godless

by Pete Hautman
Simon & Schuster 2004

A teen boy questions religion by playfully inventing one of his own based on a water tower, but things get out of hand as everyone who participates views the new religion differently. 

This is a book I've started several times over the last three years and only now finally managed to read it straight through.  It's no fault of the book or its author, I've simply had my attentions diverted elsewhere every time I tried to pick it up again.  This time I had a hard time putting it down.  Sometimes books have to find their moment.

Jason's tired of boring Catholicism.  It doesn't speak to him, and attempts to reach out with youth ministry only push Jason further toward atheism.  One day while helping his science nerd friend Shin hunt snails under the two water tower the boys run into Henry, a charismatic bully who would just as much read sci-fi as knock a kid down.  While musing over the ideas of religion Jason wonders if it isn't possible to start a new religion with the water tower as their god.  The idea, meant to provoke others, takes root in his friend Shin and Jason finds it serves his purposes to promote the new religion with Henry and a cute girl named Magda.  Jason's real desire is to climb to the top of the water tower and he wields his new position as founder of the religion as an excuse to get Henry to show him how to climb it and to perhaps win the attentions of Magda.

But Shin's obsession over creating the bible for the new religion push his rational thinking aside, and Henry's bad-boy behavior does more to win Magda to his side as the new religion fractures, and in the end the kids find themselves in trouble when they discover the can get inside the tower's reservoir and pollute the town's drinking water.

This idea of teens inventing their own religion as a way of exploring what exactly it means to have faith is both rich and organic – I was part of a group in high school who playfully did the same thing as a way to explore the elements of religion with which we found common ground.  In the end, of course, everyone reverted to the religion they were raised with, and the idea quickly lost its hold.  Jason comes out the other side of his ordeal in much the same way I did, which was to realize that having religion is different than having faith.  He clings to his invented religion because within it he can define right and wrong in a way that makes sense to him, in way that allows him to not simply accept the moral contradictions placed on members of many other organized religions.

Hautman does a nice job of keeping the theology light and allowing enough room for a reader to draw their own conclusions.  A good choice for the National Book Award for Young Readers back in 2005.

Stitches

by David Small
Norton 2009

This graphic memoir about the illustrator reinforces the stereotype of the suffering artist, but does a fine job doing so.

Small recounts the major periods of his life that center around his having cancer as a child that developed to the point where he had to have glands in his neck and half his vocal chords removed. His father, a radiologist, and his emotionally closed mother created an atmosphere of silence in the house that was oppressive and forced Small and his brother to find other forms of escape. For his brother it was playing drums, for Small it was escapism through art. It isn't until the end when Small has begun to make his own life, after years of therapy, that his world opens up beyond the suffocating world of his family. As a portrait of an alienated childhood, coupled with the horror of misdiagnosis, it's a wrenching story that is also full of poignant moments.

Growing up there were always images and stories of people who suffered for their art. Comedians may be the only other profession I know of where suffering is practically a prerequisite. Sure, artists can suffer through elective poverty as well as adverse childhood circumstances, but other creatives seem only to have misery for their bread.

Graphic memoirs are curious in that they tend to present a more stark world of childhood than most fiction. I can't say this is true across the board for all memoirs though I know people who cannot or will not read fiction because it lacks this verisimiltude. What is interesting is how graphic memoirs fare with younger readers and whether they make the same distinctions or if realistic fiction is as real to them due to lack of experience.

What instantly came to mind with Stitches was Alison Bechdel's Fun Home which came out a few years ago. That book had people singing its praises right and left, and recommending it for mature teen readers (due to content issues), but it didn't work for me as a book for non-adults. I couldn't really articulate why until reading Stitches. Both stories feature closeted gay parents and the confusion of not understanding their parent's behavior until the narrator was older, but despite Small's more menacing treatment by his parents his self-portrait comes across better because he personalizes the narrative. Bechdel, a cartoonist, delivers a narrative that delivers a story but very little emotion; Small, an illustrator, conveys the emotions and deals more directly with the symbolism that comes from literally having no voice. Without understanding the child protagonist and their emotion we are left with a child's view of the adult world intended for adults to siphon meaning. Inexperienced younger readers are otherwise adrift in the experience.

I think we're still in the Wild West days of graphic novels for teens and younger readers. The medium grew up outside the world of children's publishing and has yet (if it ever will be) incorporated into the fold. Added to that, the graphic memoir is a form of creative non-fiction with its own set of rules that also tends to fall outside the purview of what is generally created specifically for children. Non-fiction for non-adults is still somewhat viewed as materials for instruction and not necessarily enjoyed in their own right. Graphic novels tend to have a higher profile because of their accessibility (i.e. they look like comics, which makes them an easier sell to kids) but I think this puts an unfair burden on them.

