Rate Your Experience: One Final Survey!

Here at the Uni High English Department, we value customer satisfaction above all. Please take a few minutes to answer a few short questions about your experiences this semester. And thank you for your many contributions to this class every week!

English Department Survey

The English Department has been experimenting with various forms of "ungrading" in all of our core English classes for the last two years--we are looking at ways to deemphasize letter grades in favor of a labor-based, qualitative-feedback-driven mode of assessment of your writing and other activities.

Please take a few minutes now to record your impressions and experiences in all of your English classes over these last two years: https://forms.gle/TaKqBDzaayYHu4Te7.

Thank you!

A Generation Gap

We’ve seen a good deal of tension between generations this semester: from Esther Greenwood’s rejection of her mother and Mrs. Willard’s narrowly defined gender roles, to Alison Bechdel’s complicated efforts to distinguish herself from her father, to Jason Taylor’s repeated conviction that his parents have no idea what his daily life is really like. Perhaps generational tensions are inherent to coming-of-age narratives: parents have one view of what their children’s life should be like, while the children’s self-definition often entails setting themselves apart from those values.

But Sag Harbor presents a starker rift between generations than any of these, and this generational story seems fundamental to the larger story Whitehead is telling. We’ve talked in class about how Benji and his friends have to deal with very particular issues of self-definition, as paradoxical “black boys with beach houses.” Their racial identities—their sense of themselves as part of a larger context of Black culture and history, their personal navigation of racial stereotypes, even their musical tastes and fashion choices—don’t seem to come “naturally” to them. The culture at large views them as a walking paradox; The Cosby Show notwithstanding, Benji is all too aware that to white America, he and his friends don’t exist. There’s a particular view of what being Black in America means, and this doesn’t seem to include a doctor father, lawyer mother, midtown apartment, elite private school, and a beach house near the Hamptons. Of course, Benji doesn’t experience his own circumstances as a contradiction: “what you call paradox, I call myself” (72). It’s the life he’s born into. There’s nothing strange about Sag for Benji and Reggie and their crew—they’ve literally been coming out since they were in utero.

The enclave of African American families who own beach houses in Sag Harbor has a long history, and these boys are born into that history. They have been taught about this history, too. Benji might not be sure who W. E. B. Du Bois is, but he knows the name Maude Terry, for whom Terry Drive in Sag Harbor is named. The narrative fills us in on what Benji has been taught about this history. Maude Terry is “the spiritual architect of the developments”: “She was part of a group from Brooklyn and Queens who started coming out in the ’30s and ’40s. . . . One day our Maude, after walking through the dirt paths summer after summer to what would become Azurest Beach, decided to investigate who actually owned these woods” (95). She finds out they’re owned by a guy named Gale, who gladly sells the seemingly useless stretch of land to Terry, who then divides the parcel into lots and sells them “to her friends, to her friends’ friends, and so on, the middle-class black folk of their acquaintance” (95). Hence was born the “first generation” of black Sag Harbor. Benji and his crew are the third.

The history of Sag Harbor mirrors the larger course of Black history in the twentieth century. The first generation, Maude Terry’s crew, represent the pre-civil-rights-movement individual strivers, those who put up with all manner of prejudice and bigotry to carve out a modest piece of the American Dream for themselves in New York. (Du Bois, who reputedly enjoyed fried fish with this crowd once himself, would have called them the “talented tenth.”) A beach house on Sag is a pretty good token of “making it” in America. The second generation—Benji’s parents—represent what some cultural historians have called the Civil Rights Generation. They have a strong and even combative sense of racial identity, and Benji’s father is sharply attuned to even the subtlest of racist insults. They’ve lived through the strife of the 1960s and its aftermath, they have a strong awareness of Black history and their place within it, and they enjoy the fruits of their labor with a proud defiance. (Benji’s father lives his own kind of “paradox,” switching between easy listening and Black-nationalist talk radio on the drive out to Sag.) Benji’s mom and dad have had to fight for what they have, and they see themselves as closely connected to an ongoing racial struggle in America. They send their kids to private school, but they’re upset when they have no idea who Marcus Garvey is.

