September 2010 Archives

My choice book for this week was Walter Dean Myers' Monster. I knew I wanted to read this book right away when I saw it on the list, simply because Walter Dean Myers has long had a reputation for being controversial. The only other book of his that I've read, Fallen Angels, is #24 on the American Library Association's list of 100 most frequently challenged books of the 1990s due to its gratuitous use of profanity, racial slurs, and gruesome wartime violence, so as a connoisseur of controversial books I knew I wanted to read Monster from the moment I saw it as an option for the class.

Monster is the story of the trial of Steve Harmon, a sixteen-year-old black kid from Harlem who is charged as an adult for being an accessory to a robbery/murder. He faces a lengthy jail sentence, and possibly the death penalty. Did he do it? Was he just in the wrong place at the wrong time? Neither Myers nor Steve ever definitively says one way or the other, and that's what makes the book interesting. Since it's never made explicitly clear if Steve is guilty or innocent, the reader is left to draw his or her own conclusions. The prosecution labels Steve and his fellow defendants "monsters," a hefty accusation. Steve is struck by the surreal quality of the trial, comparing it to a movie. Indeed, the entire story is told from Steve's perspective in the form of diary entries and scenes from a screenplay (Steve is a budding film student), adding his own unique outlook on events in the trial as they unfold. Most memorably (at least in my opinion), a voiceover using Steve's own voice cautions him as he sits in his prison cell, trying to hide his tear-streaked face under a blanket, that this is reality, he can't hide or run from it, and must deal with it as best he can.

Monster raises a lot of interesting questions about the American justice system and the route that youthful offenders take through it. Steve is a kid from the rough-and-tumble (and historically black) New York City neighborhood of Harlem, a strike against him already. Myers' choice of where Steve's race and where he grew up was, at least in my mind, 100% deliberate. As much as I hate to say it, white Americans tend to view ethnic enclaves like Harlem as bad neighborhoods that one would do well to stay away from, when in reality they are living examples of the vicious cycle of broken homes, drug abuse, crime, and incarceration. Living in a rough neighborhood doesn't automatically make you a bad person, and it's hard to break out of an environment like that when you don't have the means, but it seems like the prosecution and the jury has condemned Steve already just because of his background. There's an overwhelming of sense of "guilty until proven innocent" here--that, since Steve has been arrested in connection with the crime, he comes from a bad area of town, he's black, and the arresting officers and witnesses wouldn't lie about the events of the crime, he must be guilty. I see a lot of this going around now with the Ground Zero Mosque situation in New York. People who are against the mosque's construction (actually, it's not even a mosque, it's an open community center that happens to have Muslim prayer rooms) have a mindset that goes something like this: "Muslims destroyed the World Trade Center and killed 3000 people on 9/11. There was no denunciation of the attacks from the Muslim world"--actually, there were, but that's what you get when Fox is the #1 news network in the country--"so therefore all Muslims must either be terrorists or terrorist sympathizers." Never mind the fact that Muslim-American citizens were killed when the towers collapsed, these people think that you have to prove you're an American first, Muslim second, and that the onus is firmly on Muslim-Americans to "prove their loyalty," so to speak. But how can they do that, when conservative white America has already socially and ideologically convicted them of treason and terrorism? Monster is a lot like that: even if the reader doesn't know whether or not Steve is guilty, it's more likely than not that he's a victim of circumstance, and those sitting in judgment have convicted him in their minds as a proxy of the overall problem.

I'll get down off my soapbox now and talk about the book itself for a bit. Myers' use of a screenplay/diary format serves two purposes. Not only is it a unique presentation of the story, it also allows the reader insight into Steve's deepest thoughts (and there are a lot, considering he's on trial for his life). Steve's choice of a screenplay to keep a record of the events of the trial, his observations about it, and his reflections on his own past, future, and possible fate make him both believable and sympathetic. Myers makes Steve's guilt ambiguous, and Steve himself never cops to anything. But he's a sixteen-year-old film student on trial for murder who shuttles back and forth between a forbidding courthouse full of biased white people and a maximum-security prison full of hardened criminals. My heart went out to him immediately.

The screenplay format also affords Steve the opportunity to act as his own conscience, voice of reason, or whatever the situation demands. In the very first scene, he explains that the best time to cry in prison is when a fight breaks out, so that way no one can see your tears and beat you for being weak. Later, he tries to hide his head under a blanket to shield his eyes from the harsh realities of the cellblock, but a voiceover in the screenplay--in my mind I read it with Steve's voice--tells him that hiding under a blanket will not change anything; he is still in prison, no matter what he does, and he must deal with it. He's being charged as an adult, after all, so he must deal with his problems like an adult.

Steve's screenplay is his way of coping with his current situation, but it also functions as a mirror for his life. He ruminates on what he's done or not done that brought him to this point, and he tries to make sense of who he is and what will become of him. His father won't look at him. The jury is not disposed to acquit him. His lawyer isn't confident of their success. The prosecution wants the death penalty. All that presses down on Steve's mind, and the screenplay allows him to make sense of it all on paper. However, the reader never finds out what his ultimate conclusion is. The book ends with his acquittal, and even though he walks, Steve still can't answer the question, "Who am I?" The reader can trace his evolution throughout the story, but without a final realization, the reader is left wondering whether Steve can reclaim his life and move on, or become just another street thug like the prosecution accused him of being.

