Wonder, part 2

Yesterday I wrote a "review" of R.J. Palacio's Wonder wherein I was trying to work out what I was thinking on the fly, on the screen, sorting out my thoughts in public. even as I was committing the post to go public I was still left with the feeling that I hadn't really scratched the surface. I've been trying to stay as close to gut-level in my reactions while at the same time shortening my reviews to something a little more manageable; people respond better to shorter reviews, or so I've been told, and anecdotal reader response tends to bear this out.

What I realized during the day was that I hadn't really discussed the book itself, in particular the elements of craft that impressed me, and perhaps an examination of how the book falls into the mold of a potential "classic" by virtue of possessing a certain quality that, for lack of a better term, I simply call award-bait. I don't mean that in a mean way, there are just some books that have a tone and feel that sits just above all others in such a way that they attract the attention of people who give awards for noteworthy books. 

I have to admit, the reason I'm coming to this book so late from all the hoopla of its initial release is that I've found more and more I find the hoopla surrounding a book's release tends to be a distraction. I wanted to get to a point where I couldn't really remember what I'd heard in order to delve into the book with fresh eyes. I'm glad I did because there were some nice surprises in store.

First, Augie Pullman has a great voice. He's optimistic yet realistic. He knows his deficits but underneath he's just a kid with the same worries as other kids entering middle school: Will he be able to make new friends? Will there be any kids as into Star Wars as him?

Will these kids stare and make fun of him the way other kids have his entire life?

That Augie discusses his facial deformities and surgical procedures with a detached boredom doesn't remove the fact that emotionally he knows he trapped behind this mask forever. He knows he'll never be normal but that doesn't stop him for wanting, just once, to be treated for who he really is and not what he looks like... and certainly not out of pity. Palacio finds a nice, light touch for Augie's voice, a balance that straddles his inner and outer worlds.

The biggest, and most welcome, surprise comes when the point-of-view shifts. I realize I've just gone ahead and made it so someone wanting to read with fresh eyes as I did will now have to wait until they have forgotten this review, but such is the nature/danger or reading and writing reviews.

The shift in POV solves a problem with most first-person narratives in that it gives the reader insight to the other characters Augie interacts with, and in particular provides elements of the story Augie couldn't possibly know. This is a great trick because it retains the intimacy of Augie's world and provides background and depth without either diluting or undermining his perceptions. His saintly sister Via enters high school and goes through an emotional roller coaster of emotions that Augie cannot fathom. Nor can his parents, it seems, and it isn't until we hear Via's own take on events that we learn that her sacrifice has come with a price. This shift happens again when his new friend Jack Will cannot figure out why Augie is giving him the cold shoulder (but the reader knows), and when Via's boyfriend plays a small role in undermining a bully at Augie's school, and when his friend Summer chronicles their work on a Science project. The effect is a bit like a documentary where the narrative shifts according to which person has the most insight into an event. It works because, as with Augie's voice, it is carefully crafted and not gimmicky.

As I hinted at yesterday, the one false note is the ending, which isn't so much deus ex machina as it feels too good to be true. And by that I mean that what makes it untrue is that it quite simply is too good. Too good in the sense that Augie's soaring triumph at his middle school seems to set him up in a way that is potentially dangerous for him down the road. If it sounds like I'm concerned for the imaginary future of a fictional character, I am, because in order to buy the rest of Augie's story I have to care enough about him to not want him given a false hope. Yes, I want uplifting, but I also want honest, and it matters in a story like this. Everything about Augie and his world has been rendered in a realistic and unflinching manner, and then comes an award ceremony that doesn't simply elevate his self-esteem but paints an entire school as having been moved by Augie's humanity. The totality of this communal change elevates Augie's personal moment to something that, to my sense, felt slightly messianic. Augie is a special boy, indeed, but is he really that special?

Without digging up the reviews I so carefully avoided or deliberately forgot, the hoopla for Wonder is deserved, but with the caveat that the book serve as a point of discussion for young readers and decidedly not as a lesson. There is nothing more I hate than watching a solid book with a unique character used to club innocent children over the head with the weight of heavy-handed moralizing and guilt-inducing pity.