And here’s where the novel’s generational conflict comes to light. What about Benji’s generation? What’s their relationship to the history of the African American Sag community, or to the larger context of Black history in America? They are living in the wake of the civil-rights movement, presumably enjoying the hard-won spoils that their parents’ generation sacrificed for. Whitehead doesn’t let the reader indulge in the white liberal fantasy that once buses and lunch counters were desegregated, America was on a clear and direct path to racial equality. From the first chapter, thanks to his dad’s radio listening, we hear references to contentious current events in New York that call into question how much “progress” has been made: “The playlist of the city in those days was headline after headline of outrage, in constant rotation were bloody images of Michael Stewart choked to death by cops, Grandma Eleanor Bumpers shot to death by cops, Yusef Hawkins shot to death by racist thugs” (19). But while his father is constantly chiming in with his own affirmation of this outrage, Benji and his brother are just trying to sleep in the back seat. This image aptly illustrates the generational dynamic in the novel as a whole: the father muttering about racism on his way to some hard-earned peace and quiet and grilling at his beach house, while the teenage boys just want to get some more sleep.

Benji and his crew represent what has been called, variously, the Post-Civil-Rights Generation and the Hip-Hop Generation (subsets of the larger category Generation X--i.e. your parents' generation): the kids who are coming of age in the 1980s and early 1990s, whose parents lived through the civil-rights era. As Whitehead points out, his generation is coming of age alongside the emerging hip-hop culture—he and Ice Cube were born the same year, and they both grew up listening to Run-DMC (176). In his narrative, the kids and hip-hop itself “lose their innocence” around the same time: the “golden age” of the late 1980s gives way to the hypermasculine violent rhetoric of gangsta rap as these kids grow into men. Hip-hop is just emerging as what will become a dominant, global cultural and economic force, and kids like Benji and Reggie and Nick are riding the cusp of this movement.

What is this novel’s view of the Hip-Hop Generation and its relationship to the larger narrative of African American history? Do Benji and his friends see themselves as part of a proud tradition? Do they even seem to appreciate how lucky they are? The opening chapter sets up the blank slate of a summer in Sag as replete with possibility and transformative potential—a time for “self-reinvention,” which also represents Reggie and Benji’s most extensive exposure to Black culture (he has to learn all the new slang and handshakes and hairstyles). But once the novel gets under way, this potential seems squandered. Benji and Reggie seem to work all the time, and when they don’t work, they sit around, or drive around. The days seem empty and aimless. They get themselves into trouble for no good reason at all (“discovering a new way to kill a chunk of summer” [157]), and they spend all their time gorging on ice cream, watching TV, and listening to the radio. In previous summers they played video games, but now they’ve outgrown that in favor of sitting around on the beach talking shit, boasting, and putting each other down in new and creative ways.

Benji does give some respect to Bobby’s grandfather: “a real gentle guy, always kind to our mangy bunch when we came over. Gentle in that way that said he’d seen a lot of racist shit in his life and was glad that things had turned out better for his children and grandchildren. That cool old breed. . . . He had a right to be proud. And a right to get some damn sleep at the first hints of twilight” (152). But what are Benji and his friends up to, while Bobby’s gentle grandfather retires for the night? Posing with Randy and Bobby’s new toy guns, pretending to shoot each other, calling each other “pussy” for not wanting to play along, making empty boasts about “sticking up some pink motherfuckers” at school in the fall. The contrast is stark. Is this what Bobby’s grandfather and his generation worked so hard to establish?

There’s a definite sense of decadence to Whitehead’s depiction of Benji’s generation. It’s not that the “racist shit” they have to deal with isn’t real—they’re all too aware that, as “black boys with beach houses,” they don’t have the freedom to completely define themselves. They are constantly anticipating how others might view them, and calibrating their behavior and appearance accordingly, and Whitehead isn’t clearly mocking or belittling the various strategies they pursue (the “prep-school militant” is a bit of a punchline, but Benji is ultimately sympathetic to the fact that he and his friends can’t merely “be themselves”—they have to project a certain “front” to the world). The Head-Patting Incident is a big deal—or at least it’s maybe a big deal, depending whether or not Martine is Black. And they can’t tell if he is or not. So maybe they’ll do something about it, maybe they won’t. And when Benji does (sort of, passive-aggressively) do something about it, the novel raises the likelihood that his action was based on a misidentification of Martine’s race.

