The back of Black Swan Green has an excerpt from a Publisher's Weekly review which says that this novel "captures the sheer pleasure of being a boy and brings to mind adventures shared by Huck and Tom." I don't think this reviewer and I read the same book. Don't get me wrong - I agree that the book was a great read. But it sure wasn't about capturing the pleasure of adolescence. It was about the fact that being thirteen is a matter of navigating a dynamic and deeply complex caste system which nobody will explain to you (and asking about it would ensure you a place smack at the bottom). There's no floating down any rivers on any bloody rafts. There's getting teased, being ostracised, and desperately, desperately, hoping that whatever just came out of your mouth was not the Wrong Thing. I am, to this day, convinced that the best way to navigate your way through this system without internalising it (and then perpetuating it) is to have a best friend with whom you can make up your own elaborate rules which are at least transparent to you.
The sheer awkwardness of these years is captured rather nicely by the narrator's general confusion about how to go from meeting a girl somewhere and speaking to her, to having a girlfriend you can snog. Because you couldn't ask anyone how that works, right? And certainly there's no handbook. He concludes that either everybody knows all about it, but nobody's telling, or nobody knows anything at all, and it's all an elaborate hoax. I am fairly sure I had the same thought myself, but having less native self-confidence, I was convinced that there was some great secret I was missing out on. Now, at twice that age, the elaborate hoax theory is gaining some ground. But I digress.
The story itself is fairly mundane, but that's not the point. The point is that Mitchell writes a great coming-of-age story which you're supposed to read as an adult who can look back at their own coming-of-age time, and think about the characters, "My God. I knew you. I hated you, you bastard." And then realise that you can look back on it and know how absurd the whole thing really was.
But let me tell you - if this is what it's like to be a thirteen year old boy, it's not half as complicated as it is to be a thirteen year old girl.
2 comments:
Great review. I"m going to go and read this book soon (I may have to order it for our library if we don't have it). I especially liked the comment on using a friend-code to prevent internalization of the system; is that what we did? Is that why we did it? I have to say, having a best friend was really kind of like being married in the safety net aspect of things. It's one of those "at least so-and-so will always love me" feelings, which in retrospect i'm sure made it WAY easier to shrug off the adolescent trauma. Now, some people think that's co-dependent and stifling; fair enough. After long and careful consideration, I now think it's sort of a personal choice. I honestly really like that feeling. It's a lovely warm place to operate from within, although it does a body good to stray outside too. This has devolved into a ramble; thanks for a thought provoking review.
I don't know if that's why we did it. It seems that junior high is the place where you internalise all kinds of social norms, for better or for worse. And one of them does seem to be the standard "status" system of society, which I've never been particularly comfortable with. In fact, I'm not really that good at operating within hierarchies generally, even the one in academia that I've been living in for the past few years. The fact that I'm now at a relatively high status in the system (compared to the number of people in it) feels creepy sometimes.
But maybe we saved each other from the full blast of adolescent horror, just by having some system which said that the way we were was perfectly fine. It is like a safety net, since it guarantees that there's some standard where you won't be found lacking.
But speaking of being found lacking, time to go back to writing lecture notes.
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