Seal of Disapproval

One of the books on my list of suggested YA novels is Dishes by Rich Wallace. New book, new to me author. It's just a skinny little thing, 145 pages hardcover (and evidently costing $16.99. Viking, not cool).

About halfway through the book, I had to put it down. It was getting on my nerves, and I had other things I needed to do. I updated my facebook status before going off to do my errands: "i think the YA novel i'm reading might be both homo- and fat-phobic."

After the soothing cupcake-and-sparkle of My Most Excellent Year, I picked Dishes  back up in the futile hope it would improve.

It didn't.


It's rare for me to say "what was the point of this book?" I am aware of subjectivity, of art for its own sake, of that elusive and nasty word "relatable" - there are many reasons for reading and writing, and I'm open to most of them. This one? 
Search me.
There's no obvious plot: Danny, our first-person narrator who has no real personality, is working as a dishwasher for the summer in Ogunquit, Maine. He's gotten the job via his mostly-absentee dad, Jack, who bartends at Dishes, the gay bar  in town. 
What we know about Danny: he likes running and keeping fit. He likes pretty girls. He has a vague, fleeting romantic streak that is poorly expressed and doesn't stick with him. "Sex I've had," he tells us, but never a girlfriend. Jack, his father, was seventeen when Danny was born; Jack mostly stays out of Danny's life. In Ogunquit, Jack is known as quite the man about town - always a different girl.


Danny meets a pretty waitress named Mercy. They flirt. They have sex. Hector, a gay waiter at Dishes, befriends Danny. They have meaningful conversations on the beach at night. Danny flirts a little, but asserts his hetero-ness over and over. 
Blah blah blah.


Homophobic:
we are always being reminded that Dishes is a gay bar! full of gay men! Hector and Chase, both young, attractive waiters, are gay! and, of course, they both lust after, and hit on, Danny. Who feels uncomfortable. Not because they're gay! Oh no. Danny's all open and tolerant. He just feels bad that he can't give them what they want.
What's really gross is Mercy. 
At a league softball game, after Mercy and Danny have had an awkward "date," she comes up and says "You're playing?...For the gay team?"
Danny: "we won this morning."
Mercy: "I'm impressed." Doesn't sound like it.


Mercy points out her brother, playing on the opposing team (firemen, of course). 
We're treated to another episode of Danny's flirting. Hector says "I was sure you were a switch-hitter," when Danny steps up to bat righty. Danny: "You wish." I flex a bicep and give him a very manly look.
Oookay, Danny.
Now we're treated to Mercy's brother, and his teammates, making antigay remarks. They make comments under their breath, "like the occasional faggot or pussy." 
Mercy asks: "Is everyone on the team gay except two of you?"
She's really interested in knowing who's gay and who isn't. 


Later, after the game, Mercy and Danny go for another late-night date/walk. She interrogates him about Hector, wanting to know - surprise - if he's gay. Then she brings her brother into it - he wants to know why Danny's interested in her, a girl. Danny, who by this point should be wondering why this girl is such an idiot, OR kicking her to the curb for being a homophobic schmuck, reminds her that he isn't gay. Mercy: "He[her brother] said he'd kill you if I got AIDS."


"I start to say something about Buddy being an asshole, but I remember in a hurry that he's her brother, so I don't. But I certainly say it loud and clear to myself."
To Mercy, he says nothing of significance, until he asks her if she has a problem with gay people (it's taken him over 70 pages to realize this question needs asking; neither Danny nor Mercy is the sharpest knife in the drawer. Maybe they deserve each other).
Mercy: "No. I have a problem with people who can't figure themselves out."
Danny, understandably, is confused, because Mercy makes no goddam sense.
She says " You're always hanging around with these...."
"These gay people."


Sigh. Still, Danny isn't bright enough to call it off, so he continues this inane, and offensive, conversation.
Mercy: "I don't call them queers or faggots like my brother does. This isn't homophobia. It's about whether I can trust you."