In other words, things are significantly more complicated for this generation. Racism is still there, even though the existence of shows like Cosby might imply otherwise, but it’s a lot more ambiguous and elusive. Benji’s father likes to talk about “whitey” as a catch-all antagonist, but Benji goes to school with mostly white kids, and he also digs “white” music like the Smiths and Bauhaus along with Run-DMC and Afrika Bambaataa. And when he is the victim of what seems like a racist incident, he can’t even tell for sure if the perpetrator is “white.” Is it too clichéd to say that, for Benji’s generation, things aren’t quite so black and white as they used to be? “That’s some racist shit right there,” NP says after the Incident (115). Or, then again, maybe it’s not. We’re in “deep eye-of-the-beholder terrain” (113), and Benji can’t merely react against racism because he’s not even totally sure racism is what he’s experiencing.

Does the novel indulge in any nostalgia for the older generation? Is there a sense that Benji’s decadent crew represents a dropping off from some more noble community ideal? He’s certainly aware that they might be viewed in this way. Referring to the first generation, he says, “They had fought to make a good life for themselves . . . and they wanted all the spoils of their struggle. A place to go in the summer with their families. To make something new” (65). But then he adds, with audible irony, “If only they could see us now. O Pioneers!” Benji’s teenage narcissism and detachment is epitomized when he follows up the proud origin-myth narrative of Maude Terry with, “Cut to forty years later, to me, more specifically, as I made my way to work and confronted one small hitch. Taking the beach shortcut meant running a gauntlet of forced social interaction” (95). I can imagine the first generation rolling their eyes in exasperation at this ungrateful brat: We fought so hard to establish this place for you, and you can’t even be bothered to make a little small talk on your way to work? To bring us back a pint of Rocky Road?

Benji cites Bobby’s grandfather on how things used to be. To the reader, the picture he evokes probably doesn’t sound half bad: “[E]veryone was welcome when you threw a party. Maybe you didn’t know each other personally, but you all had the same story, right, when it came down to it: after a long journey you had found safety on this shore. . . . If you saw the lights or heard the music . . . you walked on up and pushed in the screen door, whether you knew the person or not. And once you walked in, you were blood brothers” (97-98). This image of a small, close-knit community formed along bonds of common interest and experience—a refuge from a racist society where a little music can be played, drinks shared, chicken grilled—doesn’t resonate at all with Benji. “That sounded crazy, frankly. The custom of a better time. Half the fun of having a party, it seemed . . . was in excluding people, especially your neighbors, who would be forced to listen to the music and laughter” (98).

I don’t know whether Ben, the adult narrator of the novel, is criticizing or defending his generation’s decadence and narcissism. He often sounds bemused by the image of his younger self—the things they did and said, the ways they acted, the stuff they ate (the thought of which now literally sickens him). He refers to “the other boy” when he contemplates Benji with the BB in his eye. I think he’s just saying that this is the way it was, and this is the way they were.

Notebook Prompt: Ben and "the other boy"

Ben, the older narrator of Benji's teenage adventures and mishaps in Sag Harbor, concludes the chapter "The Gangsters" with the following passage, referring to the copper BB that is lodged in his eye socket: "It's still there. Under the skin. It's good for a story, something to shock people with after I've known them for years and feel a need to surprise them with the other boy. It's not a scar that people notice even though it's right there. I asked a doctor about it once, about blood poisoning over time. He shook his head. Then he shrugged. 'It hasn't killed you yet'" (191).

What do you make of the fact that Ben still has the BB in his eye? What does this particular story about "ill shit going down on a Thursday" have to do with the older man telling the story? How does Ben seem to view the episode in hindsight? Why does he refer to his younger self as "the other boy," and why might he assume people would be "shocked" to hear this story?

Take 5 minutes now to contemplate these questions in your Notebook.

