So Many Books... - 120 Hour Challenge - Day 4

08:39 pm - 120 Hour Challenge - Day 4

Not from the backlog of books read and still unreviewed, as I just finished this last night, so I'm kind of departing from my own challenge rules. It's an older book and has got a lot of praise (along with a bit of criticism) so it may be totally uninteresting book-talking for most, but I loved it and am going to do it anyway.

The book starts with Troy, the self-described 'fat kid' of the title, saved from jumping in front of a train by Curt, a 'skinny punk guitar genius' - who's mostly homeless and definitely messed up. Curt claims that Troy owes him lunch, and in the diner calls him 'Big T' - the nickname being almost enough in itself to win Troy over completely. Still, he's horrified when Curt plans to start a punk band with Troy as his drummer, because Troy - stretching the truth a bit - says 'his instrument' is drums. Not only does Troy have no friends, but his home life is awful too - his ex-Marine dad is rigidly authoritarian and can't understand how Troy hasn't managed to 'take charge of his life' and his skinny, athletic younger brother makes it clear at every opportunity he gets how much he despises Troy as a pathetic loser. All this is given in often very funny first-person narrative, rather than as the dirge it could easily be.

Okay, I won't be spoiling spoiling, but I will tell about the mood of the ending, because I have to to say anything about the fat-friendliness (or otherwise) of the book. Clearly there are three ways it could end: 1) tragic; 2) good for Troy after he learns from Curt's meeting a tragic end; or 3) with Troy and Curt helping each other. Also, vitally, any happiness for Troy could happen a) with weight loss or b) without weight loss. If you don't want to know which of those happens, don't read behind the cut.

It's 3 and b, which makes it a big WIN as far as I'm concerned. Just to say that again: Troy does not get happy and lose weight, he just gets happy.

Second big win was coming out of the book and realising that I'd come to like the two characters I'd never thought in a million years it would be possible to feel the least smidgen of liking for: Troy's dad and his obnoxious brother Dayle. It's not anything like as unusual as the first 'win', but it does relate. (In my head at any rate - whether or not I'll get it out coherently is another matter.)

gnomicutterance made a criticism of the book some time ago on diceytillerman's post about the lack of this type of outcome in YA books with fat characters (if either of you read this, would you mind my linking? Or have you said more elsewhere?) - that the book is obsessed with Troy's fatness, which takes away from the points in the book's favour. I disagree, though if it were a third-person narrator, the relentless focus on his body would be horrific, of course. It's true that he never thinks of himself as anything other than 'Fat Kid', often in paper headline style, never walks but 'waddles', huffs, sweats and his fat spills over the edge of chairs regularly. But this is in his head and his perspective is obsessively - morbidly - conscious of himself and how he looks and how he moves and how he sounds - always.

Here's where what I have to say about this could read as pretending to find fat friendliness in a text by dismissing all the world's very substantial fat prejudice as only in the fat person's head. And I'm not doing that. (If you read through what I have to say carefully, and still feel I am, then please tell me, but not without reading carefully first.) It seems to me that there's a very accurate portrayal of a nasty and all-too-common feedback loop in Troy's state of mind here. There is a serious problem in society's attitude towards fat people. Some of it's casual dismissal or sloppy assumptions and some of it's a lot more openly toxic and even violent. But the bigotry is no more acceptable than any other type of bigotry. That needs to be changed, and I can't say that too emphatically. Nonetheless, what can happen with an individual living in that society is what I think Troy portrays. Correctly perceiving the unacceptability of being fat and experiencing rejection because of it, Troy becomes more and more sensitive to that rejection and unacceptability, until he's both obsessed by it and has managed to distort his own perspective. Feeling that everyone's always laughing at him when he's out in public, always staring at him, always thinking about his fatness, because he's always thinking about that. This doesn't mean that the problem is Troy's alone, but it does mean that he's come to feel that he could never have a reasonably happy life as he is, and that obviously, is a self-fulfilling conviction.

When I was thinking about this, what came to me was Sophie in Howl's Moving Castle. If one accepts fairy tale convention as the equivalent of society for this purpose, then there's a real parallel with her talking the Witch's spell onto herself in layer upon layer, making it far stronger than the initial spell OR fairy-tale anti-oldest sibling bias. That has always seemed to me a wonderful metaphor for the distorted perspective it's so easy to develop and the power of the self-talking-down that can result. And this applies to many, very different, kinds of 'unacceptable' conditions - including ones that are only unacceptable to oneself.

Troy starts to shake loose from his obsessive and warped perspective when Curt - confusedly - tells him that everyone isn't always looking at him. His head just about explodes from the idea.

If the universe is, in fact, curved when before we thought it was flat...

I consider what's just been said. If Curt's observation is true, then it's possible, though not probable, that people are not always looking at me when I think they're looking at me.

Matter begins to bend unpredictably.

If people are not always looking at me, then the eye rays that make me bloat to the size of a blue whale whenever I'm in public, are perhaps more diluted than I think they are.

One thing that's interesting is that for all the narrative is very funny, and though Troy constantly feels people are laughing at him, he doesn't start laughing at himself for a while. That's part of his expanding view of things, and this eventually allows him to see that though he's seen much unkindness or selfishness in those around him, his self-centred misery has also caused him to treat them with a lack of compassion and understanding. Yes, I know this sounds trite, and could have been, but the way it's done makes it very moving instead. (Dayle? As I said, I'd never have thought he could be sympathetic, and he is actually totally so.) Granted, it might have been even more powerful if Troy had been laughing at himself and seen the impact of that self-centredness on others and still been initially unable to move out of it, but that would be a hell of a lot to ask of a short book, and everything works anyway. And while I'm admitting quibbles, Curt also accepts the help offered to him in a perhaps easier-than-realistic way, but hey, I'm all for the hopeful (and funny!) ending, rather than the least-optimistic and therefore supposedly more realistic one.

One of my favourite things was Curt's saying that the greatest drummers 'listen to the sounds arouund them, then add their own part in the conversation', and Troy's realisation that he wants, more than anything, to have that kind of conversation. He never loses the acute awareness of his body, but by the end, he's reclaimed the language of fatness to bring to the conversation.