talk, which I think is a terrific book. And the main character in it is a boy named Walker. Seriously, how could I not like this book? And yet I didn't, much. I don't really understand the need to train for a sport until--much less past the point that--it hurts, which is what the "stotans," a cross between a Stoic and a Spartan, do. The parts of the novel about why people are prejudiced and what's the best way to respond to tragedy or treat people of the opposite sex were done better in Whale Talk, as if it is the culmination of Crutcher's ability to work through those issues with some of these same characters.

So why am I complaining about my reading disappointments? I think every once in a while people who talk about books should talk about the books we didn't like much. We all want to talk about the books that make us glad we've read them, but if we never contrast the ones that make us feel we've wasted our time, then we sound like people who are constantly enthusiastic--maybe over stuff that others might find mediocre. So I decided to complain today, as part of my continuing effort to be a fox in the henhouse.

Have you read anything lately that turned out to be a disappointment?

Whale Talk

The males at my house ("our dudes," as Eleanor refers to them) enjoyed taking quizzes at sporcle this winter, a site Harriet brought to our attention. One that I took with them was about banned books, and there were several by Chris Crutcher that we hadn't read, so when I found his YA novel Whale Talk (a frequently banned book) at the library recently, I checked it out and read it, and enjoyed it--both because it's a good story, and because it's oddly appropriate to my life right now.

Part of my enjoyment came from my recent motherly struggles to understand and support a newly teenaged son. Three-fourths of the way through Whale Talk, a novel in which the young male protagonist struggles to control his newly-fired-by-testosterone-temper, I was at the soccer field, watching a newly-grown-taller adolescent boy get a "yellow card" for pushing another player in a moment of temper during a game. I was watching a newly-grown-very-tall boy who has, just this season, learned how to control all that new arms and legs. And I was watching my son, still in the throes of literal growing pains and not able to run as fast as he used to, tripping over another player and spinning twice in the air before hitting the ground. But he's tough, you know. He's a teenager now. He can "walk it off," as the coaches say. I was sitting next to the mother of the newly-grown-very-tall boy, who told me that her son also had to stay home from school on Monday, after a weekend of delivering mulch for the high school soccer team, probably because he was exhausted, like my son, from trying to keep up with the much older boys, carrying sacks of mulch that were exactly half my son's weight. But we know that eventually these boys will get tougher, just as they're getting taller.

Whale Talk is about the right way to get tougher. It centers on the story of a group of high school boys who band together on a swim team and share their strength, which results in each one of them getting tougher physically but also more sensitive to the feelings of others. It's the teenage boy tightrope, and Crutcher makes me feel it almost like I'd been there. Both the main character and his father have some demons in their past, but instead of using them for a "twinkie defense" of bad behavior, they use what they have experienced to control what they can and let the rest go, something that clearly takes more strength than giving in to temper and lashing out. At one point, when the main character, T.J. (who describes himself as "black. And Japanese. And white"), feels like beating up a guy who is mistreating his girlfriend, T.J.'s father tells him that beating up the guy won't help, saying that guys like him "have just as much right to exist as you do. They have just as much purpose. You think it's your job to teach them a lesson, but they're not going to learn any lesson you're going to teach, so I have a feeling it's the other way around. You kick Mike Barbour's ass, and it just cranks him up to be more like he already is. He'll immediately turn it racial and respond by hurting somebody else. He and Marshall both have that amazing capacity to believe that other people make us do things."

As I read, I kept trying to figure out why the book is frequently banned, and I thought it might have something to do with the secrets the boys share with each other, but when I went to Chris Crutcher's website, I discovered that a lot of the challenges to this book are because of the language (yeah, like your teenager doesn't hear these words at school) and even the way the characters question authority. Crutcher responds to challenges of his books intelligently and sensitively. He has a staff that evidently patrols the internet looking for challenges, as I got an concerned email from one of them, offering help, after a previous review of one of his books, in which I mentioned a local religious group's intention to challenge a long list of books, including some of Crutcher's.

I'll continue to read more of Crutcher's novels, and recommend them, not just to boys, but also to parents of boys. Because it seems to me that both sides are trying to figure out how much and what kind of tough is enough. And if you think you've figured some of it out, please... share!

