33 Snowfish (by Adam Rapp)

After having read 3 Adam Rapp YA novels, so far there are a couple of constants. Thematically, violence and abuse are always key elements in his novels. Stylistically, on the other hand, Rapp is almost Faulknerian in his insistence on voice.

In an almost naturalistic way Rapp shows the influence one’s social conditions and environment have on the human character. And when one grows up in a highly violent environment, violence invariably begets violence. However, it must be made clear that there is absolutely no gratuity to the violence you encounter in 33 Snowfish. Boobie, Custis and Curl behave in a way that appears incredibly crude and cruel, and it really is, but it’s not violence in the “Fuck you, you fucking fuck” Joe Pesci kind of way. These kids behave the way they behave because they have had to grown up in situations that are so tough, so completely caught off from any form of human decency, a world in which violence, brutality and abuse are the norm rather than the exception. In a 2000 interview with Adam Rapp, Ann Angel aptly describes Rapp’s characters as “naively innocent adolescents caught in violent and emotionally isolated places”. The fact that someone like Custis – a 10-year-old! – is almost “naively violent”, in his acts as well as in his use of language, is what makes a lot of what happens to him so tragic: he’s never known anything else.  In that same interview Rapp says: “I am not interested in romanticizing or sensationalizing violence. I am interested in honoring what I know to be true.”

In the end though, especially Custis’s behavior is just that: the way he behaves. And it is a triumph of the resiliency of the human mind and spirit that he can get to a point where redemption seems possible after all that he has seen and done. However, we don’t need to be naïve or mistaken, either. Kids like Custis don’t all make it. Custis is boy who escaped from his pedophile kidnapper. Boobie is an arsonist who probably also killed his parents in his latest act, after which he just takes his baby brother to sell on the streets.  Curl is a 15-year-old drug addicted prostitute. There’s no way all three can beat the odds and Boobie and Curl’s stories show us the other options, both of which are as realistic as Custis’s chance at salvation is.

Style-wise, 33 Snowfish is not all that different from The Children and the Wolves (in which you also get three voices) or Punkzilla. In 33 Snowfish we get Custis (whose narrative dominates the novel), Curl and Boobie (whose voice consists of drawings only, drawings that are as basic and nihilistic as Boobie’s own acts and intentions). Language and voice are ways for Rapp to explore the world of his characters and both almost create the story. Stream-of-consciousness is then the almost logical narrative device to carry a character’s voice, giving the novel a certain cadence and musicality that is almost unique in YA literature today. It should come as no surprise that Rapp refers to William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying in the motto of 33 Snowfish. Like Faulkner, Rapp seems to believe that a true exploration and evocation of a character’s situation can only be done from the inside, not from a detached impersonal point of view (as could be equally tempting considering the subject matter). We get as close to Custis, Curl and Boobie as narratively possible, which is why in the end – despite the horrible things that these characters do and say – a reader can “sympathize” with them. Not pitying them or feeling sorry for them, though, but understanding them and thinking and feeling with them. Custis, for instance, is never guilty of self-pity (so the reader shouldn’t be either), but he acts and reacts in accordance to what he encounters in life, and as it just happens, what he encounters in life is painful, cruel, even nauseating.

In another interview way back in 2000, Adam Rapp claims to “admire Cormac McCarthy’s phenomenal gift of language”, but she shouldn’t be worried. He’s blessed plenty with that gift himself. As for the cat, I think I’m ready to read that Faulkner book again now.

Ask the Passengers (by A.S. King)

Dear Astrid,

I just wanted to send you this letter to tell you I got your message loud and clear! If any other person had said everything you said, it would sound corny as hell, but because it’s you, I know it came straight from your heart and that’s just something I love about you. Come to think about it, I know I don’t say it enough, so I might as well do it now, so here goes…

I love you because you’re just such a complicated and conflicted human being. At first when you told me that you sent your love to the passenger flying above, I was skeptical. Actually, not really skeptical, but more sad for you. Didn’t you have people around you to love? Who loved you back? What a sad sad planet if a 17-year-old awesome girl has to send her love to total strangers. I know you told me you feel estranged from your parents, your friends even, heck, even estranged from yourself, but this love sending thing, it sounded too Twin Peaks… But now that I know you better, it’s just who you are, you know? You don’t need it (even though you totally do, dude, hence this letter!), so you’re just giving it away! I couldn’t do it. You’re bigger than the people around you, and definitely bigger than me. Some people would call you messed up (hell, I did too before I knew you!), but they’re just wrong. You’re not messed up, you’re real and selfless, and all-accepting. Your spirit is indomitable, which is maybe what I most love about you.