This is the point where any reasonably sane hetero guy with any life experience at all gives up the ghost, and runs as fast and as far as possible because clearly, Mercy's nuts. Psycho, as the kids say.
Her sob story: she dated this guy in college, who cheated on her. With a guy. Her ex-bf went back and forth between her and the guy. She tells Danny: "I went and got tested and sweated that out until the results came. I was clean, okay, but that was criminal, if you ask me."


Danny lets it go, because, hey, he's found a really pretty girl, and she seems to like him (he actually says this at some point in the text). And she lets him have sex with her in a disused storage room, so - great. It's unclear if he actually likes Mercy; it's hard to see why he would.
For the remainder of the book, Mercy keeps popping up at Dishes, checking up to make sure Danny isn't, you know, talking to any of those....those....gay guys. Who, of course, are just throwing themselves at Danny. And are really promiscuous to boot. Except the "marshmallow bouncer" Sal, upstairs, who can never seem to find a hook up. Every comment about Sal is actually about Sal's fatness - when he runs downstairs to break up a fight, everyone jokes about how the whole building shook, ha ha.
We're told various characters could "stand to lose some weight." That Danny's mom isn't cute anymore, she's "really overweight." And more fat jokes at Sal's expense. 


Wallace makes some vague efforts at cloaking the homophobia, but they're weak. Mercy saying she's not homophobic doesn't mean she isn't, which seems, temporarily, obvious to Danny. But he's pathetic too, and is sure all the gay boys want him, and mostly he just wants to get laid, so he lets it all go.  Hector, the only one in the book with the potential to have a soul, makes a few comments to the effect that you straight dudes are all the same - you all think all gay men are dying for you. Danny's retort: "well, weren't you?" Hector: sheepishly, "kinda."
Mercy's creepy jealousy seems to be her main character trait, and that's one I can't see many guys putting up with from the get-go. There are never any female "rivals" (her word for all those...those...gay guys at the restaurant), so we only ever see Mercy's paranoia deployed at gay men. And she is always very careful to identify them as gay - the bar as gay, people as gay, whatever. 
Suddenly, at the end, she's all lovey-dovey, when Hector and Sal get together. Danny, fat-phobic as he is, is puzzled - Sal's like three times the size of skinny Hector! Mercy suddenly becomes the font of wisdom and lovingkindness: "they're exactly the same inside. Why shouldn't two kind souls be together?"
It's funny how two pages earlier, you were shooting laser-eyes at one of those kind souls for daring to speak to this blank flop of a Danny.


Then everyone goes home happy, feeling like they've carved out their niches in the world.


No really. That's pretty much how it ends.


If this book is actually a peep inside the mind of an 18/19 -year old straight male, then I thank god I never could read minds. Danny's only criterion for girls, evidently, is prettiness; he seems totally comfortable with Mercy's creepy jealousy and her homophobia; he has no interests, no ambitions, no emotions. In fact, the most emotional scene in the book is one between Danny and Hector, when they briefly discuss their mutual longing for a real emotional, romantic connection with someone. Danny clearly means "possessive and sex-based" when he says "emotional, romantic connection," because that's what he gets with the ill-named Mercy. 


This is an icky, fat-phobic, insidiously homophobic, book that should never have been published by a major publishing house (Viking, I'm ashamed of you). The homophobia is all the worse because it's under the veneer of "acceptance." Danny and Mercy both mouth correctnesses, but undermine their words with their suspicions and persistent classifying every gay person they encounter. We don't see much conflict between straight and gay characters, because the heteros mostly hide their disdain for the gay fellows at the bar. The strife and tension is almost never made manifest. Instead, it's hazed over with a weak-ass happy ending that pairs of the fat guy and the sappy gay boy, leaving all the other promiscuous gay boys to each other, while Mercy and Danny face their emotionless, sterile - but sexual - future together. 