Lolling About

During our weekend lull in activity level, I lolled about (to use the Sweet Potato Queen term) and read a couple of books, and they were about right for lolling. Neither one was absolutely great or horrifyingly terrible; they were just okay. I'd read about Alive in Necropolis on Devourer of Books and had to read it to see if it would be good to send to my friend Miriam, who came to visit us once when she was living in LA and exclaimed, on the way to our house from the airport, "what vast necropoli!" as we passed graveyard after graveyard in the rural countryside.

Alive in Necropolis, by Doug Dorst, is a kind of ghost story, but probably unlike any you've ever read. My favorite part was the occasional look at a convenience store clerk who never became part of the main action:
The overnight clerk at the Zes-T-Mart prepares to go home. He is a heavily tattooed young man whose pierced ear and nose are connected by a length of steel chain, and he wears the afternoon-shift girl's name tag because he liikes to head-fuck naive customers into wondering if his name really might be Mindy. He notices that, once again, several cartons of Chesterfields have vanished on his watch. He blames their disappearance on ghosts. He will never inform his manager of his suspicions, and he will never ask to see the surveillance tape to test his theory. This coming afternoon, though, he will crawl out of bed and join his four roommates around the house bong (a complicated maze of Habitrail tubes that once housed a gerbil named Happy), and while watching smoke plumes rise from the mouthpiece, he will dreamily remark, "Dudes. When we die, we'll all smoke Chesterfields." And although his friends will burst out laughing, thinking it's just stony talk, he'll find himself happy to believe in ghosts who jones for nicotine and remain brand-loyal. It's the one belief he has that is unique and private, and thus absolutely unassailable.

Aside from passages like this, however, the story bogs down in the mundane and slightly boring story of a new policeman named Mike Mercer, whose life becomes entwined with the plight of the ghosts on his beat, ghosts who are being terrorized and "killed" by outlaw ghosts. Despite the potentially fascinating premise, the pace is so slow that it kills all but the minimum of interest. Even a cat lover like me will bog down after enough pages of Mike's former girlfriend mourning for her dead cat (who manifests no ghostly tendencies).

The other book I found good for lolling about with was Chris Crutcher's new book Deadline. The premise of this one is that the protagonist, a senior in high school named Ben, only has a year to live, and wants to live it to the fullest. He goes out for football, wins the girl he wants, and takes other chances. There's no surprise ending, and not a lot of depth to his metaphysical thinking, considering his situation. When asked to make a list of things he wants to do before he dies, Ben says he wants to know whether it's true that "in 1960 a young author named Lee Harper wrote a national best seller about a man who imitates and taunts birds of prey, called To Mock a Killing Bird."

My favorite part of Deadline was the bit about book burning. Ben has an unrealistically understanding and wise English teacher/ football coach who, when faced with a student who thinks The Autobiography of Malcolm X should be burned, takes a copy out of the library and burns it in front of the class. The student says:
"A lot of good that did. There are three more copies in the library and you paid for that one. They can just buy another one."
"You want to burn them all?" Coach says in mock surprise. "Oh, that's different. I don't think I can get behind that. I mean, when somebody burns a flag, they just burn one or maybe a couple. They don't try to burn them all."
"You can say what you want, Mr. Banks, but what's in some books is poison. There have to be books that you think are trash, too. I mean you might not say that to us, but you know it's true.
"You're wrong," Coach says. "I would say it to you. There are a lot of books I wouldn't recommend to anyone. I mean, there's a book in the Old Testament--which if memory serves from the last state senate campaign is a big book in your house--that says we're supposed to kill active homosexuals. My younger sister is a homosexual. Active, I think." He waves his hand over our little band of book burners. "And if statistics bear out, so are one and a half of you guys. It just doesn't seem right to kill you."
"This is so stupid," Sylvia says, but Coach ignores her.
"But I don't want the Old Testament banned," he says, "for two reasons. I don't want a bunch of parents coming after me in the middle of the night with torches, and more important, I'm pretty sure you can read that book and not go out and kill homosexuals, because you have other information that tells you that's not okay and because you have a brain."

The irony, of course, is that Chris Crutcher's books regularly appear on lists of "challenged" books, including here in my small town, where I found Deadline on the shelf of new YA titles at the public library. Alive in Necropolis was on the shelf of new fiction, and both of these were worth reading, if not worth buying. They were worth the free time I had this weekend. So if you have time to loll, you could check one of them out.