October 13, 2013
The one positive thing that I can say about being sick (with a head cold) during my birthday weekend is that I had plenty of time to read. Oh, well, 26 isn't that big of a deal anyway, and I can always push my canceled plans to next weekend. I'm still feeling a little achy as I write this...hopefully I feel better in the morning, because I have another long week ahead of me!
This book is another one that I read for my YA lit class. Whale Talk wasn't specifically assigned, but I read it as one of my "independent choice" options. We're supposed to choose texts that cover different genres, so I guess this one would fall under "sports" literature. But, like other Crutcher works that I've read, it's about so much more than sports, though the characters are gifted athletes.
I read two other Crutcher novels for the YA course that I took as an undergrad. There are many similarities between this novel (which I believe is one of Crutcher's best known), and the two others that I read, Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes and Chinese Handcuffs. The setting, for one thing; they're all set in or around Spokane, Washington. Based on these books, or other works that I've read set around the same geographic location, this is a shitty place to live. Racism, child abuse and molestation, violence...sounds like a freaking shithole. But then again, perhaps that has less to do with the setting itself than with the ages of the characters (all high schoolers, upperclassmen, as this is YA literature). One common theme of these three texts is "hell is for children," because the kids in Crutcher's novels have been through some really rough shit.
T.J. Jones is the main character of Whale Talk. One thing that I have to say about the use of this first person narrative: I was sometimes confused as to whether T.J. was speaking in the present tense, or the past tense. The beginning passages would indicate that it was all in the past tense, but the narrative voice was in the present at times. I don't know, that's something that just bothered me and threw me for a loop at times, almost as though the editing for this book was sloppy or something.
Anyway, I just wanted to get that out of the way. T.J. was adopted by the Jones's when he was two. Prior to that he'd lived with his mother, a drug addict who was extremely negligent of him. Young T.J. had emotional problems as a result of this early neglect (and any unknown abuse that he may have suffered, because his drugged out mother wouldn't have been able to protect him...goddamn it, that's so real, and shit like that makes me hate the world sometimes). His parents, white (while he was mixed race, white, black, and Japanese), were good to him, and sent him to a therapist, a black woman named Georgia Brown. Uh, cute, I guess. But she has a way with children who have been in fucked up situations, and has helped T.J. to get over a lot of his trauma. He still goes to see her, though he's approaching 18, but he mostly helps with some of her young patients (like little Heidi...more on her soon).
T.J. seems like a good guy. He's intelligent, and probably because of the prejudice he's faced during his school years, is turned off by the hypocrisies at his school's all-powerful athletic department. A natural athlete himself, he never participates in school sports, until his English teacher bribes/blackmails him into joining a newly-formed swim team.
I have to say, I felt uncomfortable by the relationship between T.J. and Mr. Simet, as described at the beginning of the book. Of course, Mr. Simet is a good guy, a mentoring character for T.J., and eventually the rest of the swim team. I just feel like the kind of closeness that Mr. Simet and T.J. had would be considered inappropriate today (though I was surprised to see that this book was published in 2001...I thought it was a bit older than that). And in stating that, I feel like Crutcher's depiction of the world is more true than I want to admit, that there are many monsters out there. If it weren't for teachers taking advantage of vulnerable students in order to satisfy their own perversions, close mentorships wouldn't be impossible.
There are monsters aplenty in this book, though through the reasoning of T.J.'s mother (a lawyer who deals with social work-type cases, including familial abuse), it is acknowledged that those monsters became that way for a reason. People like her, and her husband (who volunteers with many children's organizations in an attempt to atone for a fatal mistake from his past), work desperately against a deeply ingrained system, and cycle, of abuse and violence in our society. Any educator can tell you that a child from a "troubled" home probably has issues, and has probably become angry over his or her own helplessness in the situation. I know I have, and do, become angry about it all at times. One child in the book who has suffered abuse at the hands of a "monster" is young Heidi, the mixed-race stepdaughter of Rich Marshall, a young wealthy business owner in T.J.'s community. He physically and emotionally abused her because of her race, as her father was a young black football player who became paralyzed during a game (Crutcher lays the drama on thick). T.J. already had plenty of reasons to hate Marshall, including an incident with a fawn, which he tried to protect from Rich (illegally!) killing it. Rich is an irredeemable monster. Crutcher's other books each had one or two of those.