Which, sadly, tends to happen with books that get little gold or silver medals affixed to their covers.

Wonder

by R.J. Palacio
Knopf 2012 

Can a boy with a deformed face find friends, happiness, success, and acceptance when he first goes to middle school? Only in a middle grade novel. 

I'm going to lean a little heavy on this book, despite the fact that I found the writing and narrative structure compelling and well crafted. Bear with me, I'm thinking aloud.

There are buses and billboards and junk mail that I see fairly regularly with pictures of a kid with a cleft lip or cleft palate coupled with an appeal for me to do something to help the poor child pictured. I hate these ads because not because of their appeal to help children but because they do so by attempting to guilt us into giving by trying to shock us into a politically incorrect place. We are so used to beautiful images of people in ads that when we see a child with a disfigured face our initial reaction (according to the psychology behind the ad) is to cause us to reel in horror and then instantly feel bad about having that response; if this were not true they wouldn't put the photo in the ads. These images force us to to look away, then look back with pity, and finally assuage our guilt via a donation. It isn't charity so much as penance for our thought crimes.

August "Augie" Pullman, the narrator of Wonder, is the photo in these ads times ten. It's the combination of two separate medical conditions that has disfigured Augie's face, a one-in-million set of circumstances, made only slightly better through dozens of surgeries in his twelve years on the planet. Due to his constant need for care and recovery from surgeries Augie has been home-schooled but his parents believe the time has come for him to be mainstreamed, to get a solid education and learn how to deal with the realities that life is going to dish out to him over time.

Mind you, Augie is perfectly normal in every other respect, and is the kind of whip-smart kid that is part-and-parcel of most middle grade stories. But where most protagonists have a goal placed before them Augie's is simply handed to him and his best hope is simply to cope. He is given the option of baking out of going to school, but without saying it Augie knows that he would essentially be choosing a lifetime of house arrest, so there isn't much of a choice.

Augie is used to kids recoiling in horror at his face, he's used to the brutal honesty of kids who speak their minds without intending to be mean, wounding him all the same. Inside he's just a kid like the rest of them but its the outside world that must bend to meet Augie half way. And as entertaining and heartwarming as all this is, it was about the halfway point that I started to wonder...

In the early 1960s this story could have been about the one black kid in an all-white Southern school. In the early 1990s this could have been about a kid with AIDS coming to school. The first girl in an all-boys prep. These stories all fit the mold of a kid who is different bringing people closer to understanding their "issue" while growing themselves in gaining acceptance. It all started to leave a bad taste in my mouth, like the waxy coating after eating a donut that tasted good at first and then suddenly not so much so.

My thoughts continued to drift as I read. I remembered The Elephant Man (which later is referenced in Wonder) about Joseph Merrick, a victim of his own deformities who lived in the much less forgiving Victorian England. Or was it? Merrick, despite his outward physical appearance and limitations, left school to earn a living in the workhouses of the time, and despite the story of his being a sort of sideshow freak who was taken advantage of, Merrick actively sought out this lifestyle. A shy and withdrawn man who once dreamed of meeting a blind woman who could love him because she couldn't see him, by comparison Augie didn't seem to have it so bad. Little Augie may have been taunted as a Zombie or the butt of a middle school joke called the Plague, but fat and gay kids are taunted and bullied far worse than anything Augie experiences.

So while Augie had to put up with betrayal by his closest friend and deal with older kids from another school giving him a beat-down, he also had at least one girl friend who could see beyond the surface, and eventually the return of his best friend after a little time-in-the-wilderness guilt and anxiety over some overheard comments. In many ways Augie's deformities are almost irrelevant to the story. He is sweet and charming, and after a while it was as if his face hardly seemed to be deformed at all. Not because we were see the real Augie beneath the surface but because the surface became unrealistic by virtue of the story's commonplace events.

