Do I dare disturb the universe?”
Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War
(Yes, it’s really T.S. Eliot, but trust me,
Cormier used it better.)
I think since the beginning of time there has been a fundamental disconnect between the job of a parents and what parents actually are. And I think that disconnect has led us, in a way, to so many of society’s problems.
A parent’s first job is to keep their child safe. The definition of ‘safe’ keeps changing over the years and centuries and millennia, but that is the basic idea. Once you become a mother or father, your job is to keep your child safe. It can become hard to abandon that responsibility the older your child gets, when they’re no longer in your sightline every day, when they having relationships with people you might not personally agree with philosophically, when they leave your house entirely and venture into adulthood. A parent will always believe it is their job to keep their child safe.
I don’t know when it became some kind of accepted term that parents were necessarily wiser or knew better than everybody else – whether they are adults without children, or teachers, or even their own children. Unless there’s some vital initiation rite that I am fundamentally unaware of, parents are not given the wisdom of God. They do not know anything and everything. Any parent whose five-year old keeps questioning them about anything knows this better than I could ever say. But somewhere along the line, it became gospel that parents are better suited not only what is best for their own children, but all children, always and forever. No matter how different the world between when they were children and now, no matter how they lived their lives as children, no matter what anyone who isn’t a parent says, they know what is best for the children. They know this so well that they don’t even have to ask their children if that’s okay with them – and based on how our society treats them, they probably don’t.
This is a larger theme that I intend to expound upon in some of my other Constant Reader columns. I took a fair amount of flack on it when I made some – in my opinion, tepid suggestions about high school sports - in my review for We are the Wildcats and I suspect I will take quite a bit more in this column and others to come. But these issues and others are some that society has to address. Maybe the best way to do so is looking at how some writers view these conflicts.
So to move to the specific: for those parents who have spent the past several years trying to regulate the kind of books their children read, I’d like to address you: You’re adorable. No, seriously. All the threats that your children are facing – the last few years have made clear what a lot of them are – and you still think that the biggest problems facing your children are whether or not they read The Hunger Games or The Perks of Being a Wallflower. To quote the book I’m about to get to: “you’ve spent much of your lives putting out the wrong fires.”
This has always been one of the biggest pet peeves when it comes to parents and their problems with certain literature, and Suggested Reading actually goes so far as to have some of its character say it out loud. Forbidding certain books from schools as always struck me as a disconnect between the current generation of children as well as their fundamental nature. All students – particularly high school ones – hate reading. It’s basically something they have to be bullied in to doing, no matter whether it’s a public school, or as in the case of this book, a private one. The head of Honors Lit tells a character:
“…with every class that comes through that door, there are fewer and fewer interested students. Not to mention students that are willing to tear them to shreds or speak to them. If something happens to these books I’m pushing, are they going to even care?”
I can answer that question. Most of them already don’t. With each generation, more and more children give up reading. Not just Catcher in the Rye or Great Gatsby, but Harry Potter and Twilight. It’s not just the fact that the illiteracy rate in the country keeps getting higher, it’s that there are so many other distractions out there that promise instant gratification. No book will ever give you ‘instant’ gratification. It takes days or weeks, and few people –children or adult – have that kind of attention span. You can blame television or social media or all the devices we have, but all of them are just part of a long standing problem in American society. How we got there is really irrelevant to the fact it’s where we are.
To the second point, parents wanting books banned goes against the fundamental nature of how most children – and I include myself at their ages – view something being forbidden. Whether its pornographic magazines, the V-Chip or anything on the internet, the surest way to make sure a child – or really anybody – will want to see it is to explicitly say that it’s bad for you or forbidden. I guarantee you that no teenager in the last decade has ever said: “I was going to watch Game of Thrones but since my parents told me not to, I’ll heed their advice and watch another episode of Full House.”
Indeed, I honestly think we solve the banning of books issue very simply with simple reverse psychology. All organizations that think Rainbow and Park and Speak are bad for your children to read. Make them required reading in your schools instead! Run ads on social media saying that you couldn’t put down The Chocolate War! I guarantee that the children themselves will be creating bonfires of them in their backyards the second you told them that.
Because I assure you, characters like Clara Evans, the protagonist of Suggested Reading are few and far between as it is. Clara opens the novel about to begin the Evans Highlighter All-Nighter, a tradition she’s had for years of reading a selected novel from beginning to end the night before high school begins. The novel is question is by her current idol the fictional Lukas Gerhardt which is about a book about two boys who build a forbidden library to stop a war in a dystopian future. (If nothing else, Suggested Reading makes you really wish a book like this actually existed.)
