Very Far Away from Anywhere Else by Ursula K. Le Guin
Recommended.

I stumbled across Ursula Le Guin’s 1976 realistic young adult novel Very Far Away from Anywhere Else while searching for cheap ebooks. Amidst a sea of self-pubbed young adult paranormal, this quiet title stood out—and stood out even more because I’d never heard of it. I’m a fan of Le Guin, as both a writer and a human being, but I never knew that she dabbled in realist YA.

But dabble she did, and Very Far Away . . . , while more a novella than a novel-proper by modern YA standards, is an insightful, painful, and spot-on look at growing up smart in the suburbs. Our narrator is Owen, a lonely senior in high school who dreams of heading off to MIT. But those dreams are nearly derailed by his friendship and subsequent romance with a girl named Natalie, a talented, driven, and career-minded musician.

It’s a bit difficult to talk about the plot here, because, in a way, there isn’t one: this is simply Owen’s account of his last year in high school, stretching from his birthday (when, to his horror, his father buys him a car he doesn’t want) to his departure from his hometown. The narration here isn’t a standard one. Instead, Le Guin utilizes a frame story where Owen is speaking straight into a tape recorder. This means that large chunks of time are glossed over, and many events (including conversations I might have liked to see up-close) are repeated via breezy summary.

All that’s fine, though, because there are really two reasons to read Very Far Away from Anywhere Else, and neither of them are plot-related.

The first is because of the voice. Le Guin does an effective job of capturing the voice a sensitive, intelligent, but still clearly male character. Owen is undoubtedly adolescent (such as when he recounts his decision to fall in love with Natalie), but also empathetic and astute. Even when he’s subtly contrasting the life of Natalie—a girl driven to succeed in a male-dominated field no matter the cost—with the traditional, family-oriented life of his mother, it’s easy to forget that he’s being written by a woman, and, worse, written by such a well-known one. Owen isn’t Ursula; Owen is Owen, and he seems to come to us fully-realized, born in armor out of the head of a god, so to speak.

The second reason to read Very Far Away from Anywhere Else is because of the details. Owen and Natalie live in a sharply-rendered California suburb, a world of foggy beaches and torrential downpours. They discuss their dreams in Natalie’s sparsely decorated, echoing upper-class home, and, though the story takes place in a time contemporary with its writing, Owen’s quest for college financial aid and the off-hand mentions of college applications still ring very true today.

But my favorite detail was that of Thorn, a paracosm that Owen developed as a child and shares with Natalie. This is as close as Le Guin gets to genre writing here, but it’s never indulgent. In fact, Owen recounts his imaginary world with more than a little sheepishness. He knows he’s sharing something that makes him vulnerable, different—but Natalie’s sensitive reaction reveals how strong their connection really is.

This is a slim book, one which would otherwise be a nice palette cleanser between weightier reads if it weren’t for the fact that it has a very melancholy tone itself. Still, it’s a worthwhile endeavor. Though it was written a long time ago, I suspect it will still ring true for modern teens, particularly those who have never felt quite at home in their home towns.

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How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got A Life: A Novel by Kaavya Viswanathan

I can’t pretend that I read How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life for noble reasons. I was bored, and putting off my own writing, and the internet is an abundant source of everything, even plagiarized pap that the publisher tried to destroy.

I’m sure you know the story behind Viswanathan’s book–how she, an Indian-American girl from New Jersey, was going to debut as a novelist during her sophomore year at Harvard, but when she did, it was discovered that her book, about an Indian-American girl from New Jersey who is trying to get into Harvard, was composed at least in part from prose cobbled together from various sources. Though her book contract was eventually canceled, Viswanathan initially denied any deliberate wrongdoing, claiming, “as I was writing, I genuinely believed that every single word I wrote was my own. I was so surprised and horrified when I found these similarities, when I heard about them over this weekend.”

Having now read Opal Mehta, I can unequivocally say: Bull. Shit.

I had the persistent feeling, in reading Viswanathan’s book, that the run-down of plagiarized passages on her novel’s wikipedia page actually grossly underreports the amount of plagiarized text. Perhaps the writing just really is that derivative, but I found myself googling phrases again and again, taxed by the niggling sensation that I’d read them before. I can say with certainty that the book lifts liberally, both in structure and thematics, as well as (at least in one case) a specific scene, from both the television series Freaks and Geeks and the movie Mean Girls.

And a close reading of the text seems to carry the metamessage that Viswanathan knew this. There are two scenes were the narration specifically seems to question characters about the sources of their ideas. First, during a scene where Opal’s parents hatch plots to help her achieve social success:

She looked at me with exasperation. “Opal,” she said. “Please stop daydreaming and pay attention to the appropriate printed materials.” She pointed to the carefully color-coded binder she had placed in front of me.

