The challenge, of course, is credibility. Charity is
depicted as attractive and bright (Advanced Placement English), but immersed in
the seamier aspects of life. Knowing them well, she copes with them competently.
Do you recognize this person? Is this present day, middle class America
presented akin to the manner in which Dickens presented the seamier aspects of Victorian England through one
of his characters?
Life is gross: that’s the bottom line. Baggage handlers
don’t so much load bags onto a conveyer belt as “chuck them into the guts of
the plane.” One of Charity’s seatmates
is “a fat woman” who we later learn “stinks of sweat.” The other seatmate, as
he lifts a bag into the overhead bin, has an exposed, protuberant belly button
and the tops of his boxers are visible. He’s wearing sandals and “he has hairy
feet and narrow toes.”
At one point, we are told that the world, to Charity, “feels
crude and unfocused, a bad sketch of itself.”
Later, after she’s first fallen asleep on the male seatmate’s shoulder (she worries that she might have drooled), we learn his name is Mark as a conversation ensues and he gives her his cellphone number, palms her inner thigh and digs his wrist against the crotch of her jeans. All this on an otherwise routine flight from Boston to Seattle.
Charity eventually texts Mark and receives in return a
couple of photos of his genitals. Nothing fundamentally new there: just one
aspect of Mark’s “junk” involves something Charity “never before had occasion
to notice.” One thinks of the recent Colorado school sexting scandal and trends
in Young Adult literature – books Charity probably reads – towards more
candid descriptions of sex.
And so it goes for several pages until finally, at the
Seattle aquarium, Charity takes a snapshot of a bunch of chopped up fish flying
out of a bucket through the air to some sea otters waiting below, pairs it on
Instagram with a shot of the interior of her mouth and sends the montage off to
friends and strangers with the caption: “Fish gutz/my gutz: compare and
contrast” – the latter a reference to her current AP English assignment,
involving none other than Charles Dickens.
To wit: the story of her life and a compelling depiction
of where we as a society are at?
“Teen-agers may be more prone
to acting on their urges, or they may just be more attuned to the profoundly
contradictory and damaging messages the culture is constantly sending all of us,”
Taylor, the author, said in a New Yorker interview.
“The culture:” that’s the rest of us, right?
What about Mark, who was
clearly intent on having sex with the under-age Charity. She knows his activities are
illegal and should be reported, but doesn’t want to go through with that course
of action because of what it would mean for her. That’s a choice Taylor, the
author, endorses for his own purposes. “I
didn’t want his behavior or point of view to define the narrative or, worse
yet, flatten Charity into victimhood,” he explained in the interview.
Here’s a bit more from Taylor: “Another
thing about her—which may or may not be broadly true of teen-agers—is that her
thinking is far more nuanced and articulate than what comes out of her mouth.
If this were written in the first person, the disjunction between Charity’s
thoughts and her speech would present an enormous technical problem: if you
play up the contrast you risk cheap satire, but if you play it down you have to
write the whole story in mumblecore. Free indirect style is ultimately about
modulation, and this story—given its subject matter as well as its
structure—demanded a lot of that.”
One wonders if The New Yorker would have printed the
un-modulated version.
Finally, the word mumblecore,
which Taylor used, but perhaps incorrectly. Mumblecore is a technical term for
a subgenre of independent film characterized by amateur actors speaking naturalistic
dialog as opposed to a type of expression (presumably only partially
comprehensible) associated with teenagers.
No comments:
Post a Comment