There are also characters who made mistakes. T.J.'s dad, a motorcycle enthusiast, had accidentally killed a baby during his truck driving days, running it over...after having sex with its mother! Oh, and he got the woman pregnant, which T.J. learns when he drives down to visit the woman a few months after his dad was shot dead by Rich Marshall. Uh, yeah, again, Crutcher lays the drama on real thick, which I found to be the case with Chinese Handcuffs (maybe not so much with Staying Fat..., which seemed to have more humor to balance it out). T.J.'s dad felt guilty about the poor baby his whole life, which was what prompted him to take the bullet for Heidi (Marshall's true target).
Anyway, that's only half the story, really. The other half consists of T.J. putting together the swim team so that Mr. Simet could avoid being the assistant wrestling coach under a tyrant. T.J. made it his mission to get misfits of the school to earn a coveted letterman jacket. He was prompted by the bullying of Chris, a mentally challenged young man who was harassed for wearing his dead brother's letter jacket. Chris had been abused and neglected as a child, too, which resulted in his handicap. Along with Chris, T.J. also recruits a tough guy who lost a leg (also as the result of abuse suffered as a child, and was maybe also sexually abused); a guy who, for unexplained reasons, doesn't talk; an obese young man with a drunk, probably emotionally abusive mother; and a couple of other social misfits with less traumatic life experiences, but who nonetheless round out the unlikely team. Their an easy group to cheer for, and I found myself interested in the details about swimming and the meets, if only because my father is a swim coach and I have some knowledge of those things. Basically, T.J. knew that all of their times would improve, regardless of skill, because of all their practicing, and that's how he rigged it for them to get the letter jackets in the end (though the overly proud athletic department put up a fight against it). In fact, T.J. was the only one not to get a jacket, though he was the only one to qualify for state. He ended up throwing his last event, so that his school wouldn't have an edge in the conference championship or something. Fight the machine, T.J.
The world in Crutcher's books is darker than I want to believe the world really is, but his characters are always strong, and there's always a note of hope at the end of his books. Overly dramatic, to be sure, but it's easy to see why his books have been so popular. If it has to be melodramatic, as least it's telling a substantial story with important messages about some very real issues that kids today are forced to go through. Damn, hell really is for children, though I guess I didn't need Crutcher's works to tell me that. It makes me feel good that I do my best with troubled students, and that's all I really can do in this fucked up world of ours, I guess. If more people did like that, like the "good" adults in Crutcher's novels, the world wouldn't be such a messed up place. I have to say that Crutcher presents an unflinching look at the ugliness of the world, rather than ignoring it like so many other works aimed for teens.
One other quick note. There's a short story by Crutcher that I absolutely love called "Fourth and Too Long." It was published in a collection of short stories, each set in a different decade of the 20th century. I believe that the collection is called Time Capsule, and Don Gallo (an author that I am not familiar with) was the editor or whatever. In Crutcher's story, set in the '60's, a football player in rural Idaho is being threatened with expulsion from his team if he doesn't cut his hair. He's dealt with a lot of shit: he's orphaned, taking care of his senile grandmother because, as an older teen, it's easier than going into the system. They're very poor, but with his careful planning, they get by. He wants a football scholarship, but he wants to keep the hair, as it covers up his ears, which were mangled by a dog when he was young. His resistance is fueled by a Vietnam vet, a traumatized young man who'd once been considered a "fine, upstanding young man" in his community. He'd done as he was told; now, with severe PTSD, he is a shadow of his former self. So the main character ends up switching schools, and playing for a mostly-Native American team, going up against his old team at the end of the story. Of the Crutcher works I've read, that one is my favorite by far. I think I will read more Crutcher short stories in the future; he has a popular short story collection (or two?), so I'll check one out at some point. Maybe with less pages to fill, he takes it easy on the drama, but still gets his important messages across.
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Diversity: as far as our country has come, there's still a long way to go when it comes to race relations. This particular photo was used on the University of Iowa's website, where I attend school. Go Hawkeyes.
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