I opened the binder to the first page, which was headed “Setting the Scene.”

“‘Make sure your interactions occur outdoors, but only if it’s raining,’” I read out loud. “‘Preferably when he is in a position where you can kiss him upside down’ — are you joking?”

“What?” Mom looked defensive. “It’s a well-documented move with a very high rate of success.”

“Yeah, if the guy I’m kissing is Spiderman.”

Mom crossed her arms over her chest.

“Don’t be trippin’, Opal,” my dad said hastily. “Maybe that’s not the most practical plan. But we have lots of other strategies.” He turned some more pages in the binder. “Here’s a list of the top ten ways to get the man of your dreams.”

“You thought of ten plans?” I asked disbelievingly. “That many?”

My parents looked at each other smugly. “It was easy,” Dad said. “A little bit of research is all it took! Meena, why don’t you start?”

“Let’s see . . .” Mom turned the page. “Strategy one: Convince Jeff’s best friend to bet him that he can’t turn you into the prom queen. Then, along the way, he’ll find that you’re destined for each other.”

“Mom,” I said, “that’s She’s All That.”

“Oh.” She looked put out. “Well, how about this one: Your little sister can’t date unless you date first, so somebody pays Jeff to take —”

“Ten Things I Hate About You. And I don’t have a little sister.”

Mom coughed. “Get Jeff recruited to a very dangerous secret society, and then —”

“The Skulls.”

She studied her list again and started crossing things out.

Later, Opal questions the source of text on a couple of posters made by the boy she likes–text that actually is plagiarized from Salman Rushdie:

Jeff handed me a pile of neon-colored posters. The top one read, If from drink you get your thrill, take precaution — write your will, and continued with information about the Woodcliff counseling center.

“The posters are great,” I said. “You didn’t write them yourself, did you?”

“Well…I suppose I did.” Jeff preened for a moment. “You know me — I’ve been trying to spread conservative humor since before Al Gore was president.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but I laughed as loudly as I could. “Hahahahaha. Since before Al Gore was president.” I slapped my knee. “Oh, Jeff, you’re hilarious.”

Hilarious, indeed.

These scenes happen in quick succession, in the middle of the book where the ratio of clearly plagiarized text to original prose is highest. Was Viswanathan trying to tell us something?

Regardless of whether she knowingly plagiarized or not (uh, yeah right), the end result is a very, very poor one. The two major plot sources of her book are the aforementioned Mean Girls and Megan McCafferty’s work, but in cobbling them together Viswanathan breaks the Aesops of both. She attempts to make Opal an observant, wry narrator after Jessica Darling. However, Jessica Darling was at her core empathetic, particularly in her capability to turn her own critical eye on herself. Opal Mehta is not empathetic. She is, in fact, short-sighted to the point of obliqueness about her own flaws, and many of her observations about those around her lack humanity or real insight.

Take, for example, the aspects of Indian-American culture sown throughout the novel. Opal’s parents are cringe-worthy caricatures of Indian parents, so obsessed with their daughter’s success that they’ll even push her into slutty clothes if it will lead to the Ivy Leagues. Opal regards the other Indians in her life with derision and disdain. Indian men and boys are all antisocial nerds who just want their wives to cook for them. Mehta even seems to believe that it’s impossible for Indian boys to be cool:

“Aren’t there any nice Indian boys in your grade?” She looked at the picture of Suraj Patel, a computer genius, who had spent all last spring break locked in his room, trying to hack into the
CIA mainframe.

“Mom,” I said. “There is no way my kissing an Indian boy will help [me get a life]. I need to find someone cool, and popular. Someone who already has a life.”

The casual racism is pervasive here, and no more palatable when written by an Indian-American writer. She treats Indian cultural details in a breezy way that’s meant to add cultural flavor but is, in effect, either just awkward (“Talking to Sean had been like eating sev mixture, the Indian equivalent of Chex Party Mix”) or puzzling to the American reader (Mehta decries the commercial nature of Diwali but goes to no effort to describe why this is true or to even describe the holiday generally; hell, even Outsourced has the cultural sensitivity to use Indian holidays as a learning experience, and not an excuse to complain about Indians).

But it’s not just in her descriptions of Indians that Mehta seems unlikeable but in her descriptions of everyone. What made Jessica Darling an interesting narrator was her insightfulness. Though initially quite judgmental in her descriptions of popular girls like Bridget and Manda, through the course of McCafferty’s books you come to have real affection for even those who seem a bit vapid at the outset. None of this complexity is inherent here, even at the end of the novel. Girls are big-boobed bitches or studious good girls, with little gray area in between. There’s certainly no room for the important message of Mean Girls–that judging other girls is, in fact, fucked up and wrong.

