Early Thanksgiving

I’ve been reluctant to post more pet peeves because they can be too negative like I’m a Debbie Downer or something, but I don’t want you to miss Dolly Parton’s pet peeves, which are definitely amazing and not negative at all.

Lacking Dolly’s great comedic timing and incredible ass, let me share with you a long-simmering pet peeve of mine: the teen protagonist. A few weeks ago, I wrote a short review of Yellowface and referred to the unlikable protagonist, and in a later post, I mentioned the very unlikable narrator of The Sea, The Sea. I wonder if books with unlikable protagonists are more memorable. While Jupiter Song and Charles Arrowby have stuck in my mind, there is a class of narrator that I deplore the most: the fifteen-year-old girl.

In the mind of a writer who is not a 15-y.o. girl, this species of human is just old enough to notice the people and situations around her but is not smart enough to ascertain what’s going on. That allows the writer to slowly unpack their story, allowing their naive-but-maturing narrator to learn and discern what’s going on around her just as the reader does, even if all the facts are in place from the very beginning of the story. Here’s my review of Tell The Wolves I’m Home, by Carol Rifka Brunt, from 2014.

I read this actual book about a month ago, and I wasn't that thrilled with it. I've heard it is a Young Adult novel but I'm not sure. In any case, the protagonist is a slightly goth/Ren Faire type loner, whose only friend is her recently deceased gay uncle. He died of AIDS; the story takes place in 1986. For some unknown reason, she's allowed to be close to her uncle but is not allowed to meet his lover. After his death, she is befriended by his lover, and keeps their friendship a secret. Meanwhile, her older sister who seems to be more typically well-adjusted sort of falls apart, as does their relationship. Here are my problems with this book: it really underplays the amount of hatred and ostracism that gay men felt from their families and others in the early 80s. There are also several anachronisms in the book, which jarred me out of my willing suspension of disbelief. And there's no explanation for why the older sister would have been so left out of her sister's friendship with their uncle. Anyway, unsatisfactory book.

The protagonist in this book is an ingenue, who is smart enough to navigate her way into The Big City alone, but not mature enough to pick up on all the homophobia her husband and his partner are suffering, and how AIDS impacted their world. The reader doesn’t know either (unless they already know) and so it’s like we are expected to clutch our pearls at the injustice of it all when the girl figures it out.

Another example: Here are my thoughts (also 2014) on Where’d You Go, Bernadette?

It was a good book. Very fun, light read. The main character Bernadette Fox is really likable (to the reader, but not too many people in the book) and the way in which her mental illness is handled is really great. Here's the problem: The narrator is her 15-year old daughter. I am really tired of 15-year old girl narrators. They are a literary crutch. You have one of those and you can call [your book] adult fiction and YA, you have a smart, articulate narrator who is old enough to know about “stuff” but not old enough to have any actual complexity and experience, so everything that happens to them, they can just react with a fresh naivete. They are trustworthy and loving, and have gotten through puberty but are not having sex or complex relationships. They are also boring. And just as irritating as you remember girls being when you were 15. I wish Bernadette had been the narrator - - complex, messed up, genius -- totally unreliable as the narrator. It would have been a much better book.

My last example is My Absolute Darling, by Gabriel Tallent. The plot is horrifying: a young woman is essentially imprisoned by her father on their farm in West Marin. Ostensibly, he’s just a hippie with a mistrust of the authorities and a broken heart, but in fact, he’s raping his daughter and probably killed her mother. Here’s the craziest part: the fifteen-year-old girl doesn’t know she is being sexually abused. It only occurs to her when she manages to talk to a teacher at school for more than ten minutes and then goes to a big party at a rich kid’s house. The reader also doesn’t know that the girl is being abused; it’s revealed slowly, which I found abhorrent. (Yes, the author is a man). Sexual abuse is not a puzzle or a mystery, and to fail to credit a 15-year-old with being aware of her basic bodily integrity is disrespectful to the whole category of young women. This book was a bestseller, by the way.

A friend of mine noted that there are fewer books with teenage male protagonists, aside from Holden Caulfield (whom he hates) and the narrator of Black Swan Green by David Mitchell, which I haven’t read. He thinks it’s because 15-year-old boys are not believably perceptive, so don’t make good narrators. It’s an interesting point. The reason I like Holden Caulfield is that he doesn’t realize he’s perceptive; he’s narcissistic and articulate, and The Catcher in the Rye is about his internal journey, not his observations on an external set of events.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of my mind’s draft folder, I want to turn to some thanks-giving, which is the opposite of pet-peeving. I think that each of my pet peeves should be balanced by something that brings me joy and yesterday offered me a lot of options. So here are some things that make me the opposite of peeved:

1. Hearings that get canceled just a few days before they start. This is a very specific gratitude: when my cases cancel on short notice, I get paid anyway, and then I have a gift of a day to do something else.

2. Hiking in Sibley Regional Park. This is something I chose to do today when my hearing got canceled. I took the dog and listened to a political podcast. Halfway through, I thought, “I should probably enjoy nature and not listen to Pod Save America,” and then I thought, “You know what? I can do what I like, which is sometimes listening to . . .”

3. Political podcasts: My appetite for the minutia for certain subjects (politics, quilting, law, and writing) is almost bottomless, and if I’ve worn out my friends and families trying to discuss these topics, I’m entitled to listen to podcasts that conform to my own biases just like everyone else.

4. The Band: Yes, the band called The Band.

After reading an NYT appraisal of The Last Waltz, the documentary about the Band, I realized that I had never watched the movie. The Band is one of those music groups that has been on permanent rotation in my life, starting in childhood and continuing to a distant point in the future. Aside from the NYT endorsement, Hanif Abdurraqib talks up this movie constantly, and he’s never wrong, as far as I can tell. I rented The Last Waltz and watched it over the past few nights while making dinner. I was limited to that time frame because I chose to watch at a volume that my family thought was “too loud” and “kind of annoying”. It’s mostly great, although the sound mix leaves the conversational vocals so quiet, that it’s almost impossible to hear. Someone, please remix this movie.

Last Thanksgiving, I decided that I wanted to compile a short list of movies that are suitable to watch on Thanksgiving day while I’m cooking. Fantastic Mr. Fox was the first entry on this esteemed list. I’m adding The Last Waltz, which was filmed on Thanksgiving, and which is the day Abdurraqib watches it (well, the day before). I’d like the expand the Thanksgiving filmography. Do you have any recommendations? Let’s get a good list going; now that August is almost over, it’s time to buckle down and get ready for Christmas, and we don’t want to let this important task pass us by.