In a story like this, a kid like Augie should triumph, but his stakes need to be exponentially higher than "normal" kids. By the end of Wonder it's as if the entire school (save one bully type) have turned and been won over by Augie. In one school year he went from zero to hero, as they say, but the notes are so high at the end that suddenly it becomes clear Augie's in for a lifetime of letdown. He's survived his first year of middle school and... it's all downhill from here. He might have been mainstreamed to the point of acceptance (not quite normal) but he'll never have a year as spectacular as the one in this book (no character could) and, when I think about it, its kind of sad.

Yes, of course, the point is that by the end the world sees Augie as "normal" and he can (theoretically) continue to have the normal sort of adventures most kids have... but in the real world? In the real world kids who start Wonder will try to align themselves with others in the book who recoiled in horror then came to accept him as just a good-natured, Star Wars-addicted kid with nerdy tendencies, but like those bus and junk mail ads, it comes at the expense of the reader's internal guilt. For 320 pages they have been shown how time and again Augie's face has shaped the reactions of people inside and outside the book, and the happy ending is the penance paid to let the reader off the hook.

See, everything worked out okay for Augie in the end, so don't beat yourself up over the fact that initially you realized you wouldn't have behaved so kindly if you'd met him for the first time.

Young readers will put the book down, grateful the visit to Augie's world was only a short one. They will convince themselves they learned a great lesson and may themselves be changed by it (if they can be that honest with themselves), but once the book is closed it's no difference then send a check to the people who paid for the cleft palate ads.

Out of sight, out of mind, guilt paid off in full.

The Hero of Little Street

by Gregory Rogers  
Allen & Unwin, Austrailia 2009
Roaring Brook, US 2012

The Boy, who previously met the Bard and the Bear and battled a Midsummer Knight, takes "readers" on another adventure, this time through the world of Vermeer.

The Boy, out titular hero, is kicking around when a soccer ball appears. One swift kick and the ball lands in a fountain, and the bully boys who were previously playing with the ball are none too happy. They chase the Boy to take refuge in an art museum where he finds himself joined by a dog from one painting, helps a musician in another painting, and is let out into the world of Flemish masters through Vermeer's "Little Street." When his canine companion is taken from him the Boy tracks him down to a basement butchery where hundreds of dogs have been captured and caged. After making a daring escape the Boy and the dogs return to the "real" world where they meet up with the bully boys again. The Boy gets the last laugh as the newly freed dogs chase the bullies down as a favor to their new master, and the Boy continues on to another day and another adventure.  

click image to enlarge

That Rogers does all this without words in a comic-framed format is only half the marvel, his real strength comes in the ability to make the real and the fantasy imaginings slip fluidly in and out. When the dog slips out of Jan Van Eyck "The Arnolfini Wedding" the reader doesn't question it any more than the Boy does, it simply happened and is part of the world. As it is the world Roger's Boy inhabits has the feel of another time and place where time and technology play no part. It adds a sense of timelessness about the whole affair, a story of a boy and a chase and a series of adventures.

And it was while thinking about the story in this light that I realized this is where picture books are more liberal than their wordier counterparts up the literacy line. A picture book has the advantage of being like a short story where there may be a one-up change in the main character's position of predicament from the beginning of the story, but no need for there to be the sort of emotional or plot development necessary for traditional narratives.  I mean, I suppose I could find a three act narrative in The Hero of Little Street – act one: hero chased by bullies; act two: in the museum world; act three: return of the hero triumphant – but in the end it feels more like a cumulative series of adventures in the mode of the Odyssey. Four of five more of these Boy books by Rogers and they could be bundled together into an epic tale of their own.

you probably want to see this bigger, too

The last lingering element that was hard to place was Rogers visual language. It is a comic format but something keeps me from calling it a graphic novel. It isn't simply length, there's something that taps into something I couldn't place for a long time until I studied the poses of the characters, their lines of action while standing still, their contrapposto if you will. One thing computers haven't managed yet is the ability to search for sense connections beyond words, those memory senses of image and smell and touch that can't be entered as a search term. In the end I finally made the connection: Sergio Aragones, the "marginal" artist from MAD magazine whose linguine-legged people and wordless comics are echoed in Rogers' storytelling. The actual influence may not be there at all, but the fluidity of moving through these visual ideas is there, it's a shared vocabulary of images. I think if you know both artists works it's easy to see the connection, even if they are only distant cousins half a world apart.