Toxic Masculinity in Black Swan Green and at the Jersey Shore

Although he would be unlikely to describe it this way himself, we can see that over the course of Black Swan Green Jason is struggling with gender trouble. So much of his anxiety about being accepted into the tribe of “hairy barbarians” (as Madame Crommelynck memorably christens them) has to do with performing a particular version of heterosexual masculinity—anything that would be denounced, by local standards, as “gay” or not “hard” must be rigorously edited and suppressed, whether it’s a wooly hat, a map of Middle Earth, or the fact that he’s taking a walk on a weekend day (because walks are, you know, gay). Poetry—probably the most meaningful and “real” part of Jason’s life at this point—is the “gayest” of his propensities, and he literally conceals his poetry under a false name, terrified of the consequences if he were “outed” as the author.

There are closeting dynamics throughout this novel, as Jason is afraid that his insufficient masculinity, or his “gayness,” will be discovered. It goes without saying that his “life will be over” if it is. Jason doesn’t appear to be attracted to boys (we’ve probably had a bit too much evidence at this point that he's attracted to girls), and there’s no evidence that he’s experiencing actual gender dysphoria (he does confess to us that he sometimes wishes he’d been born a girl, although he knows that saying so out loud would subject him to violent homophobic harassment [6]). But what if Jason were gay? What if he were experiencing gender dysphoria? David Mitchell makes clear that there is, in Worcestershire in 1982, no possibility of coming out, of living openly with a gender nonconforming identity, among this teenage culture. There is a consistently homophobic and gender-normative valence to all of the bullying depicted in the novel (“Maggot” is just one letter off from the most common term of abuse I endured at Jason's age), and it’s easy to see how daunting it would be for a gay or trans kid to come out in such a context, where even wearing a wooly hat on a cold day can get you denounced as “gay.”

And this heteronormative gender-policing regime is not limited to the kid-culture in the book. We first see Jason anxiously editing himself in “January Man,” as he joins an exclusively kid group on the frozen lake: these standards are enforced primarily through other kids, who police each other’s gender expression relentlessly for any sign of deviance or weakness. But as the novel unfolds, we can easily see how systemic this culture of masculine heteronormativity is throughout the community. Think of Mr. Carver, the P.E. teacher, who gets laughs from all the kids when he makes homophobic jokes about Floyd Chacely and Nicholas Briar in the showers. Or Mr. Murcot, the metalshop teacher, who calls the co-ed class of students “boys,” unless he’s “bollocking” them, in which case they are all “girls.” Think of the stories and rumors surrounding Mr. Blake and his alleged physical abuse of his son, who has left home forever. Think of Uncle Brian getting creepy and sexist at the dinner table, interrogating Julia about her choice of college and implying that she’s following a boyfriend to Edinburgh, and how Hugo reminds Jason of Uncle Brian when he sexually harasses Kate Alfrick at Mr. Rhydd’s shop. These hairy barbarians Jason is so eager to impress didn’t invent these gender standards—they have inherited them from their fathers and teachers, and we see this most clearly in the Ross Wilcox situation. It is implicit in Mr. Kempsey’s aphorism, “The brutal may have been molded by a brutality you cannot exceed” (212).

As I ponder the Ross Wilcox situation, and the role that Ross’s father plays in his son’s brutality, I recall a story from my own experience as a non-gender-conforming kid growing up on the Jersey Shore in the 1980s. I have far too many of these stories, and I usually don’t like to share them in class, because it takes our focus away from the literature. But dealing with what we now would call “bullying” was pretty much a daily occurrence, in some form, for me and my friends in our first two years of high school. The social dynamics were different from Black Swan Green, and the “hierarchy” Jason describes was less rigidly defined. But when my friends and I started to get into skateboarding and punk culture, which at the time was pretty much nonexistent in our town, the backlash was swift and immediate. I have sat in a classroom while a teacher mocked my haircut or called me a “girl” or “card-carrying queer” (I swear my history teacher used precisely this expression, a favorite of his to denounce liberal politicians in general). I have had cops tell me that they would not pursue the person who just assaulted me because I “asked for it” with my “faggot haircut.” On some days, it would just be random people yelling insults from passing cars, and on other days the cars would stop and the violence would be verbal and physical. On some school days, it would just be random football players or metalheads shoving you against the lockers as you walked the halls, and on other days (one in particular) I ended up in intensive care with a ruptured spleen and liver. Simply riding a skateboard through town put a target on your back, and my partly shaved head with gross little dready spikes on top was seen as a direct provocation in the hallways at school.