In truth, even through Mehta’s supposedly-incisive initial perceptions, these girls are never more than cartoon characters. Whereas Bridget and Jessica were once believable and genuine friends, Mehta has Opal and Priscilla bonding in a ludicrous way (“over our mutual fascination with the abacus in a playgroup for gifted kids”). Ludicrous is how I’d describe a lot of the character details here.

And most of the details generally are just off, even in plagiarized sections of the novels. In fact, I’d say that the plagiarized passages are where the voice falters most heinously, as Viswanathan struggles to substitute equivalent pop culture references but almost always fails (replacing a brainy Angel with Ms. Moneypenny). The only thing that saves these passages from appearing to be screamingly obvious is the general stiffness and ham-fistedness of the rest of the prose.

Things improve by a very sleight degree, as they usually do, near the novel’s climax. But then Opal has a nervous breakdown about the pressures her parents have placed on her and the depressing nature of this book–the entire endeavor, where a girl gets into Harvard thanks to a college consultant who passes her “novel” on to a book packager for a big book deal and then it’s all revealed to be a sham–sets in. Is Opal most believable in these scenes because some parts of the book are, perhaps, autobiographical? It’s tempting to believe that to be the case, even if I can’t prove it.

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I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth The Trip.: 40th Anniversary Edition by John Donovan
Recommended.

There’s no doubt that John Donovan’s 1969 young adult novel, I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip is historically significant—charmingly pitched by the author to Harper & Row editor Ursula Nordstrom as a “buddy love” novel, I’ll Get There . . . was, in fact, the first teen novel to include “gay” content. In an era when homosexuality was still considered a mental disorder, thirteen-year-old protagonist Davy kisses another boy and then grapples with the fall-out. Though most of the boy-kissing takes place off-screen (“We only made out once!” Davy exclaims), this was nevertheless groundbreaking for the time.

Modern discussions of the novel, such as the one here, in the comments of the Booksmugglers blog, often focus on whether or not Donovan’s book goes far enough in promoting a message of queer acceptance to modern teenagers. Commenter Angie writes:

The question I *am* asking: if you only have $15 to spend on a teen book for your library and you want one that has queer content in it should you buy Boy Meets Boy or Donovan’s book? Of course, this is a question each librarian must answer for their own community, but I personally can’t think of a single thing that would recommend Donovan’s title to contemporary teen readers over Levithan’s. This decision is a reality for many small libraries or for libraries struggling with smaller budgets. The question now for these budgets and these librarians is not “Should I get a book with queer content?” but “Which book with queer content should I get?”

I can’t help but feeling that questions like these—and the intense focus on I’ll Get There . . .‘s status as a groundbreaking “issues” book—almost entirely miss the point.

Because, in fact, the “queering around” (as Davy refers to it) does not occur until almost two thirds into the narrative, and it’s really a very small—though important—part of Davy’s journey. The novel opens with Davy’s grandmother’s funeral. He and his dog Fred have lived with his grandmother (“a good old guy” who respects both Davy’s space and his agency) since he was a small child, but now that she’s gone he’ll be shipped off to the claustrophobic Manhattan apartment owned by his alcoholic mother.

Davy’s mother is an inconstant emotional abuser. She downs bourbon and kvetches about how she’s sacrificed her life for her child, despite the fact that she hasn’t had to inconvenience herself with his presence for longer than a weekend in eight years. She shows him off to her tippling friends, and grills Davy for information about the weekend meals he shares with his father and his father’s new wife, conversations which inevitable end disastrously:

“She’s big around the middle, don’t you think?” Mother says.

“Who?”

“Stephanie, of course. She’s always seemed rather bovine to me, don’t you agree?”

I ask her what she means by bovine, and she says she means that Stephanie looks like a big cow. Would I agree? I don’t say anything.

Through all of these uncomfortable, painful, accurate scenes, and amidst a cast of characters vivid enough that they might as well be real, the star is Davy. It feels tempting (if easy) to describe him as little more than a young Holden Caulfield. His observations about his life and his world are equally sharp, right down to the little details, and they’re all wryly communicated in slang-heavy vernacular. But Holden’s already begun the process of growing up—the process, perhaps, of becoming a phony. Davy is no phony. At thirteen, he still occupies the hopeful fantasy land of childhood. Unaware of how completely (if sweetly) naïve he is, he asks his relatives if he can just continue to live in his grandmother’s house alone after her death, and carries on conversations with taxidermied coyotes at the Museum of Natural History. He’s young enough that his dog can still genuinely be his best friend, though no wonder—with his grandmother gone, Fred’s the only person left who really listens to him.

