(Re)Cycler

I just read (Re)Cycler by Lauren McLaughlin, the sequel to Cycler, which is a novel so original on the subject of gender identity that I'm teaching it for the second time this fall in my sophomore-level class on "Relationships and Dialogues." (See my review of Cycler.) (Re)Cycler follows some of the main characters from the small New England town of Cycler to New York City after their graduation from High School.

The slightly older characters of (Re)Cycler have fewer questions about sexual identity, so the premise of the sequel is a little less fraught, but it does offer some amusing viewpoints on gender stereotypes, as in this dialogue between Jack and a guy he's met in a bar who keeps a chart of which girls he's had sex with and then traded with his male friends:
"Just because a girl's no good for you doesn't mean she's no good for your friends."
My stomach turns over. "That's your philosophy?" I say.
"It's not a philosophy," he says.
"No," I say. "You're right. Truth, justice and the American way is a philosophy. Live and let live is a philosophy. Never bring dog meat to the party? That's not a very good philosophy."
"Jesus," he says. "Do you cry at the opera too?"
"What?"
"I hate to break it to you," he says. "But you sound like a girl."
Part of the comedy of this dialogue lies in the fact that, for the better part of each month, the speaker who is accused of sounding "like a girl" IS physically a girl, although he is physically a boy at the time this conversation takes place.

Later, when Jack recounts the conversation to his girlfriend Ramie, the following dialogue ensues:
"Why are guys like that? Why do they think it's cool to be mean to girls?"
I shake my head. "Beats me."
"Thank God you're not a guy."
"I know," I say. "This one dude, Alvarez, actually referred to girls as dog meat. Wait. What do you mean I'm not a guy?"
"You're deeply not a guy," she says.
"How am I not a guy?"
"Duh," she says. "There is nothing guylike about you."
"Excuse me?" I say.
She looks right at me with those dark eyes. "Jack, please. Trust me. You're not a guy."
"Do you mean I'm not a perverted girl-trading jerk, but I'm still, like, a man?"
She looks at me with narrowed eyes.
"Wait a minute," I say. "You have to think about this?"
"Jack," she says. "Stop being so conventional. Jeeze."
But Jack isn't the only one.

Pretty much all of the characters in this novel seem overly conventional when it comes to gender roles. Since the novel is set in contemporary Brooklyn, a girl being criticized for dressing in gray clothes that look androgynous is incongruous, as are some of the sexual stereotypes presented to Jack and his female alter ego, Jill:
"Once, this guy named Brett stole her wallet when she refused to give him a b.j. He justified said action by claiming it was 'false advertising' for her to let him pay for dinner, and he was merely getting a refund.
The weirdest part about that story...is that Natalie concluded, after the shock wore off, that he sort of had a point.
'I did let him pay for dinner,' she says. 'I didn't even pretend to reach for the check.'
My inability to comprehend any part of this twisted tale is, according to Natalie, damning evidence that I am operating under a 'naive paradigm,' which I should reconsider if I'm going to have any success operating in the treacherous waters of the New York dating scene. When I protest that the world can't possibly be as brutish as she describes, she reminds me that we've met today to discuss a guy who, until recently, used to trade girls with his friends."
At this point, the novel buys into (yes, literally) the no-longer-shocking equation of dating with sex for money (e.g. prostitution) without offering any new ideas about how dating should proceed in the 21st century.

It's hard to believe that it takes until the end of this second novel for it to even begin to occur to Jill--and Jack--that her bisexual love interest Tommy could be the answer to all their dating problems.

But this is YA literature, and it deals with how it feels to be young and trying to sort out who you love from who you're attracted to. In hindsight, yeah, it's easy. But when you're still living through it, it can be as hard as Jack's leaving Jill's brand-new boots beside a trashcan in a Brooklyn alley probably seemed to her the morning after.

I'm glad that adult writers like Lauren McLaughlin are writing novels about how hard it is to sort out adolescent feelings in a world where gender stereotypes are changing. Even if some of it seems dated before the novel can even be published, many of the adolescents I know are reassured to read that some of what they're going through has been experienced by other people; that they're not alone.

Did you read a book (or two) that made you feel less alone as an adolescent? Like millions of other preadolescent girls, I was grateful for the character of Margaret in Judy Blume's Are you There God? It's Me Margaret, and Barbara Kingsolver's absurdly tall teenage girl with unfashionable shoes (Codi in Animal Dreams) helped me get through the last of my absurdly tall and mostly unfashionable adolescence.

The Sagan Diary

Sometimes I bring in real, live authors (in person or via the internet) and give my class the chance to ask them questions. Oddly enough--or so it seems to me--the one they always ask is some version of "how did you get inspired to write this book we've been assigned?" And this is usually after at least five weeks of me working on them to think--and read--more critically. "Can't you think of some more interesting questions?" I ask. "Don't you want to know why Jack, in Lauren McLaughlin's Cycler, is emerging more often as the story progresses?" Or I think to myself "wouldn't you like to see who would crack first if John Scalzi's Consu face off against Joan Slonczewski's Sharers?" (By the way, this is an idea for Who's More Awesome if it could be done as well as some of the previous posts like Ferrets vs. Poseidon or Sasquatch vs. The Abominable Snowman).