I love you because you know what a hard thing it can be to make decisions, because you realize that even though these decisions really are about you and nobody else’s business really… they’re not just affecting you, but also the people around you. Some decisions need time. You need time. You need the time to make mistakes, you need to get lost, and then you need to find again, you definitely need to find the exit to the cave on your own and you have to decide whether you want to go back into the cave or not. And I want to give you the time to figure things out for yourself. You should never be pushed into something you don’t want to. I know how friends and  (especially!) parents can be, though. I mean, when you’re a teenager, you’re convinced your parents just won’t get it – Hello, they’re parents = nag, nag, nag = job description! So you want at least your friends to understand what you are talking about or, in your case, not talking about. You hope they will at least give you the time to become the person you really are. But when they start pressuring you into saying, doing and thinking in a certain way, the urge to just explode must be overwhelming.

And when you explode, you do it so well! I love you for that! All the time you behave so entirely noble, not wanting anything in return for the love you give people, but once you’ve reached that point of no return, phew… you just have to let it out, right? I loved the way you called your dad on his behavior. Such a great conversation with your dad… that definitely must have taken a lot of guts. Also, I have to say that I still love you despite the fact that you called your mom a bitch then. I know, I know, she really did behave like a bitch around you – I mean what’s up with the Mommy and Me thing, right? – but it’s still your mom, you know? I guess it’s a big no no to say that moms have favorites. But they so do. Anyway, I get the frustration. I felt your frustration, all those thousands of miles away, I felt it. Doesn’t she see how hard her behavior is on you?

I love you because at 17, you’ve totally figured out the boxes!  Wow! You know that my own peers haven’t figured out yet that boxes make you small? Not you, though, you defy the boxes. Even Kristina and Dee seem to need the boxes, but they just want to contain you again and in their world there are still fixed forms and their boxes are just as rigid as the “defined normalcy” they’re fighting in their own complicated way.  Actually,  that reminds me of this girl, Louise, I heard talking today. She’s just 2 years younger than you are, and smart as hell. She was in her English class, giving a presentation about “Love Your Body” (totally boss topic, btw!), and she’d been researching all of these advertisements, but the one that really caught her eye was this totally sexist ad with a caption like “Even a woman can do it” or some such nonsense, and she went into this long (but eloquent) rant about the word “even”. She rocked, dude! She got it too. About the boxes, I mean.

I love you, Astrid, because you are totally grounded in reality yet aren’t afraid to dream. You know that you are really going somewhere. I mean, motion is possible and you don’t take bullshit from these philosophers saying that there is no such thing (killer Humanities class, btw, you definitely have to send over your notes!). Love how you used their arguments to prove your own point and to rouse discussion !

Lastly, Astrid, I share your complete distrust of gossip – small town or big town. Gossip – like boxes – makes you small. And it doesn’t represent who you really are, just another label! I hate it when that happens. People just always assume they know everything about you – sometimes / often even without actually having talked to you.

So anyway, I’m really thankful you sent me your love. I just had to respond!  Here’s me sending you some love too!

Love,

Ringo the Cat

PS. A.S. King, dude, I totally love you too because each and every time I read your books, you do something that so few authors can. Not only do you make me not want to stop reading, but your books start up a dialogue – so Socratic of you . I love that you make me think and respond!  And more than anything, you’re probably the only author who speaks to my brain and my heart with equal ferocity.