A grim read, indeed. 
Highly UNrecommended.

most excellent

The semester is almost over; classes ended last week. I'm in the lull before the grading storm - my students will turn in their finals at the end of this week, and I'll be grading like mad until 4 May, at which point grades are due and I will be free from this semester, which has been one of the most difficult, frustrating and work-overloaded of my life.
As a reward for finishing classes, I checked out two large bags full of YA books from the public library. I pestered the wonderfully brilliant and helpful child_lit listserv for recommendations, particularly asking for LGBTQ books, and books that adolescent boys actually read.
One of the suggested titles was Steve Kluger's My Most Excellent Year, a book and author I had never heard of before.
I read it yesterday.
Picked it up in the late afternoon; kept reading until I was finished, late at night.

Normally, I am not very sentimental, and my preferences tend to veer away from romance-driven plots, or any book featuring adorable small children. But somehow, Kluger's book (which is about both romance and an adorable small child) just worked for me. It is delightful. It was a joy to read. At one point, fairly late in the book, I had to go get some food; as I set the book down, I said [out loud, to an empty room] "I love these people!"
When I begin referring to characters as people, I have been won over.

Kluger's book is cleverly - if not originally - constructed as a series of interpolated texts: diary/essay excerpts from the three protagonists - Augie, TC and Alé, written, in their junior year of high school on the theme "My most excellent year"; chat messages; emails; newspaper articles, etc.

The plot is fairly simple, really: TC and Augie have been friends since first grade, since right after TC's mom died. The two boys adopt each other as brothers, and incorporate each other's families into the larger blend - to the point that the boys refer to each other's parents as "Mom" "Dad" or "Pop."  TC's family, going back generations, are devoted Red Sox fans; TC and his Pop share their obsessive love of baseball, specifically the Red Sox. Augie is an American-born Chinese, the only child of a delightfully progressive set of parents: mother writes entertainment reviews for the Boston paper - reviews which are the thin mask of her political activism  - and Dad owns a bookstore/cafe. Augie is also gay, though he "doesn't know it" at the book's beginning (though everyone else does, as we see from TC's writings, and from some particularly affecting emails between Pop and Augie's Dad). Enter Alé, fiercely smart and politically active daughter of the now-retired Mexican ambassador. Alé is beautiful and fierce and well-connected due to her parents' devotion to the diplomatic corps; she fails to ingratiate herself with her new classmates by mentioning attending functions with celebrities and "Bill and Hillary," who actually come to dinner at Alé's family's home. TC - cute, charming, likeable - falls for her right away. She takes one look at his cute, charming, likeable self and settles into disdain, dislike and contempt. She sits with Augie at lunch on her first day at the new school; he wants to pick her brain about encounters with such divas as Judi Dench and Liza Minelli.

Most of the book circles around the problem of TC trying to win over Alé, and Alé trying to resist his charms (which are, evidently, many; every character who gets to narrate in this book, with the exception of TC, swoons for him. I swooned for him before too long). But Augie also has his own set of problems, in the form of Andy - the growth of their relationship is fascinating and adorable and a little painful to watch. Augie's out, eventually, to his totally unsurprised family and friends, but Andy's definitely in, and the push-and-pull of Augie's truly flamboyant outness and Andy's considerably less flamboyant personality is great to watch. 

One of the things Kluger does really nicely in this book is something approaching subtlety, though this is hardly what I would call a subtle book. But the three protagonist-narrators reveal, repeatedly and throughout the novel, how their views of themselves are at odds with others' views of them. For instance, Augie tells us early on how all the boys copy TC's attitude and "look," turning their shirts backward when TC shows up one day with his worn backward. Many pages later, TC refers to this moment of unintentional, and unconscious, trend-setting; he recalls the day all the boys turned their shirts backward, worrying that they were making fun of him. 

Using multiple narrators to reveal different things about characters is not a new trick, but what Kluger does that I really admire is leave those things alone. They don't become plot points, they don't become Heartfelt Discussions Between Friends. We get Augie's version; we get TC's version. There's no further discussion, no further commentary. No talk from anyone about "gosh, I never looked at it from that perspective before."