For me, at least, knowing too much about an author's inspiration is a bit like watching Peter Jackson's special features on the DVD of The Fellowship of the Ring--Legolas and Arwen, in particular, looked and sounded enough like how I'd imagined them all my life that it was an unpleasant surprise to hear how the actors sounded without lines to read. Sometimes it's better not to know, because then you can continue to imagine.

But some of us just can't resist reading everything available by our favorite authors. And so I got a copy of The Sagan Diary for my birthday, and I read it. I expected it to be what a previous reviewer calls it, a "contrapuntal work" to the three novels in the Old Man's War series (Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigades, The Lost Colony). But there's nothing in it that I hadn't already inferred from reading those books. There's a section in the chapter entitled "Speaking" about Jane's relationship to language that doesn't go any farther towards explaining the point of view of one who was born able to communicate mind-to-mind than the novel that introduced the idea did. Why I thought the diary might be able to, I don't know--it's the age-old science fiction conundrum of how can you imagine an alien with no mouth? Or no eyes, etc. It's almost impossible not to have some substitute for eating or seeing, because even human language--most of our metaphors--is so wrapped around those methods of sensory experience.

Also I was disillusioned to find a sketch of the character Jane Sagan looking exactly like the photos of Scalzi's wife that he posts on his website from time to time. Too much information! I had my own picture of Jane, and she was smarter, stronger, faster, braver--and more mysterious--than any human woman in existence could ever be. Plus, I don't like the implication that the hero is based on the author, because the author has already succeeded in making him larger than life. Why poke a tiny hole in the Macy's parade balloon of "The Heroic John Perry" just to see if he'll start zooming around on his strings and making that amusing brrrrff noise?

I was entertained by the preface, in which a military analyst complains about how useless the diary is for her purposes. Very eighteenth-century, preface-reading. I'm always quite agreeably entertained when a modern writer makes good use of the tradition.

I was puzzled by the lengthy appendix, a list of names, none of which I recognized from the Old Man's War novels, until I discovered that they are the names of people who pre-ordered the first edition of The Sagan Diary. Okay, harmless enough, but why preserve that appendix in the mass-market edition?

Have you ever procured a copy of something supplemental to the main works of an author of whom you are extraordinary fond and been a bit disillusioned by it?

The Next Barrier

I finished reading Lauren McLaughlin's new YA novel Cycler this week. In the wake of the presidential election, where I think that we proved that, as a country, we've finally moved past our oldest form of racism, I think it's time to move on towards eradicating some of our other forms of national lunacy, like homophobia. (Votes to ban gay marriage are not a step in the right direction, though.)

Cycler is not about being homosexual. The main character, Jill, is physically changed into a boy for a few days each month. But Jill's parents, who are understandably upset and bewildered by this change, which began with puberty, refuse to see the boy, who calls himself Jack, as their son. They lock him in Jill's room and help her use self-hypnosis to forget what happens during the days he exists. But Jack knows what is going on in Jill's life, and as he emerges more frequently and with needs of his own, the plot comes to its crisis with Jill and her mother trying to contain the harm they think he will do, and with Jack showing them that it's not possible to wall off part of your existence forever.

Jill panics when she learns that, as she puts it, "the man of my dreams, the love of my life, is not even heterosexual" when the boy she's had a crush on tells her that he's attracted to her, but that he's bisexual.
"I'm sorry," he says. "I don't know why I thought you'd be cool with it....Better to know now rather than later," he says. "I've learned that lesson."

Jack, on the other hand, finds that the girl of his dreams, Jill's best friend Ramie, has some idea of what's going on, despite how unbelievable it seems. He is willing to open up to her because, he says, "Ramie, 'worshipper of chaos' that she is, can usually be relied on to choose the more reckless of any two options."

And yet, why is it "reckless" to love someone who doesn't fit neatly into one of two gender categories? This month's Atlantic has an article about transgendered children, and their parents' struggles to accept them and help them be accepted in their communities. One parent, the mother of a transgendered boy's best girl friend, refused to let her daughter see her friend anymore, saying "God doesn't make mistakes."

Mistakes? Infinite variety is a mistake? I don't see that. I particularly don't see why doctors (a psychologist named Kenneth Zucker is featured in the article) should try to "re-educate" such children. I don't see why doctors in the 1960's felt entitled to physically alter babies who had been born with both male and female characteristics, sometimes without the consent or knowledge of the parents (shades of The Memory Keeper's Daughter, by Kim Edwards and Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides).

I do see that it's a difficult decision for some parents, who have to authorize their child's use of hormone blockers as early as age 10, before the onset of puberty. And yet, since the hormone blockers are reversible, what kind of parent would deny them to a child who has identified with the "opposite" sex since she/he was first able to talk and draw pictures (the article features a kindergarten-age boy's self-portrait of himself as a girl)? Yes, there are cases much less clear-cut than that one. But why is it so important to us to make a clear distinction?

Are we making all of this harder than it has to be? I think so. What do you think?