I didn’t know the term “toxic masculinity” at the time—I first heard it maybe ten years ago, and it was one of those phrases that I knew immediately what it meant. It’s something I’ve experienced, and pushed back against, my whole life, but it can be illuminating and even revolutionary to be able to name something like this. (As when Julia helpfully teaches Jason the term “Pyrhhic victory” [115], and he is then able to grasp why his father hasn’t really “won” when he celebrates the crane eating Helena’s new koi in “Rocks.”) When we think about Ross Wilcox and his horrible behavior as being largely shaped by his experiences at home, by the model of masculinity that his tax-dodging, wife-beating father represents, we are thinking about the effects of toxic masculinity, or how this culture of bullying has become systemic in Jason’s world.

When I think about Ross Wilcox and his father, I am reminded in particular of Robbie Holmes. He was never one of my main tormenters—just a kid two years older than me who would reliably mess with me about half the times I ran into him, but not someone I usually think about when I revisit these old days. He never did anything too bad, and for whatever reason he seemed to have it out for my friend Pat even more than me (these guys would sort of play “favorites,” in that it often seemed like they hated one or two of us especially). But this one interaction I had with Robbie when I was fifteen and he was probably seventeen, as he stood in my face asking me why I had to be such a total queer, springs to mind as a neat example of toxic masculinity. On this particular day, I was loitering with a couple of friends around a public bench, doing some tricks on the curb and the bench—the same as a hundred other afternoons over these years. Robbie Holmes and another guy came up to us, and we braced ourselves for what might come next. On this particular day, Robbie focused on me.

It was a common kind of interrogation: “Why do you have to look like such a queer? Why do you wear those earrings, don’t you know that’s gay?” In the mid-1980s in America, it was somewhat acceptable for a straight/cis male to have one pierced ear, but it was widely understood that it had to be the left ear; I have no idea where this notion originated, but everyone knew that a pierced right ear was a signal to the world that you were homosexual. I pierced my own ears, both of them, with safety pins—this was the kind of thing I thought was fun at the time—and I had one ring in my right and two in my left, an extent of accessorizing that went beyond the narrow bounds for men and boys in those days. Robbie’s interrogation then ascended to a new level: “Do you know how bad my father would whip my ass if I came home looking like you?”

I don’t remember how I responded—probably something very witty like “No, I don’t, why don’t you tell me?” But I distinctly remember thinking more along the lines of Your father sounds like a real dick. I’m glad he’s not my father. I don’t know what Robbie Holmes was trying to convey with this statement, but it was clearly an expression of disgust, a statement of what I deserved for my deviance. Was he impugning my own father, who was too weak to beat me for cutting my own hair and piercing my own ears? My Dad hated the way I looked in high school, and he would really have preferred me to pursue a more conventional route, but he never punished me or beat me for it. Was he doing an insufficient job as a father? What kind of man allows his son to go around looking like this? At the same time, I sensed a twinge of envy, as if Robbie Holmes would really like to have the flexibility to explore his identity in these ways, but he knows that his Dad would kick his ass if he did. He hated me and my friends because we represented a kind of freedom he could not enjoy, and he took it upon himself to police these gendered boundaries, to enforce the “iron-clad rules” his father had taught to him.

This particular interaction did not lead to violence, apart from the verbal abuse. It is likely that Robbie ended it by taking my skateboard and rolling it into traffic, a common move by lunkheads who couldn’t skate and wished they could. And I don’t remember even talking about it with my friends at the time—this stuff was so common, we’d just get back to whatever we were doing after the goons walked away. But in retrospect it strikes me as an almost too-perfect illustration of the concept of toxic masculinity, and how it is “inherited” and enforced from one generation to the next. He was literally bullying me by threatening me with the prospect of his father being my father, and gloating about how this “real” father would have abused and rejected me because I wore earrings and liked to skate.