Kluger uses this same trick to do a narrativized version of he said/she said, too, with TC's and Alé's narratives: each will comment on the same moment, with wildly varying interpretations. We get TC, bemoaning something he said, sure it's set him back months with Alé; pages later, we learn, from Alé, that those very words were the thing that finally broke her resistance to him. 

Because a student recently wrote about this, I was probably more aware of this than I normally would have been, but the relationship between Augie and Andy opens so smoothly, with so little comment, that it's almost shocking. My student wrote about the obnoxious plotline of "we're the only two gay guys here, let's fall in love" that often crops up (cf, Kurt and Blaine in Glee). Augie and Andy's relationship isn't at all staged that way; neither boy is openly gay at first (though Augie's a confessed diva who ends up directing and staging the freshman-year talent show). And there are no awkward discussions about "are you?" or "when did you know?" there's just two boys who totally have crushes on each other, hanging out, being awkward and shy because neither yet knows the other reciprocates, and because neither has had any experience with relationships yet. 

The most sentimental twist is the introduction of adorable Hucky Harper, a six-year-old deaf orphan (I know, right?!) who somehow conceives a passionate hero-worship of TC. This happens around a baseball diamond, because nothing in this novel gets far from either musicals or baseball (a delightful pairing, really) - Hucky watches from the sidelines and shakes his head yes/no at TC, telling him when he should swing the bat. TC ends up with an unreal batting average for games at which Hucky is present. Eventually, the two form a friendship - TC frantically begins learning American Sign Language, seeking extra help from a teacher whose mother was deaf, and who is thus fluent in ASL. There's not a lot of goopiness around Hucky in the text, either - he's adorable and knows how to use his adorableness to his advantage, getting extra hot chocolate and toys by pulling the sad face. The older kids are at once charmed and exasperated - they can see through his ploys, but fall to them anyway.

Hucky is another  moment when Kluger allows us to see TC and Augie differently, without making a fuss over it. TC tells us that Hucky reminds him of Augie, when TC first met Augie - off on the sidelines, alone, lonely. Much later, Augie mentions how strongly Hucky resembles TC right after TC's mother died. Each older boy is motivated partially by his sense of affection for his friend, a friend they see replicated in little Hucky. But they never discuss this with each other, or anyone else; it's simply a dribble of insight that Kluger releases into the novel for the reader to hold in her head.

TC never once does anything but take Hucky absolutely seriously. He doesn't spend much time "poor little tyke"ing; instead, he hangs out with Hucky, and works his ass off to learn ASL. Eventually, a plot unfolds around Hucky's love of Mary Poppins, and his devout wish that Mary Poppins will come and live with him. 

By the novel's end, a number of highly implausible things have happened, through the auspices of some rather deus-like characters: Clint, a secret service agent and one of Alé's closest friends from her childhood, and TC's Aunt Ruth, a member of the House of Representatives. Both Clint and Aunt Ruth are introduced and given personalities from the get-go; neither is dropped in miraculously when needed, so I give Kluger some credit here. 

But when the implausibles start piling up, rather than spoiling the novel, it somehow nudges it right to the line of magical realism, rather than unbelievability. And I think this, more than anything, is what I loved about this book: it has a definite aura of the same kind of almost-magic that good works of magical realism have. It's realist fiction, but there's just a faint flavor, an undertone, of the kind of fantasy that I'd call "fairy tale" in the most benign or positive sense of the word. But this magic is never made cloying or obnoxious; instead it feels like you're watching an improbable set of coincidences and circumstances naturally mesh together to produce a fantastic outcome. And sometimes, though rarely, these kinds of things do happen. 