Clara attends a very traditional Tennessee private academy. She is entering her senior year living what she considers a humdrum life. Her one great love is books. She volunteers as her school library. She donates to books to charities. She holds her own book club. She may not know that Thomas Jefferson once said: “I can not live without books’, but if she heard it, she’d call it her mantra.
I should add that Clara is far from perfect. She has exactly one friend in the entire school, LiQui Carson, and she seems happy with it. She has very negative opinions towards most of the other, richer students in this academy who she derivatively refers to as ‘star-stars’. She honestly seems closer to the librarian, Mr. Caywell and her Honors Lit teacher Miss Croft, then anyone else at the Academy. And its likely she have stayed that way – happily – if she hadn’t accidentally read an email that went out from the headmaster about expanded the list of banned books. Or to use their euphemism “prohibited media’.
Clara is immediately angered (Her immediate reaction is a page of WTFs written one after the other.) She’s even angrier when she told that this has been going on for awhile and that she, the librarian’s assistant, has never noticed it. She goes around in a daze for several pages, spouting off to everybody, before deciding to write a letter to the headmaster Mr. Walsh, who spends most of his time at the academy walking the halls, the better to avoid conflict. When he meets with her and barely gives her the time of day, she gets mad and then rebels. Her rebellion is to bring forbidden books into Lupton Academy with white book covers, hand them out in secret, and ask her readers to write anonymous comments about how the book made them feel. (Most of the books, by the way, are the ones I’ve already mentioned in this review.)
Her rebellion, I should point out right now, is done not out of some higher purpose, but really out of spite. Like most teenagers, she has little view of the potential consequences of her actions. And she comes across somewhat self-centered for much of the book (like so many teachers). So perhaps she is giving herself too much credit when the faculty begins to react to the prohibited media ban, first by Miss Croft changing her lesson plan and eventually resigning and then Mr. Caywell beginning to feud with the Principal. The dominoes continue to fall in a more personal way as her life becomes increasingly interwoven with Jack Lodenhauer and Ashton, two of the star-stars she’s spent her high school life taunting without even bothering to get to know. Her certainty that books are the solution to every problem becomes increasingly hard to put up the more she becomes aware of the demons that Jack in particular is carrying.
There is a lot to worship about Suggested Reading. It avoids far too many of the clichés that are going on. On several occasions, the characters themselves point out how so few students are uninterested in life outside their own bubbles that they would just as simply accept the school board’s explanations and ask few if any questions, like Clara ends up doing. It also never makes it clear just how broad the revolution that Clara is leading actually is among the student body – a revelatory segment near the end of the book actually points out that all of Clara’s actions may only be affecting a relatively small portion of Lupton Academy. Nor does Clara herself fall victim to the clichés of so much YA literature – her friendship with a ‘star star’ does not lead to a romance like so many lesser books would, and a decision to make her rebellion the subject of a vital dinner that could affect her future doesn’t pay off for her personally.
And perhaps most importantly (spoiler warning) you could make an argument that her rebellion changes nothing. As you’d expect with so many of these kinds of stories, eventually everything that has happened at Lupton Academy does make the national media and becomes a story. But when the smoke clears, ‘All they did was shuffle people around. Replace board members with relatives.” The prohibited media ban remains in the student handbook and it is possible the board decides not to do anything about the inciters simply to let the scandal die down. (The last page of the book indicates that they have underestimated the student body in that regard.)
But that’s not really the point of Suggested Reading. At its core, this book is about the power of words and the way they change people’s lives, even the people you think may well beyond saving. At a critical moment near the end of the book, Walsh calls Clara in to his office. Clara is certain that he is going to expel her. What Walsh says to her and the last set of actions between the two of them give perhaps the greatest sign of hope in a book that can be thoroughly depressing about so many things, particularly this disconnect between adults and keeping children ‘safe’. “Books are a light… that melts ignorance and hate,” Clara says near the end of the novel. Maybe some of the characters in this novel keep considering them fires they have to put out. Clara’s rebellion has proven that’s not all that some fires are good for, and that if used the right way, they can provide a path forward for us and other generations to fight for. Clara says she’ll fight for that world. So will I and I hope for the sake of our future that she and I are not alone in that fight.
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