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owlectomyI have loved Benjamin Alire Sáenz's writing since I read Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood back when I was in library school: so atmospheric and melancholy and beautiful and honest, all at once, and a thorough education in Spanish cursing too.
So for my New Books presentation for Committee, I said "I want to do Benjamin Alire Sáenz's new book," without having even read it. The book is Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe.
It's about two Mexican-American teenagers in El Paso who meet at the swimming pool one day and develop an epic friendship despite their differences. It's about the relationship between emotionally repressed Ari and his emotionally repressed father, a Vietnam veteran, and how they never talk about his older brother Bernardo, who went to prison when Ari was very young. It's about Ari's doubt and anger as he tries to figure out what's in his heart, and figure out what it means to be a man --
And it is also about what happens when Dante, always the more emotionally open of the pair, comes out to him as gay.
This is a book I highly recommend. The writing is spare but also emotionally honest and it makes you feel the summer storms streaking across the desert. If I can make a weird comparison, I really like John Green's books, but he's writing about teenagers who are sensitive and hyperliterate and very aware of their emotions, and I think it takes even more skill to convey that precisely the emotions of people who are closed off from the world and who act like jerks because they don't understand or can't process what they're feeling. If I can make a weirder comparison, there's something in the airiness and the tenderness and the purity of this book that makes me think of old-school shounen-ai, with most of the melodrama boiled off.
(Content note: there are two incidents of awful violence, one homophobic and mostly off-stage, one transphobic and entirely off-stage. I am -- not really sure how I feel about the latter? It's kind of a bombshell to drop on the reader and then not deal with it? I dunno.)
So, this brought me around to thinking about #YesGayYA last year and how often I heard people call for books that weren't just about being gay, but were maybe about saving the world while happening to be gay, and how much ambivalence I felt about that. I mean, I think that's a very legitimate reaction, because (a) most of the people in my online circles are more interested in SF and fantasy, where romance and identity-related introspection are not as big a deal in the first place, and (b) much of the LGBT YA that's out there runs through its paces of identity angst and coming-out angst and tentative romance in a way that is kind of predictable, and that's not really a book I need to read again. (Although so much of it is about middle-class white boys that I would welcome Aristotle and Dante even if it were that book!)
Aristotle and Dante definitely is not a book that's just about being gay. The relationship between Ari and his parents is a thread that's just as important through the book; and Ari's becoming a man, starting work and learning to drive and adopting a beloved stray dog, is equally important. But it is a book where being gay can't be incidental, or else the book would be really short, or else it would be a flat-out romance. Thank goodness Sáenz knows how to write repression and denial in a way that's not obvious and clumsy, or it COULD be one of those books that runs through its paces in a predictable way -- but I never found myself thinking, "I don't need to read another one of these."
Maybe it comes down to the danger of the single story. For so long the single story was "Here is a teenager who is confused about his/her identity, here is some angst, here is where the main character and/or the possible love interest get punished for not being straight, here is heteronormativity restored (at least partially." And now the single story has become "Confusion about identity, angst, coming out to parents is hard, disapprobation of community, tentative romance, maybe they don't get broken up at the end." And -- we need more stories than that. But it's not as if those things aren't still issues in the lives of teenagers, and a story where that's just a part of the whole tapestry of growing up and coming of age is maybe just as valuable as a story where the gay kid gets to save the world.
So for my New Books presentation for Committee, I said "I want to do Benjamin Alire Sáenz's new book," without having even read it. The book is Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe.
It's about two Mexican-American teenagers in El Paso who meet at the swimming pool one day and develop an epic friendship despite their differences. It's about the relationship between emotionally repressed Ari and his emotionally repressed father, a Vietnam veteran, and how they never talk about his older brother Bernardo, who went to prison when Ari was very young. It's about Ari's doubt and anger as he tries to figure out what's in his heart, and figure out what it means to be a man --
And it is also about what happens when Dante, always the more emotionally open of the pair, comes out to him as gay.
This is a book I highly recommend. The writing is spare but also emotionally honest and it makes you feel the summer storms streaking across the desert. If I can make a weird comparison, I really like John Green's books, but he's writing about teenagers who are sensitive and hyperliterate and very aware of their emotions, and I think it takes even more skill to convey that precisely the emotions of people who are closed off from the world and who act like jerks because they don't understand or can't process what they're feeling. If I can make a weirder comparison, there's something in the airiness and the tenderness and the purity of this book that makes me think of old-school shounen-ai, with most of the melodrama boiled off.
(Content note: there are two incidents of awful violence, one homophobic and mostly off-stage, one transphobic and entirely off-stage. I am -- not really sure how I feel about the latter? It's kind of a bombshell to drop on the reader and then not deal with it? I dunno.)
So, this brought me around to thinking about #YesGayYA last year and how often I heard people call for books that weren't just about being gay, but were maybe about saving the world while happening to be gay, and how much ambivalence I felt about that. I mean, I think that's a very legitimate reaction, because (a) most of the people in my online circles are more interested in SF and fantasy, where romance and identity-related introspection are not as big a deal in the first place, and (b) much of the LGBT YA that's out there runs through its paces of identity angst and coming-out angst and tentative romance in a way that is kind of predictable, and that's not really a book I need to read again. (Although so much of it is about middle-class white boys that I would welcome Aristotle and Dante even if it were that book!)
Aristotle and Dante definitely is not a book that's just about being gay. The relationship between Ari and his parents is a thread that's just as important through the book; and Ari's becoming a man, starting work and learning to drive and adopting a beloved stray dog, is equally important. But it is a book where being gay can't be incidental, or else the book would be really short, or else it would be a flat-out romance. Thank goodness Sáenz knows how to write repression and denial in a way that's not obvious and clumsy, or it COULD be one of those books that runs through its paces in a predictable way -- but I never found myself thinking, "I don't need to read another one of these."
Maybe it comes down to the danger of the single story. For so long the single story was "Here is a teenager who is confused about his/her identity, here is some angst, here is where the main character and/or the possible love interest get punished for not being straight, here is heteronormativity restored (at least partially." And now the single story has become "Confusion about identity, angst, coming out to parents is hard, disapprobation of community, tentative romance, maybe they don't get broken up at the end." And -- we need more stories than that. But it's not as if those things aren't still issues in the lives of teenagers, and a story where that's just a part of the whole tapestry of growing up and coming of age is maybe just as valuable as a story where the gay kid gets to save the world.
(no subject)
21/3/12 23:10 (UTC)