1 post tagged “scott westerfeld”

I'm ABD in English Literature.  That means that if I got off my butt and wrote my dissertation, I could get my PhD and possibly teach at a university.  I'd have a higher salary and fewer classes, and I'd actually get to talk about books instead of the importance of thesis statements and proper comma usage.

But even if I had the time, I don't have the mental energy.  When I tried to write for an hour or two in the evenings, I'd spend most of my time rewriting the same 15 pages over and over again.  I couldn't develop my argument, and I kept getting bogged down in my prose.  Eventually, everything stopped making sense, and I haven't even opened the file since I had my younger child.

One of the reasons I put the dissertation away, besides the futility of the endeavor, was that I started to hate reading.  When I was a lonely nerd throughout kindergarten through middle school, books got me through each day.  I actually got in trouble in 6th grade for reading too much.  And I would reread my favorites over and over again, to the point where I could almost quote them.  I've always thought that my success in my English classes was due less to any natural talent and more to my unconscious aping of the prose that I'd read.  Considering some college students still can't recognize what makes a complete sentence, I could see how I stood out for my teachers.

But eventually, I just ran out of things that I wanted to read.  Before grad school, I had the desire to be "well-read" and tried to fill in any gaps accordingly.  But the exams and classes of grad school have both given me the illusion that I have read everything "serious" and have killed the desire to read anything that takes too much mental focus.  But I also can't read bad writing any more, or at least mediocre prose.  Some of my friends take guilty pleasure in "chick-lit."  I tried a few of the books and quickly grew tired of the formula.  The speculative fiction I like, I love, but most sci-fi and fantasy bores me.  And anything Oprah touches, I want nothing to do with.  Some contemporary fiction, I absolutely love (The Time Traveler's Wife, for example, or The Cloud Atlas), but I seem to find maybe two titles a year like these, if I'm lucky.  And I no longer have the patience to read anything unless I really enjoy it.

So I went back to my childhood habits.  Cory Doctorow's review of Scott Westerfeld's Uglies trilogy encouraged me to pick them up, and they started me on a young adult kick.   I had almost forgotten the sensation of sitting down with a book and not getting up until I was done (because I wanted to, not because I had a paper due the next day).  The stakes in young adult fiction seem so much higher, and while they're simpler, from an adult perspective, the earnestness with which the characters wrestle with them recalls the drama of teen-aged life perfectly. (Do you wrestle with stakes?  It's probably a good thing I'm not a PhD.).

Westerfeld's trilogy takes place in a dystopian future society, where children are isolated from adults during their preteen and early teenage years.  When they turn 16, they get surgically modified to be "pretty," their features tailored to the exact measurements that appeal to our evolutionary predilections.  The rationale is supposedly that if everyone looks perfect, then no one gains or loses status from their appearance.  There's no discrimination, no "lookism," no eating disorders, no low self-esteem (or "self of steam," as one of my students once wrote).  Pretties live in dorms and spend their days in a perfectly controlled environment of endless parties.  Nobody wants for anything, no one has any responsibilities, and no one leaves the city. 

The heroine, Tally, can't wait for her sixteenth birthday and her surgery, but before that happens, she makes friends with Shay, a girl who is curious about the larger world.  When Shay flees with a band of unmodified outsides, Tally is blackmailed into finding her by a group of terrifying, genetically enhanced "Specials"; if she doesn't cooperate, she stays ugly for the rest of her life.  I won't spoil what exactly she discovers in the process, but you've probably guessed that the pretty world is not as benign as it seems.

Westerfeld is obviously exploring common teenage concerns of conformity and individuality, of the connection between our appearance and our identities,  but the books never feel like heavy-handed allegory, and he never dumbs the prose down.  Tally reads like a real teenager, but she's also an identifiable character, never a prat that you want to smack out of her angst.  And I love a good dystopia, from the description of the perfect society to the inevitable exposing of the flaws.  It's kind of like David Foster Wallace's essay, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" about going on a cruise, where he gets to indulge in a luxurious artificial environment and then dismantle the illusion so you don't feel so bad about not being there.

I don't miss being a teenager.  Hell no. I was miserable and bored most of the time. But I do miss the escapism that I found in books when I was younger.  It's hard to shut off my brain now - grocery list, doctors visits, meetings, playdates, finances, all these concerns prevent me from getting away from my quotidian reality.  But good young adult fiction is not only easy to read, but it makes me feel like a young reader myself, and it allows me to suspend the world for a while. It's good to be a teenager again, especially if that teenager is not my former self. As an adult, I no longer desperately long for another life, but I appreciate the brief respites that these books can provide.