It’s in this lonely, but faintly optimistic state that Davy first meets Altschuler, though initially this popular, clever boy—who manipulates his teachers into letting him write a theatrical version of Julius Caesar where he plays Brutus and Caesar is the villain—has no fondness for Davy. However, this is because he and Davy share a common bond: the specter of death hangs over both of them, Davy, through his loss of his grandmother, and Altschuler, through the recent death of his former best friend.

They tentatively build a friendship, which culminates in some kissing and a sleepover where the boys do something that Davy, in his narration, can only bring himself to refer to as “it.” Is it a romantic relationship? Davy’s enthusiasm for Altschuler does seem to border on enthusiastic infatuation, particularly after they kiss. But I think it’s important to remember that these boys are exceptionally young. In some ways, it would be unusual for even modern thirteen-year-olds to have the clarity of both self and identity to more earnestly and intentionally “date.”

And that’s a notion the culture of their time has no room for either, of course. When Davy kisses a girl goodbye at the beginning of the novel, they promise to be true to one another because that’s the narrative they’ve been offered, not because of any true depth of feeling or commitment. In the era in which he lived, he would have not witnessed any parallel narrative about relationships between men—so indeed, when Davy initially states that he’s “not ashamed” of what he and Altschuler “did together,” it’s a fairly revolutionary notion indeed.

But this is too honest and dark a novel for everything to proceed in a rosy way, and the brief, frantic elation that Davy seems to feel after his tryst with Altschuler soon gives way to prejudice, tragedy, and guilt. When Davy’s mother catches the boys passed out on the floor after drinking her whisky, she assumes “the worst.” But, though her response constitutes little more than homophobia, Davy’s usually-distant father offers him several different ways to look at the situation. He assures Davy that many boys experiment. Though he seems poised to offer Davy more traditional, homophobic rhetoric (noting that Davy “shouldn’t get involved in some special way of life which will close off other ways of life to” him), he also does this:

Father talks a lot about how hysterical people sometimes get when they discover that other people aren’t just what they are expected to be. He tells me there are Republicans who are always secretly disappointed when friends turn out to be Democrats, and Catholics who like their friends to be Catholic, and so forth. He says that such people are narrow-minded, he believes and funny too, unless they become hysterical about getting everyone to be just alike. Then they are dangerous. They become religious bigots, super-patriots, super-antipatriotic, and do I understand? I tell him I think I do, but can’t people learn to understand other people? He thinks they can, but only if they want to.

Davy’s relationship with Altshuler is resolved with a similarly shaky note of cautious optimism. Davy, guilt-wracked (due to some incredibly spoilery stuff which is mentioned in just about every other review, though I am determined not to spoil it; it’s heart-wrenching, though), seems uncomfortable with the notion of continuing their physical relationship. But Altschuler seems nonplussed. In fact, he’s downright blasé about the whole issue, ready to respect Davy’s choices, but fully accepting of his own. He says:

“Go ahead and feel guilty if you want to. I don’t.”

“You don’t, really?”

“No,” Altshuler says.

“I guess the important thing is not to do it again,” I say.

“I don’t care. If you think it’s dirty or something like that, I wouldn’t do it again. If I were you.”

This ending note—one of ambiguity, which suggests that Davy might not end up being “out” in the long term—seems to be what stops readers like Angie, quoted above, from whole-heartedly recommending the book to modern teens. However, it’s a realistic way to end the book, not only because of historical context (in which case, it’s really the only way to end the book) but because of the characters’ ages. In truth, Davy’s father is in some ways right—many boys do experiment and decide it has no bearing on their eventual identity. Some, of course, decide to identify as gay or queer or bisexual—but few teens have come to terms, openly and completely, with their sexualities by age thirteen. It’s the demand for narratives that present overly neat, unrealistic resolutions to questions of identity that largely keep those on the queer spectrum (rather than simply “gay” or “straight”) out of young adult literature, and it’s also just not completely honest. It’s certainly not reflective of the journeys of most of the queer people I know.

And this pressure to create narratives that are neatly resolved rather than messy, complex, and realistic is also part of what keeps “gay” teen novels shelved firmly in the YA-Issue book ghetto. Books whose sole concern is to affirm identity, rather than to create compelling characters and stories, are really often very boring. This makes it difficult for them to have as broad an impact as they might otherwise.

