Perhaps because I've always been such a
devoted reader I've always had a special passion for the kind of novels that
demonstrate the hold that stories have on people. Stephen King has spent much
of his career dealing with the hold writing has on people and he once said
there was an unofficial trilogy of his work that summed up with it.
The most famous of these novels is Misery
which King described as a story about the hold fiction has on the reader. The
Dark Half takes the opposite tack: it is a story of the hold fiction has on
the writer. And the novella Secret Window, Secret Garden (found in his
collection Four Past Midnight) is somewhere in the middle. In all of
them there is a common theme that the three writers involved – Paul Sheldon,
Thad Beaumont and Mort Rainey – are being held in mortal danger by a figure who
demands a story in trade and how they deal with consequences. Storytelling is
damnation and salvation simultaneously.
I am as much a fan of books and stories as
I am TV shows and movies but in my younger days I always had a different
approach then the overwhelming majority of fans then and now. Unlike them I was
always unwilling to commit to a fantasy series (such as Harry Potter)
until the author had finished the series. I had something of a pragmatic
approach based in a kind of grim reality: what if it took so long to get a
series of novels finished that the author died before he did? (That's one of
the reasons I never read any of the novels in the Game Of Thrones series
even before it became a television show.) Sadly it seems my dire predictions
occasionally have some basis in reality: as any fan of King knows he nearly
died in a hit and run with only the fourth book in his Dark Tower series
completed.
King was well aware of the fan culture by
the time he wrote Misery but I seriously doubt he was aware of
fanfiction when he wrote it: the Internet really didn't exist during the 1980s
and fanfic sites didn't become dominant on it until at least a decade later.
I've read several books about how the hold of fiction can have on younger
readers in works such as The Neverworld Wake and some of the books of
Rainbow Rowell but it wasn't until recently I read one of the first books that
deals not only with the hold fiction holds on young readers but the kind of
hold that fanfiction can play. That it does so in a story that tells an
unsettling dark mystery at its source makes Broken Things a treasure.
I was aware of Lauren Oliver and her work
in YA for a while and my opinion, I should tell you, has never been high. A
scan of her YA trilogies showed nothing original to me and I thought her first
and most famous novel Before I Fall, made into a 2017 movie, was mawkish
and amateurish at best. I might not have been drawn into all were it not for
the summary on the jacket and the brilliant opening line:
"Five years ago, when I had just
turned thirteen, I killed my best friend…
"Here's how everyone knew we were
guilty: we had described the crime, more or less, in a fanfic sequel to the
book we were all obsessed with, The Way to Lovelorn."
This story is described, matter-of-factly,
by Brynn, who makes it clear that she, Owen Waldmann and Mia were 'the Monsters
of Brickhouse Lane"
That's the story the way everyone tells it,
at least, a story repeated so many times, accepted by so many people, it has
become fact. Never mind that the case against Mia and me never even made it out
of family court. Try as hard as they could, the cops couldn't make the facts
fit. And half the information we told them was illegally obtained, since we'd
never even been cautioned. Never mind that Owen was acquitted in criminal
court, not guilty, free to pass go.
Never mind, either, that we didn't do it.
It is the opening passage combined with the
opening section of the fictional novel The
Way Into Lovelorn – the only book written by Georgia C. Wells – that drew
me in for good. I had a feeling I sometimes get with books, that I was going to
read a story unlike one I had before. And while there are certain patterns that
some will find familiar, it is the tale not so who tells it that makes it sing.
Broken Things at times can be a complex tale to follow.
The story is told from the point of view of two of the characters: Brynn McNally
and Mia Ferguson. We follow both of them from alternate time lines: THEN, the
period of their friendship with Summer and the circumstances surrounding her
death and NOW, which takes place at the five year anniversary of the murder.
The overwhelming majority of the book takes
place in Twin Lakes, Vermont. THEN tells us how Mia and Brynn entered the orbit
of Summer, who seems to be the star their universe centered around. Mia was
always the quietest of the three, Brynn was frequently angrier, much of which
has to do with the fact she's coming to terms at a young age about her
sexuality. They weren't even friends before Summer came into their world.
That's the kind of person Summer was.
Summer had grown up in foster care, never
knew her father and her mother abandoned her with just one possession: The W ay To Lovelorn. It's through that book
that she manages to build a connection with the two of them who very quickly become
obsessed with it. Most stories about fandom frequently show the negative
obsession on fanboy culture; its daring of Oliver to look at it from the perspective
of female.