The happy ending to this story, if there is one, is that the culture does seem to be shifting in profound and significant ways when it comes to gender expression among teenagers, and it is possible that the cycle is starting to weaken or break. In my hometown these days, the tennis courts where we used to get kicked out for skating are now a skate park, and the popular kids at my old high school in the early 2000s skated and dressed like punks (I have no idea what the local scene is like these days). These were the sons and daughters of my tormentors, in many cases, and I did smile at the thought of their parents having to accept their shaved hair and piercings (even if these accessories were purchased at the mall).

Jason Taylor: The New Holden Caulfield?

In a 2012 article from Slate, a high-school English teacher, Jessica Roake, describes how excited she was to first teach The Catcher in the Rye, and how disappointed she was to discover that her students failed to relate to Holden Caulfield in the way she’d expected. Like many who have put this novel on their syllabus, she had anticipated “blowing their minds”: “They would see themselves in Holden Caulfield, and J. D. Salinger’s words would elucidate their own frustrations and struggles. They would write righteous screeds against phoniness, start keeping journals, and forever treasure their pored-over paperback. The book would blow the minds of teenagers seeking a pilgrim soul—a friend’s voice in the wild of adolescence.” Instead, they were merely bored. Holden’s world seemed impossibly ancient to them, and they couldn’t relate to his “first-world problems.” He was a whiny, privileged white boy who needs to get over himself. His slang was antiquated and quaint, the cultural references (Peter Lorre, the Lunts) failed to resonate, and his disillusionment seemed like a cliché, “fundamental teenage anguish.” Salinger’s New York, to twenty-first-century readers, feels as distant as Fitzgerald’s West Egg in The Great Gatsby: “places of antiquated privilege and clarinet-heavy music.”

In a particularly pithy (and home-hitting) formulation, Roake notes that Catcher is “no longer a book for cool high-school students” but only “for cool high school teachers.” (Ouch!) Its ubiquity is part of the problem. The book is assigned so frequently in high school, and so often framed as “the book that will change your life,” that a student is wise to approach it with skepticism: how subversive can it be if my teacher is insisting that I read it? (When I was teaching Catcher in CoA Novel a few years back, the director of the school dropped by to observe class for a couple minutes. As he was taking his leave, he briefly interrupted the discussion to declare Catcher the “best book ever.” I don’t doubt the sincerity of the sentiment, or the enthusiasm; but it’s a nice illustration of the paradoxical dynamic Roake is talking about, and I suspect Holden would be bemused at the endorsement of such an authority figure.)

Roake decided that, as much as she loved Catcher in her day, and as much as she believes that there is much to be gained from reading it, contemporary students need a new book for their generation that defines what it is to be young, confused, and idealistic in the face of an often brutal and hypocritical world. Her nomination: David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green.

My initial reaction upon reading this article was to be glad that I teach the kinds of classes I teach at Uni—junior-senior semester-long special-topics courses—because this means I don’t have to choose between Catcher and Black Swan Green. I get to teach them both, in a course devoted entirely to the coming-of-age novel. Most high-school English teachers face a range of constraints on their curricula; they might be expected to cover particular material over the course of a schoolyear, and thus they might only be able to accommodate one “teenage novel.” I don’t know that I’d want to choose between Salinger and Mitchell; I’ve had a lot of fun teaching them both, as they bounce off each other in interesting ways. (Consider how often this semester we’ve used Holden as a point of comparison, a touchstone of quintessential teenagerhood against which to measure other characters and their situations. Even students who failed to fall in love with the book find it useful as a paradigm.)