And I love your disregard for boxes too. I know “they” often call what you write “magical realism”, or they will call Ask the Passengers an Issues-novel, or an LGBT-novel. Whatever.  There’s just no other author who does what you do. You are right: you just write books. But what books they are!

Life: An Exploded Diagram (by Mal Peet)

Even though the cat was slightly underwhelmed by previous Mal Peet work (Tamar), she was lured to Life: An Exploded Diagram by Patrick Ness who blurbed it and called it “so good, you almost want to keep it a secret.” This blurb makes it all the more ironic that Ness’ own A Monster Calls lost to Peet’s Life: An Exploded Diagram in the first round of this year’s Battle of the Books. Myracle was right in calling that both are just astonishing books, but in the cat’s own personal battle of the books, yes, I do think I would agree with her, because, to quote Lauren Myracle:  “Mal Peet? He. Is. Amazing! Shit, man, shit,[…]”. Yeah, I couldn’t get it more eloquent than that either…

Life: An Exploded Diagram actually starts like a family chronicle, but eventually spans 2 oceans and almost 60 years in the life of Clem Ackroyd. Deftly showing how supra-national events like the Cuban Missile Crisis can influence a couple of lusty Norfolk teenagers, it is both cleverly construed and a joy to read. Life initially has an omniscient narrator (who will turn out to be Clem) tell the tale of how in WWII a Nazi pilot was the unfortunate cause of a boy’s premature birth.  The reader first thinks it’s Ruth and her mother Win who will be at the center of this novel, but this is actually the narrator’s roundabout way of letting us now that all things happen for a reason, and that reason may both be trivial and earth-shattering.  Before we get to 1962 and the infamous Cuban Missile Crisis, it seems we have already read an entire book about Clem’s family. There’s both nostalgia and humorous self-awareness here, as Mal Peet is clearly acutely conscious of the rural Norfolk area, both before and during 1962, also introducing us to the Norfolk dialect while he’s at it.

When Clem and Frankie, the only daughter of a wealthy landowner, engage in their lust affair, halfway through the novel, Peet embarks on another tour de force: switching narrative points of view, becoming a fly on the wall during important political and military meetings (Doves and Hawks in JFK’s war room), switching back and forth between Clem & Frankie on the one hand and JFK & Khrushchev on the other hand, all the while explaining about the ifs and hows and whys of the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis and how the scare of the Cold War affected the decisions of people thousands of miles away.

At the same time of being better than any history text book ever could be, Life: An Exploded Diagram is also an incredibly warm book about a boy and a girl’s sexual awakening in the 1960s. The romance is the stuff of Shakespeare: poor Clem, rich Frankie, families are not to know… we all know the cliché,  but it works so well here, because Mal Peet juxtaposes different sorts of relationship. There is not just the relationship between Clem and Frankie (though it’s obviously at the heart of the novel), there’s also the way that Ruth & George interact (or not), the way that Win thinks about sex. I’m sure many  adult readers will also get a kick out of the way Clem describes how he got to know about sex, and how “You Learn Nothing About Sex From Books, Especially If They’re By D. H. Lawrence”. Yes, this was the 1960s in rural England.

Life: An Exploded Diagram is about love and war. The stuff that divides and unifies. It’s about relationships, it’s about community, it’s about history. Life: An Exploded Diagram is a truly epic book: in scope and in language. This makes it all the more banal that apparently so many people want to focus on ‘intended audience’. After reading so many “YA” books, “YA” reviews, “YA” blogs, it still astounds me that people can say, “Yeah, yeah, great book, but it’s not really “YA”, is it?” Err…ok, so how should I read that statement? Is it because books like Life: An Exploded Diagram, or books like Octavian Nothing, or books like The Book Thief, or… are so obviously books with literary ambitions (what a dirty, dirty word) that they fall outside of the scope of “YA”? Color me dumbfounded, because I didn’t realize it was an exclusive club. Anyway, Life: An Exploded Diagram: awesome book! If you like romance, if you like history, if you like language… then get reading now!