As a final thought, based on a conversation I had yesterday, one of the great things about picture books like this without words is that it allows "readers" to provide their own dialog, their own interpretation of the story. It's malleable or it can become firmly fixed, but in keeping with the "picture worth a thousand words" Rogers books contain millions of words... but no text.

How to Survive Middle School...

(without getting your head flushed) and Deal with an Ex-Best Friend, ... um, Girls, and a Heartbreaking Hamster
by Donna Gephart
Peachtree Press / Random House 2010 

I think the only thing the title doesn't include is the main character's love of Jon Stewart, and perhaps the fact that he isn't legally old enough to have a YouTube account... 

David Greenberg is a bit of a nebbish who wants so much to be like Jon Stewart when he grows up that he spends his free time creating a one-man TV show called Talk Time.  The show comes off like n amalgamation of different late night elements – a top six-and-a-half list, a quasi monologue, and a regular feature called "The Moment of Hammy" featuring David's pet hamster.  But just before the first day of school David and his best friend Elliot have a falling out and – because you can't have a middle grade story without a bad guy – Elliot teams up with the school bully to make Elliot's transition to middle school a nightmare.  The girl of the title is Sophie, a whipsmart, previously homeschooled girl who not only loves his videos but manages to get them a wider audience that spreads all the way to the top.  And by that I mean they get the attention of the producers of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.  In the end scores are settled, amends are made, and David might just survive middle school after all.

I've been knee deep in a fair amount of middle grade books with boy main characters lately, and I've had a difficult time reconciling these characters with real middle grade boys. It isn't that they're way off base in characterization so much as they all seem so narrowly focused.  And I don't necessarily mean self-centered (though there is a bit of that) but that their desires and behaviors are confined to a personal goal, a school-based conflict, a home-based conflict, and a resolution that comes with external aid or understanding and not entirely from within the character themselves.  I guess I'm sensing a formula, and by the looks of it I'm going to have to conclude it's a successful one in terms of getting published.

Something else that always comes to mind is that readers of this age tend to be younger than the main character by a few years.  In this case the ideal reader is going to be nine or ten years old.  So what is an older elementary school reader going to get from this reading experience?  The idea that middle school is something to fear?  That you should be career minded by the age of eleven?  That all it takes is a YouTube account and a girlfriend with a homeschool network to become famous enough to take newspaper interviews and land on national television?

I suppose the other thing that eats at me is this idea of a bully as a stock character to be overcome without addressing the actual problems or solutions of bullying in the first place.  The bully as an obstacle, entrenched as a brick wall, with no attempt to understand the reasons beyond the superficial "he has no father" or "she's just insecure."  As we've seen in the news lately, though it's hardly new, the reasons for bullying and the way students and adults deal with it is far more nuanced than some kid offering up knuckle sandwiches or adults saying "There oughta be a law."

In How to Survive Middle School... Tommy Murphy is a kid whose name screams stock character from the rafters.  If it had been written that he was born in the back of an Irish bar, I wouldn't have been surprised.  "That kid's crazy mean" David's cousin Jack warns him, and apparently that's all you need to know.  Like Checkov's maxim that a gun in the first act will be fired by the third, an off-screen bully introduced at the beginning of the story is going to be nothing but a menace throughout.

At this level the bully ceases to exist as a character and simply becomes a device.  An antagonist without a narrative arc of their own who stands out like a two-dimensional cut-out in a crowded room reduces the other characters to little more than plot devices themselves.  Yes, a main character needs obstacles to overcome, but they need to be organic to the story, they need to rise from the characters desires and not simply a road block plonked into the middle of the road.

So I guess in this roundabout way I've decided that for David Greenberg the only thing that stands between him and fame is... nothing.  Because despite his mom having run off to be a hippie beet farmer, his best friend taking sides with the cardboard bully, and being liked by a new girl to the school, all of poor David's conflicts have nothing to do with whether or not he can achieve notoriety for his videos.