I can partly see where Roake is coming from, and I’ve been aware of the growing view of Catcher as “outdated” even before this. When Salinger died, in early 2010, commentaries seemed to fall into two categories, with little neutral territory between them: there were the “this book changed my life” testimonials, and the “I never saw why this book is such a big deal” rebuttals. Common to the haters was (often) the familiar framework where the book had been built up as the most world-shifting, life-changing representation of adolescent human experience ever committed to print; this kind of hype almost guarantees a certain percentage of shrugging, “no big deal” responses. Add to this the irony of a story about a teenage rebel and truant being endorsed and celebrated by the very figures of authority the book denounces as “phony” (who themselves discipline students for being rebels and truants) and a certain type of reader is bound to be turned off. It feels like a fraud—“rebellion” packaged as schoolwork.

None of this has ever stopped me from including the novel on my syllabi, in college courses and in the Coming-of-Age Novel here at Uni. I suppose I’m lucky that my senior AP English teacher, Mrs. McLean, didn’t tell me the book was going to change my life—it was just assigned as the next thing on our syllabus. I had the vague sense it was probably about baseball; I knew Billy Joel mentioned it in that song about not starting the fire, which we talked about in history class; I knew that Ad-Rock had boasted that he’s “got more stories than J.D.’s got Salinger” on the new Beastie Boys record. But otherwise, I came to it with no particular expectations—and this was a good thing. I felt like I was “discovering” it on my own. I didn’t expect anything like Holden’s narrative voice, or his general attitude, and it truly felt “refreshing,” as cliché as that sounds now. And over the last twenty years, I’ve seen students of various genders respond strongly to the novel—maybe girls especially, despite so many commentators dismissing it as a “boys’ book.” It still has the capacity to surprise, amuse, delight, and confound—when you get past the dated slang, the “goddams” and “as hells,” Holden still cracks kids up (“Suave as hell, boy”). They still feel like he confides in them, and even readers who are turned off by what seems like his arrogance and apathy at the start can be brought around, by the end, to appreciate the idealism and loneliness at the heart of this enigmatic character.

Not everyone likes Holden Caulfield, of course—and this should be no surprise. I’m not especially looking for unanimity in any aspect of this (or any) course, but I certainly don’t expect to find it with Catcher in the Rye. Some of you end up liking Holden, even caring deeply about him—even if we do peer through a good deal of historical and cultural distance to imagine the postwar New York he wanders through, it’s easy enough to find the human heart to the story. Some of you never warm to him, find him affected, hypocritical, judgmental, overwhelmingly negative. Others are exasperated at his generally ungrateful attitude, his white-boy-privilege, and his ennui. And both of these responses—and the whole range of gradations in between—are not incompatible with a rewarding and valuable study of the novel. I don’t put it on my syllabus to change your life; I believe there’s value in working out your own response to Holden, and that you learn a lot about yourself and your world when you do so. You don’t have to fall in love with him, or the book. But it’s also okay with me if you do.

Black Swan Green is another story. Pretty much everyone in class, every time I’ve taught this novel, falls in love with Jason Taylor, and with the novel. I’ve heard from multiple alums of this course that it’s their favorite on the syllabus (apparently Ms. K, who was a student in the spring 2013 incarnation of this course, was overheard enthusing about it the other day!), and a number of people have already gone back and reread it. Roake points out a lot of similarities between these two books, and she articulates nicely some of the important differences, as well: “Holden’s cynicism and alienation from the world he inhabits have become a cliché; the sincerity and openness of young Jason feels fresh. He reads as real and naive, as immature as Holden is jaded. Instead of finding almost everything ‘sad as hell,’ Jason remains childlike in his enthusiasm for all the ‘epic’ things around him, even as the events of his life become harder for him to process.” I think age may have something to do with this: readers your age feel protective of Jason; he’s like your little brother, going through a period you’ve just emerged from, and like Julia at the end, you want to tell him it’ll all be okay, even if it doesn’t feel like it just now. But unlike Holden, about whom the jury remains out at the end of the novel, in terms of significant growth and development in his character, Jason is inspiringly dynamic. We see him grow in small and large ways over the course of his thirteenth year, and although we know he’s in for any number of trials and torments as he begins his fourteenth year as the “new kid” at his new school, we also are happy in the knowledge that he seems better prepared to deal with them.