I also happen to believe that both Stitches and Fun House were latched onto as books suitable for a younger audience simply because their protagonists are children. Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones features a teen girls who is raped and murdered and narrating from the beyond, but this book was never marketed for younger audiences; if it had been made into a graphic novel I'm fairly certain it would have been. This is an area that deserves more discussion. We either need to open up what we consider to be acceptable material for children, or we need to stop assuming that graphic novels with children as protagonists are automatically suitable because the are "cartoons."

Norton created a dust-up last fall by submitting Stitches for consideration of the National Book Award for Young Readers. Was it because, as some suggest, because they thought they had a better "in" by not competing with novels in the adult category? Because Americans do not take graphic novels seriously as literature? Because Small is primarily known as an illustrator of children's books? No matter, it was a shrewd move for the attention it received but it further muddied the waters of what is or should be considered a graphic novel for teens.

The Spectacular Now

by Tim Tharp
Knopf 2008

(cross-posting today at Guys Lit Wire)

It's an odd, almost unsettling experience to finish reading a book, fire up the internet to see what sort of buzz the book has, and then discover that almost simultaneously the book was just named as a finalist for the National Book Award. That's exactly what happened a few weeks back, in one of those moments when you wonder if the universe is trying to tell you something important.

Cue eerie music.

Sutter Keely is a charmer. A senior without a care, he is an unrepentant alcoholic living in the now, willing to embrace the weird. The only problem is that his beautiful fat girlfriend Cassidy is getting tired of his shtick. He's late and constantly drinking Seagam's and 7-Up; he's fun but irresponsible; he's a good time at parties but he's selfish. When the last straw comes and Cassidy finally dumps him Sutter figures she'll eventually come back around to his wannabe Dean Martin swagger.

The problem is that Cassidy is looking down the road at life beyond high school and Sutter isn't there. And not just Cassidy, all of Sutter's friends seem intent on trying to figure out what comes next. After years of floating without a care Sutter doesn't see the big deal, or the need to plan beyond his current buzz. So when Cassidy shows how serious she is by picking up with a new boyfriend, Sutter redirects his energies toward hooking up his best friend Ricky with a girl of his own.

Wallowing drunk, he is found passed out on a lawn early one morning by Aimee, one of those withdrawn girls everyone walks all over. Taking her on as his own special project to help her grow a spine and realize her inner self, Sutter finds himself promising to take her to the prom, officially declaring her his girlfriend, and knowingly leads her on in an effort to build self esteem. But Aimee isn't like the other girls he's dated, willing to hang out with a party boy until it's no longer fun. Aimee has fallen in love -- deep, hard, and seriously -- and slowly begins to entangle Sutter into her plans and dreams, into their combined future together. She could be the girl Sutter has always needed, the one he never realizes he'd always wanted, a girl who could change him for the better.

If Sutter doesn't first succeed in dragging her into his own dead-end spiral.

Will Sutter reform, confront his deadbeat father and clean up his drinking? Or will Aimee become his sloppy, drunken sidekick, the girl who abandons her dreams of college and NASA to stay by the side of the only guy that has ever bothered to give her the time of day?

Up until the final pages there's no way of knowing how this is going to turn out. Tharp does a nice job of having the characters remain true to themselves in such a way that every meeting is a quiet trial of wills. When Cassidy continues to get together with Sutter on Thursday afternoons after they break up -- and with the full knowledge of their new dating partners -- Cassidy makes no bones about the fact that she will probably always be drawn to Sutter's bad boy antics but cannot let him back into her life as anything more than a buddy. This suits Sutter just fine, but his unspoken longing for Cassidy seeps in and pushes him that much farther along. He's like a comet that gains velocity in her orbit, then spins wildly out into the universe seemingly with a lack of control, but he's always drawn back into her gravitational orbit when he reaches the outer limits with Aimee.

Tharp pulls a nifty trick in giving us the portrait of a charming young drunk well on his way toward becoming a pathetic one. But he doesn't judge -- Sutter's friends are more than willing to do that, and they do it with a large dose of tough love despite the apparent futility of their gestures. There were moments when I was almost afraid Tharp was romanticizing teen alcoholism in trying to present a realistic portrait, but Sutter's own aimlessness undermines anything remotely cool about being drunk. It plays as humor when Sutter goes to his sister's house for dinner and nearly sets himself on fire when he tries to secretly smoke a joint in her closet, but Sutter's empty apologies and quick judgments about his family members make the laughter ring hollow.

I wasn't as impressed with Tharp's last outing, The Knights of Hill Country, because there was something about it that felt stale. This time out Tharp returns to his Oklahoma soil with an approach that feels slightly on edge. Not edgy, but teetering at the brink of excess and charm -- much like its main character. It is unflinching in its handing of teen drinking, almost casual, but equally sober about what sort of dead end that leads to.

I don't think it's necessarily undeserving the National Book Award, but given the competition I'm having a hard time seeing this pull through as the winner. Then again, perhaps the universe was indeed trying to tell me something. We'll find out soon enough.