Monday, June 10, 2013

Characters

Was there any character in the book to whom you were not sympathetic?
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10 comments:

cl said...

Ruminating on this one, but for starters, I thought the custodian's actions were a little inconsistent. A former police officer turns in two ballots in the trash but fails to mention he'd been letting a kid in the building with a good motive to tear down the posters? I wish for the little POV we had from him that he had addressed that dilemma.

4:18 PM, June 10, 2013
kc said...

Oh, good call, Christy. That was a big moral gap! I would have liked to have seen that addressed.

I felt pretty sympathetic to everyone, except the teacher who slept with Tracy. I just never came around to understanding that, even though I kind of understood Mr. M's own dumb infidelity. Maybe it's because we never got the other teacher's first-person account?

I really liked the author's ability to make essentially everyone sympathetic so that you had the sense of this whole thing as just a big effed-up mess rather than as the typical hero vs. villain tale that high school stories are generally reduced to.

3:22 PM, June 12, 2013
Erin said...

Excellent observations. I also didn't get the teacher who slept with Tracy. In general I don't have much sympathy toward teachers who sleep with students, and that guy seemed especially pathetic. I don't buy that any particular high school girl has some power over male teachers. (Really, her ass is great? Come on. Isn't everyone's at 17?)

Great point about the custodian.

6:15 PM, June 13, 2013
cl said...

And Mr. M using a Tracy fantasy to impregnate his wife ... that was skeevy, too.

I thought Jack the English teacher was truly loathsome, but his explanation of it to Mr. M was one of my favorite parts of the book — I wish I could find it online — that he felt like all the events of his life merely led up to destroying it with Tracy. I don't like how he victimized a minor in his path to self-destruction, but just short of that there was something relatable in what he said. I think the pointlessness Mr. M and Jack were feeling drove some of their choices.

8:12 AM, June 15, 2013
kc said...

Oh yeah, I found that a bit moving too, the line about all the events of his life leading to destroying it.

I also found Paul's observation somewhat enlightening. He and the other boys in school are wondering "How could he fall for Tracy? we asked ourselves over and over. For Tracy!"

(Obviously the teenage boys don't find her teenage ass quite as compelling as the adult men do!)

But then Paul understands what Mr. Dexter saw in her: "She was unhappy."

"Tracy Flick needed someone to cheer her up. So did Lisa ... so did Tammy and my mother and my father. Maybe that's what we look for in the people we love, the spark of unhappiness we think we know how to extinguish."

Do you think that was truly a plausible motive for Mr. Dexter, as Paul surmises, given that we don't have Mr. Dexter's own point of view?

Related: I think it's pretty amusing how Tracy (correctly, but almost as if she's been coached) says that Mr. Dexter was the one at fault because "He was the adult," then blithely notes that everything would have been OK and no one would have known "if he hadn't been such a baby about it." I thought that was pretty great way of saying that it's not so much our "sins" that matter  — we all sin — as the way we behave in their aftermath.

8:53 AM, June 20, 2013
Erin said...

Oh, that was an interesting insight from Paul: "She's unhappy." It seemed a little too insightful for a high school boy, even given my previous assertion that Paul was the most mature character.

And no, I'm not sure that I buy it for Mr. Dexter, who didn't seem that deep to me, but maybe that's just because, as you say, we didn't get into his head much.

4:51 PM, June 20, 2013
kc said...

I think it makes sense if her being unhappy makes her vulnerable. I could imagine skeevy guys taking advantage of an emotional weakness. That doesn't mean he wanted to "extinguish the spark of her unhappiness"; more like he just wanted a spark.

5:00 PM, June 20, 2013
cl said...

I agree with Erin. That was quite insightful for a teenage boy, especially Paul as he's otherwise portrayed!

KC's related: I forgot about Tracy's blasé take on Mr. Dexter and nobody needing to have known about it. Because she never came clean about the posters nor expressed any lingering regret over that. And that makes me wonder re: all of them whether it's not whether we "sin," it's whether we get caught!

7:51 AM, June 21, 2013
kc said...

Good point, C, about getting caught. You have to wonder how much self-reflection goes on in the absence of getting caught ...

Speaking of sins, I felt a strong distinction in the book between the kind of wrongs we perpetrate because we're weak and flawed and needy and human and the kind we perpetrate because we're cruel and narrow. When Mr. M. is working at the car dealership some guys are making light of a sex crime (which is also how the novel begins, with the same example in Mr. M's class of the mentally disabled girl being attacked by the jocks), and two of the car guys are making jokes about the victim. Mr. M. says:

"I could have said something, but what difference would it have made? Stan and Rudy are grown men. It's too late to shape their minds, to teach them values and a sense of compassion. You have to do that when kids are young, before their personalities harden and they come to love their own ignorance. And besides, what right did I have to be holier than thou with anyone? My only consolation was that Frank Jr. walked away from the conversation, shaking his head in disgust. He was one of mine, and maybe that had made a difference."

I like how Mr. M feels he has no room to talk — but actually he kind of does.

11:48 AM, June 22, 2013
Erin said...

Oh, I loved that paragraph!

12:25 PM, June 22, 2013

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