Joyce Carol Oates: Snygg [Sexy]

From: A sale in Akateeminen Kirjakauppa
When: Two or three years ago
Verdict: Extremely good approach to complex topic, beautiful economy in the telling.
Fate: To be given to someone who will appreciate it.
Read: In one sitting on 19 Aug 2008.

This book is in English. I read it in Swedish.

I was reading this book just after Michael Phelps had pulled off his Olympic miracle and was interested to find him appearing in the book. Not in person, but the main character is a high school swimmer whose life was once changed by the 18-year-old Phelps bursting onto the scene.

There are other things going on in this kid's life too, problems relating to the fact that he is a little bit too hot for his own good. A male teacher takes an interest, and although nothing untoward happens (not even groping of the History Boys kind) there is still the fact that it could have. There is also the fact of the leniency of US educational institutions when it comes to the academic performance of top-performing athletes.* And the fact that this teacher disapproves of that practice.
And finally there are some pictures of boys and swimming trunks and even naked, an a quite possibly homosexual man in a small-minded middle-class environment of the kind homosexual men tend to leave as fast as they can, and with an inspiring economy of words Oates brews of these ingredients a local disaster. The topic is heavy and complicated, but she doesn't chicken out or simplify, even at the end.

I remember reading Joyce Carol Oates' YA novel Foxfire as a teenager and not liking it at ALL, but I always felt I should give her a real shot. She is, after all, a heavy Nobel contender whose chances are hampered by her prolific interest in stuff that I myself find fascinating – boxing, Marilyn Monroe, Young Adult readers. This novel ended up in my shopping hamper because it was on sale and looked like a quick read, and proved very good indeed. I almost wrote just now that I'm now ready to graduate to her real novels. What I meant, obviously, was her long novels.

*read more about this phenomenon in Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons

Snygg seems to be out of print. You can buy Sexy in English on Amazon.

Sari Peltoniemi: Kummat

From: Borrowed from my friend Mike Pohjola
When: Over a year ago
Verdict: Not half bad!
Fate: Returned with thanks

This novel is in Finnish.

As my friend Mike was finishing his well-received first novel, which for all its orginality is technically fantasy and technically for the YA market, I asked him whether he actually reads any YA lit himself. He immediately game me two answers, the one being along the lines of "Nuh" and the other along the lines of "Sure", and handed me this book, written by a friend of his. I took this as "not so much, but here's a recent example", and borrowed it, very curious about what YA authors in my neck of the woods are up to these days.

Kummat – "the strange ones" – are a group of high school kids who suddenly grow tails. They become a bit more animal in other ways as well, the many females turning into a kind of harem for the one, dominant male (who is endowed with looks, humour, the power of making them feel special, and a sexuality which is not as it turns out limited to females, with or without tails).

The whole thing is a bit uncomfortable for everyone involved, and for lack of anything better to do the kids decide to become erotic dancers at seedy nightclubs in their dreary Finnish town. While this may seem a bit out of left field when I write it down like this, it makes a bit more sense in the novel, which will almost certainly never be translated for the American market.

The main body of the narrative is interspersed with short narrative sequences offering potential and conflicting explanations for the tails (they are caused by aliens; hey are a curse; they are an evolutionary remnant; they are familiar from folklore). None of these explanations is given more credence than any of the others, and their status relative to the main narrative is not clarified apart from some suggestion that the kids research their predicament on the internet and that the sequences could perhaps be dreams or fantasies. (A similarly unresolved relation between different textual layers in a novel occurs in Mike's debut, for which I assume this may have been an inspiration).

Peltonemi writes convincingly about identity and peer pressure, and the novel opens up for discussions about gender, difference and status without preaching about any of these things. Thrown together with a random sample of classmates normally belonging to different cliques, the main character comes face to face with her own prejudices, and so of course must the reader, which is interesting when our prejudices are the same (and less so when they are not).

I sometimes find speculative fiction of this basically realist type difficult to read because I am not certain what importance to give different or conflicting generic signals. Reading Kummat, I enjoyed it vaguely but did not know what to make of it – a "head or tail" pun is called for but I can't think of one – and it is only upon reflection that I find it quite intelligent. The imagery that has stayed with me now feels appealing; on reading I found some of the milieus realistically but perhaps unecessarily depressing.

Ultimately the girls' cruise ship trip to Sweden, a Finnish coming-of-age ritual documented too rarely in fiction of any genre, brings home the point that the novel is not about tails specifically - what sets them apart and unites them could be anything. While this begs the followup "then why tails", the conceit works. And Peltoniemi's treatment of sexuality in high school-students is certainly more complex and thought-provoking than, for instance, Stephanie Meyer's.

Buy Kummat at Suurikuu.

Meg Cabot: Size 14 is Not Fat Either

From: A pocket book binge that left me with, like, twenty unread novels in a pile
When: I suspect the fall of 06
Verdict: Entertaining while read; fast forgotten
Fate: Charity

I absolutely love Meg Cabot's books for kids and teens (or rather "young adults", as they're called in Publisher English). They're clever and not lacking in themes or underlying ideas; her high school traumas are tempered by a common-sense feminism that is quite refreshing in the context of fashion-obsessed mediums or bohemian princesses royal. Also, the books are really funny.

But for some reason the chatty, sometimes giggly, often first-person story-telling becomes annoying in her novels for grown-ups. Reading Queen of Babble, for instance, primarily made me wanna shake the protagonist really hard. The "Heather Wells Mysteries" series, however, which started with Size 12 Is Not Fat, strikes a better balance, probably because the college dorm environment is similar to the high school world in which Cabot is so comfortable, and partly because the narrator is older than the kids around her. She already has a failed career as a teen pop sensation behind her (a fun idea, and quite appealing to a reader like me: I too have switched careers a few times during my twenties). Heather can see evil cheerleaders with a sense of perspective, even to the point of realizing that not all cheerleaders are in fact evil. For a grown-up reader using teen entertainment as a guilty-pleasure-entertainment, this is pretty much where we too stand.

Size 14 Is Not Fat Either includes some memorable imagery, like the severed head of a cheerleader boiling on a stove in a dorm cafeteria, and Manhattan paralyzed by a snow-storm that forces one character to actually ski across Central Park. The crime story itself is pretty lightweight in construction but that really does not matter, since it is fairly obvious that its importance to the novel is similar to those of Bridget Jones's career woes in Diary; they are there to entertain us and, possibly, offer the characters opportunities for insight and self-reflection. But the reading pleasure primarily derives from watching the protagonist negotiate romantic and familial relationships and societal expectations. As far as I'm concerned, any book that delivers on that pleasure defends its existence.

Not that I'm making any promises – this kind of literature is obviously not for everybody. But if you are able not to demand that Heather Wells be profound, Cabot might surprise you with moments of lucid insight into human behaviour and our pop culture obsessions.



Buy Size 14 Is Not Fat Either on Amazon
Buy Size 12 Is Not Fat on Amazon