Making It As a Modern Male III: YA Novels and the Teenaged Boy

Nominated for the 2006 National Book Award, Nancy Werlin's novel The Rules of Survival tells the story of a young teenager who is forced to become the protector of his two younger sisters from his progressively psychotic mother. From age four, when she cut him with a butcher knife to "teach" him not to eat a cookie without permission, Matthew realizes that his mother is fighting a losing battle to control what he calls "her demons." He and his sister Callie psychologically walk on eggs around their unpredictable mother Nikki, whose verbal abuse and terrifying rages threaten them and their little half-sister Emmy constantly. In Matthew's words, "The events we lived through taught me to be sure of nothing about other people. They taught me to expect danger around every corner....all of us full of fear."

Although their father Ben and their Aunt Bobbie are aware of Nikki's long absences and explosive behavior, Matthew's appeals for help are brushed aside with vague excuses of legal custody obstacles. Matthew almost obsessively seizes upon a man named Murdoch whom he observes defending a stranger's child, and when Murdoch actually becomes Nikki's boyfriend for a time, Matthew hopes that he has at last found an adult who will protect them. However, when Nikki sees that she is losing control over her children's lives with Murdoch around, she slips into a nearly constant manic rage against him, a rage which threatens several lives. When Nikki is finally jailed for her attacks on Murdoch and his neighbor, Matthew is able to unite the three adults, his father Ben, his Aunt Bobbie, and Murdoch, in freeing the children from his mother's control.

When Nikki is released from jail and kidnaps Emmy, Matthew manages to rescue his sister and take the final steps to break the bonds of Nikki's manipulation and possessive cruelty. In a hopeful conclusion to the story, Matthew comes to an early manhood, learning both to take responsiblity for himself and finally to trust the three adults who care for him and his sisters.

Making It As a Modern Male: YA Novels and the Teen Boy

Many social commentators have lamented the "lost" generation of American boys, growing up in a time in which girls have garnered a lot of attention in the public mind. Although teenage boys are considered a hard sell for fiction writers, guys probably stand in greater need of the vicarious experience offered in novels than do girls, since boys often find their life experience in riskier behaviors and since they are thought to be less comfortable with sharing personal events and feelings with each other.

Despite a resistant market, novelists are drawn to go where angels fear to tread. In this post and in others that follow, I will feature some remarkable young adult novels (roughly for ages 13-17) which show modern teenaged males coping with their own coming of age.

For anyone for whom, in the words of the main character Tom Henderson (alias “Chi-Mo,”) “life is (or has ever been) a “wince-a-thon”, Frank Portman's King Dork will bring it all back–and possibly make navigating high school a bit more meaningful-in real time or in retrospect.

Tom is a skinny, awkward sophomore with only one ally, Sam Hellerman, who becomes his friend in elementary school mainly because of that law of nature, alphabetical order. The main plot line turns on Tom and Sam’s dream of becoming rock stars and attracting hot girls, a quest which is frustrated by their obvious dorkiness, the outright physical and psychological bullying of their “normal” classmates, their generally useless parents and school, and, chiefly, their lack of instruments and the ability to play a note. Undaunted, Tom daily dreams up names and album titles for once and future bands, while Sam uses his considerable intellect to make things happen in real time.

The secondary plot line involves Tom’s search for the cause of his father’s death (suicide vs. murder), beginning with his dad's cryptic codes and code keys scribbled in those bibles of 1970's adolescent angst – Siddartha, A Separate Peace, and, of course, A Catcher in the Rye. Tom intuits that the key to his search lies in a encrypted note from an friend of his father who calls himself “tit.” The working out of this mystery and the uncovering of Sam’s machinations, along with Tom’s first sexual encounters with the illusory “Fiona” and her doppelganger Deanna Schumacher, round out the action in this up-to-the-moment bildungsroman.

Like that more notorious coming-of-age hero, Harry Potter, Tom is a sympathetic stranger in a strange land whose basic sweetness protects him from the sheer meanness of the “normals” and the depraved administration at Hillmont High. Tom and his trusty sidekick Sam manage to put together a band and get a gig at the Hillmont “Festival of Light” (a.k.a. Battle of the Bands). Wielding their hard-won guitars like wands, Tom and Sam manage to overcome the Death Eaters, (in the persons of bully Matt Lynch and the Vice-Principal Mr. Teone, the two-faced Voldemort of this piece) with Tom’s incantation of “We’re the Chi-Mos!”, the last and most transforming of his band names. (Read the whole thing to find out how!)

King Dork is a mystifying, moving, appalling, thought-provoking, sometimes convoluted, funny, and utterly absorbing novel for a reader at any stage of maturation. After all, as long as we live we’re still coming of age, and life remains a bit of a “wince-a-thon” for us all.