My Most Excellent Year most reminded me, and strongly, of the equally wonder-full Will Grayson, Will Grayson, though for slightly younger readers, maybe. When the audience full of Will Graysons stands up to appreciate Tiny Cooper, you know, you just know, there's no way that could ever happen. Except for the tiny part of you that says: But why not? and knows that, really, there's nothing to prevent it from happening. And the larger part of you that says: this is wonderful, and I don't care if it could happen in real life or not. 

My Most Excellent Year is not the most literary, cerebral book I've read this year. It's not the best-written, or the most original, or the most shocking. It's not tackling huge social issues (although in a way, it is, quietly, without making a noise about doing so). But it is a fantastic read. The characters - all of them, TC, Augie, Alé, Lee, Andy, Pop, Hucky, Mom & Dad, Lori - are all complex and likeable and funny and kind and thoughtful without ever being so perfect as to be unbelievable or unlikeable. Even TC, who is so highly regarded by everyone (even, eventually, Alé), is saved from being planted on a pedestal by his own narration, which reveals him to be far more complex - insecure at times, wildly overconfident at others, occasionally arrogant, often baffled, a steadfast friend, a devoted baseball enthusiast, a very smart kid with a political bent, a 14-year-old boy with a massive, mostly unrequited, crush on a great girl.

The adjectives I keep coming back to are charmed and delightful - and those are no bad things to feel after reading a book. 

teenage dream: Glee and gay boys

I watch Glee with a mix of delight and frustration; it's inconsistent, it has an infuriating habit of starting, then dropping, plotlines, it has an obnoxious tendency toward "special" episodes of guest stars or themes that disrupt any momentum the show may have developed. But it also has some great secondary characters (ones who chew up that scenery like crazy), some thoughtful and captivating plotlines, and the best parent on TV.

A couple of weeks ago, Glee hit it out of the ballpark with "Never Been Kissed." I've been thinking about this episode a lot, and not just because it introduces a new location, an all-boys high school that I have been referring to as gay hogwarts (it's the blazers and the senior common room that got me).

THE moment of that episode is Kurt's visit to gay Hogwarts, when he meets adorable Blaine, who sings with the Warblers, the school glee club. In this delirious alternate-reality, the Warblers are "like, rockstars" who stage impromptu performances in the aforementioned common room. Blaine and his cohorts launch into a cover of Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream," sung to Kurt (played with even more than usual aplomb by the staggeringly fantastic Chris Colfer, about whom I cannot say enough in praise).

Watching the episode the first time, I kind of groaned; I don't really like the song and so that made the moment less charming than hoped for.
But then I read the post Tom and Lorenzo wrote about the episode. And ever since reading that post, I can't stop thinking about "Never Been Kissed."

TLo write:

Sure, teenage romantic fantasies are inherently silly to adults because they come from a place of such inexperience and naivete, but they serve an important function in the sexual development of kids. They train them to dream about the best possible outcome. Just as they've been trained their whole lives as to how to make that outcome happen.

Which is some incredibly astute theorizing on adolescent fantasies about romance.
And then, because they're amazing, TLo go on to say:

Teenagers see thousands of murders depicted onscreen by the time they reach 18 but most of them never see a boy kiss another boy or sing him a sweet love song. You want to prevent gay kids from killing themselves? Push for more scenes like the above. Giving a young gay boy the dream that someday Prince Charming will come and sing a love song to him? You cannot imagine. You simply cannot imagine how revolutionary such a thing is.

And even though I spend my days thinking about queerness, thinking about adolescence and childhood and queerness, even though I was more aware (and I sincerely hope, more sensitive) of queer issues when I was in high school - despite all that, TLo are absolutely right: I cannot imagine. I simply cannot imagine how revolutionary such a thing is.

Because of the way criticism works, though, and because I think about what I read, I am beginning to both imagine and understand how revolutionary such a thing is.
even if Glee falls apart again, even if the show goes downhill from here, I will be thoughtful and thankful for this episode that shows us - not in a jokey dream sequence, not in a way we giggle or sneer at - the teenage dreams of a gay boy.