But I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip is not boring. It is, in fact, a sprawling, emotionally painful, and profoundly real novel, one that’s so much more than Davy’s concerns about kissing another boy. And that’s where decisions not to buy this book—because it fails to affirm a certain (limited, not entirely realistic) queer narrative—fail. This is, in fact, a brutal novel about grief, family, alcoholism, and dogs. More than just the story of a “gay kid”, it’s the story of a very real and brilliantly realized kid, and one whose sharp observations about life, whose keen wit, and whose story, has both entertainment value and teaching value to all teens, regardless of their sexualities.

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Boyfriends with Girlfriends by Alex Sanchez

Anvilicious.

If, unlike me, you don’t allow large portions of your life to be sucked away by the website TVtropes, you might not be familiar with this term. It refers to an aspect of a story so obvious that the writer might as well have hit you over the head with it. As the trope page says:

A portmanteau of anvil and delicious, malicious or vicious, depending on the usage, anvilicious describes a writer’s and/or director’s use of an artistic element, be it line of dialogue, visual motif, or plot point, to so obviously or unsubtly convey a particular message that they may as well etch it onto an anvil and drop it on your head. Frequently, the element becomes anvilicious through unnecessary repetition, but true masters can achieve anviliciousness with a single stroke.

Heavy-handed for the new millennium. Extreme polar opposite of subtle.

Stories that are anvilicious aren’t necessarily bad—for example, I’d say that every single episode of Degrassi Junior High was completely anvilicious, and yet there was some genuine charm in the soap operatic, but complex, plotting. Anvilicious stories are also not necessarily wrong–often the writer has a point, and a very good one! But the problem with a lack of artfulness in conveying a worthy message is that you risk alienating your audience completely, reducing them to eye-rolls and sighs. There’s something fundamentally embarrassing about being lectured.

Sadly, though it was, in many ways, a story with merit, Boyfriends with Girlfriends by Alex Sanchez was utterly anvilicious.

It’s the story of two pairs of male-female best buds—bisexual Sergio and his lesbian friend Kimiko; out-and-proud Lance and his questioning galpal Allie—as they navigate their identities and relationships in suburbia. Between mall dates, Lance grapples with his belief that bisexuality is totally a cop-out even as he’s falling for Lance. Meanwhile, Allie forges a friendship with and wrestles with her blossoming feelings for Kimiko. And all of these characters must deal with the repercussions of being out—or not—to their families.

I’ll come right out and say that I think that Sanchez’s message is a worthy one. Lance’s biphobia was the sort I heard a lot of in high school—”Bi’s a lie!” and all of that. Hell, it’s not like I can even pretend that things “Get Better” for bi kids when we grow up and leave the burbs. Allie’s story—of a hazy awareness of a more complex truth beyond just liking boys—was especially accurate, right down to the creepy, salacious response of her boyfriend when he finds out she’s been dreaming of girls.

But Sanchez does nobody a favor by presenting the issue so anviliciously. He lays it on thick beginning in the first chapter, as Lance hems and haws about how bisexuals are just kidding themselves. And he doesn’t let up for the duration of the book. The last paragraph ends with the image of a rainbow kite soaring through the air above one of our kissing couples. I wish I were kidding. Oh, how I wish I were kidding.

So as much as I strongly empathized with the message he was trying to communicate, I just think he missed the mark here. And hit a big ol’ anvil instead. I’m a grown woman, and reading this book was just a little embarrassing, even for me. I felt like I did in elementary school when they made us watch movies sponsored by Tampax. I can’t imagine that teenagers—the sighing, sarcastic purveyors of cool—would be any more amenable to a book told with such heavy-handedness.

And that’s too bad, because it’s not only Sanchez’s point that has some merit. I’ll admit that I wasn’t overtly fond of his writing style—he used a roving POV that jumped from place to place even within the same conversation—but his characters were ridiculously well-drawn and accurate. Initially I was afraid that he was engaging in some cultural stereotyping, particularly with Kimiko, but by the book’s mid-point she proved to be both very complex and very real, right down to her adorkably adolescent poetry. All of the characters had palpable chemistry in their romantic and platonic relationships. I’d easily call them “charming,” in addition to feeling like real kids I went to high school with. They were the reason I gritted my teeth and kept reading, through all the glurge. I even misted up a little when one character came out of the closet to her family.

But I’m afraid that this book’s charm, and the merit of its message, might miss its primary audience, who really do need it. Even if, perhaps, they don’t need to hear them in a book that’s filled with hand-wringing and interior monologues about why it’s not cool to hate on bisexuals. It’s not that Sanchez is wrong–not at all! But I think teens might be too busy rolling their eyes (and for good reason) to really hear it.

A review copy of this book was generously provided by the publisher for review purposes.

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