Jason is a less divisive character than Holden—and for all the talk about “this novel changed my life” coming from your parents’ generation, I suspect he always has been. He’s crude, confrontational, abrasive. He makes fun of deeply held American values, like equating one’s ego with the type of car one drives, and this must cut close to the bone for many readers. He doesn’t hold himself up to his own standards, consistently, and this chips away at the authority he tries to consolidate with his reckless generalizations about “people” and what they “always” do. Jason confronts many of the same problems, but he doesn’t rant about them very often or with the same energetic spleen as Holden does. He’s simply easier to like and, for many readers of both genders, to relate to.

And Black Swan Green, as Roake points out, is still not widely known—it still feels like a discovery, or a secret, and you may want to pass it on to your friends. Even though it’s set in 1982 (i.e. your parents’ generation), it feels a lot more contemporary than Catcher in the Rye does. Jason doesn’t have the internet, or digital media, or mobile connectivity, or whatever, but the suburban landscape he faces, the domestic troubles, the bullying, the complications of self-editing, the gender anxiety, all looks very familiar to contemporary young readers.

I’m curious to hear your responses to Roak’s article, as readers of both Catcher and Black Swan Green. I’ve had a very similar kind of good time teaching both of them, and they both are books that I’m glad to bring into your lives at this crucial stage. My admiration for Black Swan Green deepens each time I teach it—that’s one of the pleasures of discovery, figuring out all the connections and interrelated themes and motifs and structural features on our own, without the burden of years of critical study and classroom lessons to lean on. In fact, I try hard to avoid some of the most common conversations about Catcher (notice that we didn’t really talk about the “symbolism of the red hunting hat” or the “symbolism of the ducks in Central Park” at all!), so we can focus more on the beguiling and seductive narrative voice. With Black Swan Green, as a teacher, I have that feeling of discovering a book that we all can share as a secret. If it were to become the “next Catcher,” I worry that such status might ruin it a little. I often wish Catcher were not the second-most commonly taught novel in high school. I kind of hope it does fall from this status a bit. I’d much rather teach it to students who don’t come to it with any preconceptions, positive or negative.

Do I like Black Swan Green “better” than Catcher? I can’t say. In some ways, yes. Jason Taylor’s world is much more familiar to me and my personal experiences than Holden’s is. But Catcher itself is part of my development as a person, and the development of my tastes—the very tastes that lead me to enjoy Mitchell’s novel so much. I can’t excise it from my personal history; I encountered it at such an early age in my reading life, its influence can’t even be measured. It’s not simply a matter of how distant Holden’s era is from my own; reading his book is a part of my experience of the 1980s.

Read both.

I’m glad I don’t have to choose.

Notebook prompt: Jason as "Maggot"

In the ninth chapter of Black Swan Green (September 1982), the moment Jason has been dreading since "January Man" has come to pass: the chapter opens with Ross Wilcox, his breath smelling like "a bag of ham," getting in Jason's face and outing him as a kid who "goes to the pictures with Mummy!" and also (to his horror) as the "school stutterboy." The chapter "Maggot" follows through on Jason's debilitating dread of exposure back in "Hangman," as he is compelled to read aloud (from Lord of the Flies, appropriately enough) in English class. By the end of the day, when Ross and his "lot" toss Jason's Adidas bag on the roof of the departing schoolbus, he believes himself to have fully become the self-deprecating and timid voice in his head that he calls "Maggot."

As you reflect on this harrowing day of school, narrated in excruciating detail, think about how Jason's experiences connect to your own experiences throughout childhood. Have you witnessed "gang-up" or bullying dynamics in your school career? Inside or outside of school? What side(s) have you found yourself on in these situations--part of the mob, victim of the mob, bystander, or somewhere in between? Does David Mitchell's depiction of Jason's most hellish day of school ring true to you? Does it seem hyperbolic? Are kids these days generally less cruel, or less prone to mob dynamics, than they were in Mitchell's era? Does Jason's experience in this chapter resonate with you at all? Do you take away any insights from his worst day of school ever?

Take 5 minutes now and reflect on this chapter, in whatever direction your thoughts take you. You can use these questions as prompts, but don't try to address all of them.