Our required book this week was Looking for Alaska by John Green. I did a little research on this book before I read it, and was not happy to learn that protagonist Miles "Pudge" Halter, an unpopular teenager with a penchant for the profound, has often been compared to Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and one of my most hated literary characters ever. It would be unfair to say that I didn't give Looking for Alaska a chance based on this discovery, however, because as it turns out, Miles is a much cooler character than Caulfield ever was. Yes, it's true that they're both disaffected teenagers living in an indifferent and even overtly hostile world, but instead of sitting around whining about his situation and elevating himself above others like Caulfield, Miles takes an active role in getting back at his tormentors, and in turn finds out a little about himself.

It has been said that Looking for Alaska is a landmark of realistic fiction for young adults, and certainly there's some truth to this statement. Miles and his friends get drunk, smoke, dabble in sex and drugs, and pull ever more daring pranks on rival students. A lot of people seem to be really uptight about kids reading this book, however, due to its explicit content. Now, I'm going to deviate from a discussion about the book proper for a bit and go on a little rant about this. I've never understood why some adults feel the need to denounce any book, especially one written for young adults, as "disgusting" or even "pornographic," as Looking for Alaska was. The sex scene was, in reality, pretty unsexy, and it serves to develop the book's themes of coming of age and self-discovery (Miles is, after all, on his own little quest to find Rabelais' "Great Perhaps"). So why did adults freak out?

The simple answer is, they're way too overprotective. Kids in the age range for which Looking for Alaska is written don't want to read about the Care Bears or whatever, because they can't relate. Adolescence is a confusing, frustrating, often scary time, and kids that age want to read something that reflects the way they feel and see the world. In short, they're growing up, and children's literature, though it certainly served a purpose earlier in their lives, just doesn't cut it anymore. John Green knows this, and wrote Looking for Alaska with an eye to self-discovery without pulling any punches. We've all been there: the awkward first sexual experience, the first time you got drunk/high and the rush of knowing you could get caught at any time but doing it anyway, and the first time you realize that you are largely in control of your own destiny. Adults who call for a book like Looking for Alaska to be banned seem to have forgotten what it was like to be young and confused. My dad is a great example of this. For a frame of reference, I'm 22. When my dad was my age, he was newly married and working full-time. I'm almost positive he hasn't read a book for pleasure in his entire life, and he probably hasn't read a true novel (not a technical manual or a textbook) at all since he was in high school. Basically, my dad grew up way too fast, and that experience is reflected in his attitudes. I'm the exact opposite: I'm free-spirited, I'm not attached to anyone at the moment, and I had an extremely confusing and frustrating time growing up. In fact, I'd say I'm still growing up. People like my dad and people like me will never see eye-to-eye on something like Looking for Alaska, simply because people like him have gotten too wrapped up in being an adult, and people like me are still in touch with that awkward teenager that's still inside us even years after we come of age.

On a more scholarly level, Looking for Alaska is, as I said earlier, predominantly about self-discovery. Miles' explanation of why he leaves home--to "seek a Great Perhaps," a phrase usually attributed to Francois Rabelais as his last words--sets the tone for the entire novel. His hijinks with the Colonel and Alaska lead him down a path of realization: that his "Great Perhaps" entails a rebellious streak that he didn't know existed within himself. Of course, Miles can't know exactly what his Great Perhaps is; if he did, it wouldn't be a Perhaps. Alaska, through her self-destructive behavior in constant pursuit of an escape from "this labyrinth of suffering" and her eventual death, lead Miles to realize that maybe self-destruction is the ultimate answer to the Great Perhaps, which in turn allows him to live his life as he wants, without fear of failure or regret. Alaska is a walking, talking self-fulfilling prophecy. She finds the answer to her own Great Perhaps: that life is painful and the only way to escape it is to die, even if Miles tries to convince her that "we need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken."

"I believe now that we are more than the sum of our parts," Miles writes at the end of the book. He is alluding not only to Alaska's temperamental and constantly changing personality, but also to his belief in her, that she had the ability to rise above herself and her wild and self-destructive tendencies. Alaska's way out of the "labyrinth of suffering" was death, her answer to the Great Perhaps one of hopelessness an inevitability. But Miles knows now that death is only one path. The Great Perhaps is not a prize to be found at the end of the labyrinth, and the path one takes to get there is not a means to an end. Rather, the Great Perhaps is its own pursuit; it is both prize and quest. The key to knowledge, enlightenment, happiness, or whatever one thinks the Great Perhaps is, is the pursuit of same. Essentially, in order to be happy, one must seek happiness out. Alaska's outrageous behavior shows a fundamental lack of understanding of that concept, but through her, Miles is able to discover it for himself.

Looking for Alaska is not just about Miles' quest to shake his unpopular reputation, discover himself, and get the girl. It's also a deep exploration of why people act the way they do. Everyone has a motivation, everyone has their own Great Perhaps which they seek out their entire lives, whether they know it or not. Though Alaska eventually reached the end of her search for death, she failed to see the big picture, which Miles could only understand after her passing: that there's no point in being "terrified into paralysis" by one's search. Alaska was so intimidated by the "labyrinth of suffering" (her guilt over her role in her mother's death, specifically) that she chose to give up. But that's precisely why the labyrinth exists in the first place: everyone goes through it, and it's how we deal with the suffering along the way that each person finds out who they truly are. Miles discovered that he was much stronger than he thought, and in my opinion, that was the point John Green was trying to make to his adolescent readers. It doesn't matter who you are or in what circumstances you live; as long as you keep your eye on the prize--the Great Perhaps--you'll find it simply through the virtue of your search.