This is a collection of Markus Zusak’s first published works, before his recent fame for writing The Book Thief. The trilogy, comprised of The Underdog, Fighting Ruben Wolfe, and Getting the Girl, is narrated by a teenager named Cameron Wolfe. Cameron is the youngest son in a blue-collar family trying to make ends meet in an Australian suburb, and the books are a mesh of his stream of consciousness and his poetic writings as he attempts to navigate through his daily existence. The first book, The Underdog, introduces the Wolfe family and follows Cam through an aimless period in his young life where he tries to reconcile who he wants to be with the reality of who he is. Fighting Ruben Wolfe offers a bit more of a linear story: feeling like they should somehow contribute to the family, which is facing increasingly dire straits, Cam and his older brother Ruben get mixed up in clandestine, amateur boxing. As they fight, though, Cam realizes that Ruben is fighting for something other than money, and that he might be fighting for something deeper, himself. The third book, Getting the Girl, brings the themes of the first two into a familiar focus: first love and its consequences, which refines and changes everything that Cameron thought he had knew about himself.
At first, I wasn’t so impressed. I have a consciousness that streams just fine on its own, and so I tend to get annoyed by fiction that doesn’t have a point. But the Wolfe family makes an indelible impression, and Cam in particular is intensely likeable in all his quiet nobility and earnest insecurity. Once I got accustomed to the tone of this particular slice of life (which, with all of its Australian mannerisms and references, took me a bit to do), the narrative began to solidify a little, first into an exploration of the fraught relationship between close siblings, and then into a time-tested story of love and frustration. The character development is particularly excellent, and gets more nuanced throughout the books. Fighting Ruben Wolfe’s themes of sibling rivalry and family bonds build directly on Cam’s observations from The Underdogs, while the messy relationships in Getting the Girl spring from the character development in Fighting Ruben Wolfe. Taken as a whole, the story arc is subtle, and brilliant.
Getting the Girl particularly resonated with me. It could have easily been another entry in a somewhat crowded genre: horny teen boy learns a lesson about healthy relationships! As funny and enjoyable as books in that vein can be, they don't usually do too much for me. Perhaps it’s because most of those stories only touch the surface of what it’s like to have an adult’s sex drive but a child’s impulse control, and I don’t harbor any particular nostalgia for the situations that arise from that. But Zusak’s take on this particular form of teen angst struck home. While reading this, I occasionally mused that girlfriends and mothers should give these books a spin to gain some insight into the teen boy’s brain. Cameron struggles with the conflict between his hormones (sex with any female that looks his way, and proving once and for all that he isn’t a loser) and his heart (the little-boy desire of wanting to be nurtured and loved, and the manliness of being perceived as honorable and chivalrous). The results are the same insecurity, shame, and tendency towards self-defeat that almost every boy has to go through while growing up, and find inventive ways to cope with. His sexual fantasies are constant, and he accepts their inevitability. He also can’t help but fall in love at the drop of a hat, desperate to find something noble that gives those fantasies meaning, which makes him even more self-conscious. And best of all, this is not a motif that show up fully formed in the third book, even though the story itself stands alone. Rather, it is the result of Cameron’s character growth up to that point. It is beautifully understated, and cathartic to read, at least for me.
The only complaint I have with this book is the same complaint I have with every omnibus edition I read, and it has to do with the cognitive dissonance of reconciling the chapters of a collection to actual standalone books. As I mentioned, my infatuation with this book was a slow burn, since I was a little nonplussed by The Underdog and didn’t warm up to it until well past the halfway mark. If I were reading the standalone novel instead of this compilation, I don’t think I would have hung around for the following books, and that would have been a terrible loss. But as always, I can’t decide whether that speaks to a failure in the writing, or with me being psyched out by reaching the end of the “book” even though I have hundreds of pages left to read in the volume I’m holding. Suffice it to say that the first book is considerably more freeform and light on actual plot than the other two, so it pays off to stick it out if that bothers you.
But besides that small issue, this is a fantastic little smorgasbord of coming-of-age vignettes. It effortlessly brought me back to my own struggles with my self-worth as a young man, and it has the mark of a truly great read: the more I ruminate on it after finishing it, the more I love it. I would particularly recommend this to teen guys, who I suspect would not object to a little stealth introspection hidden amongst a tale of girls, fighting, and making fun of stupid little yappy dogs.
Verdict: 4.5 / 5
No comments:
Post a Comment