Like all fantasy novels Lovelorn has
a fanbase on the internet but its never been as large as any of the YA novels
of today or those of others of the previous era. Part of it is because Wells
only wrote one book but part of it may also be (as its described, ironically,
by a fanboy himself: "It's a mash-up. It's nothing new. And it's kind of
an unsuccessful mash-up. It's like Wells took all the popular fantasy books and
shook them together and poured them on the page."
Indeed part of the reason the girls are
obsessed with it as middle-schoolers is because Wells ends the book with an
incomplete sentence fragment. That, more than anything else, has led to the
obsession with it as its fans have been convinced Wells was going to write more
but that she never got around to it. (Perhaps because fantasy and modernism
don't have much of an overlap, no one thinks that Wells might have playing tribute
to Joyce with that regard.)
As part of their obsession the three girls
turn to the source that these fandoms are built for: fanfiction. Unlike the
majority of fans, however, they never seem inclined to post it on the internet
but rather write it as a genuine sequel. They've written themselves in the book
as the ultimate Mary Sues (a term they almost certainly are unaware of) and put
in aspects of their own lives into it. As the novel progresses it seems like
Summer increasingly took charge of what went in and what wasn't in.
Throughout the perspectives of both Brynn
and Mia in THEN, it becomes clear to them that Summer has a very outspoken
personality and is unafraid to say what she thinks about teachers and adults.
They see this as bravery until Summer increasingly turns the force of it on
them, going out of her way to destroy the things they care for the most in a
very public setting. For Mia, it is her crush on Owen who she considers an
outsider. When Summer kisses him at a school dance in full view of Mia, this
hurts her so badly that she ends up abandoning ballet, something she truly
loved but could no longer find joy it.
With Brynn her behavior is worse. Brynn
increasingly begins to develop feelings for Summer and slowly it becomes clear
not only that Summer's aware of it but that she's starting to taunt Brynn for
it. One night Summer comes to Brynn and the two share an intimate moment and
the following day Summer openly calls her homophobic insults in front of the
school. It is in large part because of this that the girls are the prime
suspect in her murder.
Even before this happens Summer is
increasingly becoming toxic to her friends, becoming increasingly demanding and
starting to lose touch with reality. At one point they come to a place that
Summer has found and she tells them its Lovelorn. They will continue to go
there over the weeks and months but Summer is both becoming unstable and both
girls are pulling away from her with good reason. At the end of the novel there
is a likely explanation for Summer's behavior but Oliver is too clever to argue
that it excuses the way she treated the girls who were her best friends.
Their lives were already in a shambles even if nothing had happened to Summer.
Five years later both girls are dealing
with the fallout. Brynn is rehab for the sixth time since Summer's death occur
but the truth is not only is she not an addict she's never even taken drugs. As
she tells us in the first pages she likes rehab, the whole routine of it. She's
been paying her cousin Wade to keep her in dirty urine just before she checks
out. She makes it clear why:
In rehab, I can be whoever I want. And that
means, finally, I don't have to be a monster.
Unfortunately for Brynn a storm comes that
makes it impossible for Wade to show up and on that same night everyone sees a
broadcast of the fifth anniversary of Summer Marks murder and they learn that one
of the 'monsters' is among them. These
circumstances combine to force Brynn to leave rehab and while she doesn't want
to go someone shows up.
That someone is Mia. In the aftermath of
the accusations Mia's mother began to start hoarding to the point the town has
given them two weeks to clean up or face fines for environmental hazards. Her
mother has left town for the first time for more than an hour since the murder,
but she's basically left this Sisyphean task to Mia and perhaps her only friend
in the world Abby.
Abby has the blessing of only having moved
to town two years. Everyone's heard about the murder (if you type in Mia's name
into Google Search you get an article titled 'How Do Kids Become Monsters?
Who's to Blame?") but for Abby its secondhand. Mia has had to be home
schooled essentially because she's received death threats and people will still
spit in her face. Abby is a mini YouTube celebrity so she's had to be homeschooled
too and in a bizarre way she understands what Mia's going through.
In the midst of this Mia manages to find in
one of the Piles some things that belong to Summer. One of them is a copy of Return
to Lovelorn, the fanfic they were doing. Then she sees a quiz of Summer's
where the spelling is horrible and completely messed up – which doesn't matched
the typed pages she kept coming back to them with. That means someone else
wrote them.