King Dork (by Frank Portman)

King Dork came to the cat by way of Forever Young Adult, whose writers compiled a Bad-Ass Guide to YA Books. The only author I had never heard of was Frank Portman, whose 2006 debut novel King Dork, has also been optioned as a movie, scheduled to be directed by Matt Piedmont of SNL fame. The fact that Frank Portman was virtually unknown to the cat says more about her own inaptitude than anything about King Dork’s lack of brilliance. Because brilliant, it is! King Dork is that forgotten gem, the book you wish you could read for the first time over and over again. It’ll have you snicker at its inappropriate humor one sentence and it’ll have you grin like a dork the next.

Tom Henderson is King Dork, a.k.a. Chi-Mo, short for a nickname given to him by “normal” meanies at school, after a career guidance test, concluding he should consider a career in the clergy – you figure out what it means… Tom is more than a bit of a loner at school, his only friend being the guy who happened to stand next in line to him alphabetically – Sam Hellerman. Luckily, they more or less have the same interests, namely being in a band (but not actually playing any instruments…yet) and continuously finding better band names (Tennis with Guitars really stood out, though Balls Deep does have a certain je ne sais quoi as well) and kick-ass song titles, the most infamous of which turns out to be “I Saw Mr. Teone Checking Out Kyrsten Blakeney’s Ass!”, a song which will lead Tom to unraveling the mystery of his dead father and his book collection (one of which is of course – how could it not be – The Catcher in the Rye).

King Dork is the type of book that will undoubtedly get a lot of anti-votes when it comes down to voting for the most politically correct YA novel… Many will ask the question whether this is really such an appropriate book for teenagers, what with the quasi-gratuitous blow jobs and all, or the not so concealed references to teens using other teens to get their hands of their mother’s prescription drugs.  I wouldn’t say the book is inappropriate for teens because of this particular content, though I do think that a lot on teens will not get all the music and other references in the book, which is a damn shame of course, but which could be a huge incentive for them to start doing some cultural investigations of their own – hey maybe their parents’ collections aren’t that tragically uncool after all… And it’s of course all of that plus the utter satire and self-consciousness of the protagonist that makes King Dork a snicker-fest for the not so Young Adults amongst us.

Something that is of and for all ages, though is the fact that Tom Henderson is an all-out rebel against the conventions of high school life, which in his case is personified by the importance The Catcher in the Rye plays in his high school career. For Tom, the sanctity of The Catcher in the Rye is something for people who grew up in the sixties, like his teachers, his parents, LBT (Little Big Tom, his stepfather) etc. and whatever made Holden Caulfield such a rebel/role model for that generation is what makes Holden, err… phony for Tom Henderson’s generation.  Tom Henderson conveniently mocks the whole tradition of self-referential teenage literature throughout his whole stream-of-consciousness rants, crossing over to flat-out parody and satire, but at the same time he manages to be damn entertaining, adding not just entertainment, but a dash of mystery and a whole lot of (un)resolved sexual tension between himself and fake-mod girl called (or not?) Fiona.

King Dork is deliciously incorrect: it’s for self-proclaimed nerds (Nerdfighters, John Green blurbed this book!), there’s teenage cruelty (how could there not, it deals with the tribe called high school teens), the girls are either sinners or they’re saints (nothing in between), the guys are either weird, dorks and sex-obsessed,  or evil, popular and sex-obsessed. And yet, this book is hilarious, absurd and nothing short of the book you have to read when you are 16… come to think of it, but Tom Henderson could very well stand next in line to Holden Caulfield as the guy you wish you’d known way back in high school, and Frank Portman managed to map the confusion that identifies adolescence much in the same way as J.D. Salinger, or even more recent Stephen Chbosky. Even despite the slightly abrupt ending, this is a five-star book!

The Fault in Our Stars (by John Green)

In probably the most anticipated book of 2012 – the release date of The Fault in Our Stars was even moved up 5 months  just because nerdfighters were waiting for it so badly – John Green yet again asks some truly universal and existential questions about love, life and the human condition but manages to transcend his typical John Green-ness, by letting in an abundance of genuine emotions and showing a personal and sensitive side to his writing hitherto not revealed in his previous work.