So when Mia shows up at Brynn's rehab, just
as she is about to be unwillingly discharged and tells her they have to go back
to Lovelorn Brynn knows its coming. The two girls haven't seen each other since
they were accused and each things the other is responsible for them being
charged. Mia naively thought that if she could talk to Brynn she would make it
better. Instead Brynn abandons the car as soon as they get within distance of
Twin Lakes.
While this is going on Owen has returned to
Twin Lakes as well. Owen left the country after being accused, something that
Brynn in particular despises him for. Owen lied about his whereabouts the night
of the murder and neither girl is sure if he is innocent all this time. He's
only returned from London because his family is about to sell the house and his
presence infuriates Brynn and stirs up feelings that Mia can't understand – or doesn't
want to. Eventually Owen and Wade show up and along with Abby the five of them
try to figure out what happened to Summer.
Now I think I will start to becoming vague.
Much of Broken Things is about Lovelorn itself; the story, the
search for the fiction that Summer wrote, trying to interpret the meaning of
certain characters and what clues their might be in it. Mia is more committed
to the idea that they might find Summer's killer in it than Brynn ever is; her
path is basically that of someone who is trying to avoid a reality that, in its
own way, is the saddest of the group.
The novel also tries to understand the kind
of girl Summer was - the version that
Mia and Brynn knew, the one Owen had a glimpse of, the one her foster parents
did. Because Oliver is clever she never states directly the real reason Lovelorn
is so important to Summer and therefore the rest, and because my opinion
could be textbook psychology I won't either.
Because NOW basically takes place at the
fifth anniversary of the murder of Summer, Brynn and Owen's appearance could
not have come as a worse time for them. A ceremony is being planned by their own
middle school which might be intended for healing for a town that has never
gotten over it. When the Monsters of Brickhouse Lane attend (for reasons I won't
go into) it becomes clear that what this town wants is to form a lynch mob and
everyone barely escapes with their lives.
Throughout it Brynn clearly hasn't gotten
over the trauma and can't understand why anyone would care about her, even
Wade. In one of the best passage he tells her about the Salem witch trials and
drives it home:
"What happened in Twin Lakes five
years ago was a witch hunt. Something terrible happened. No one could
understand it. So what did they do? They made up a story. They made up a myth…They
turned you into demons. Three average everyday girls. A little lonely, a little
ignored. The boy next door. An old book. They made a movie out of you. It was a
witch hunt."
And then he drives home the consequences
The thing is they got it wrong. Someone
really did kill Summer…There's a monster out there, Brynn. All this time,
there's been a monster out there. And no one's tracking it."
The parallels are obvious, from the Central
Park Five to the West Memphis Three in particular. Oliver's twist on it is that
even though no one wrongly went to jail or suffered a punishment, the fallout
has almost been worse for the survivors. They have been tried in the national
court of public opinion, which is always far more unforgiving then a court of
law and doesn't change that much regardless of the verdicts of juries. That
there was no trial, no closure for anyone, has made things even worse for not
just Brynn and Mia but in a sense the entire town.
What all of them are trying to find is a
term in Lovelorn: the Shadow. As Wade points out it’s the only thing Wells did
in her book that was truly different: something that is a presence and that
involves a yearly sacrifice. Wells never defines that. The fanfic was written
to define what the Shadow was and just how it fit in. Implied by Oliver (though
only occasionally hinted at by the girls) is that they have been the sacrifice
for the Shadow and they're trying to figure out who it was.
It's rare you hear a metaphor for what so
accurately surrounds so much of our world today. So much of our society has
become a Shadow, demanding a sacrifice to keep the peace, to blame for our lot
in life, to keep us to stop looking for the real monsters in our world. And
we're all looking for a Lovelorn, some place where there are no wars and
everybody's fed and happy and we're all at peace. It's easier to believe in
when were children but some of us never leave the fantasy.
The actual investigation and who was
responsible for what happened to Summer I will leave for you to discover. In a
way, it matters immensely who the killer is and why they did. In another, it's
almost a disappointment because its someone so familiar, though there is a twist
that not even the characters themselves find out about.
What I will leave you with is a paragraph
on one of the last pages. I won't tell you who says it or why. But it's a
lesson I think we could all learn:
"This is something I understand
now. This is the miracle – of other people, of the whole world, of the mystery
of it. That things change. That people grow. That stories can be rewritten over
and over, demons recast as heroes, and tragedies as grace."
That's a lesson we could all learn, now more
than ever.
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