Tween Choice Awards

Under the Covers with Justin Bauer: Skippy Dies and The Instructions

by Justin Bauer

Middle school damages everyone. Nobody gets through it unscathed (tell me I'm wrong; I'll snap your bra strap until you cry). The herd mentality, the state-of-nature bullying, the arbitrary cruelties of adults, a body that disappoints and betrays you — the only honest thing anyone can say is that you'll grow out of it, and grow into yourself. Early adolescence demands you constantly negotiate between what you are and what you can become.

This nerve-wracking slow dance of unrealized potential is the part of adolescence Paul Murray captures best in Skippy Dies (Faber & Faber, Aug. 31). "Until recently the opinion of girls was of little consequence; now — overnight, almost — it is paramount. ... They do not care how many golf balls you can fit in your mouth; they are unmoved by third nipples." Murray's chart of these changes is sharp, sad and accurate: "As the juggernaut of puberty gathers momentum, quirks and oddities and singularities turn from badges of honor to liabilities to be concealed, and the same realpolitik that moves boys to forsake long-nurtured dreams of, say, becoming a ninja for a more concerted attention to the here and now, forces others, who were once worshipped as gods, to reinvent themselves as ordinary Joe Blows."

He shapes each of his stock characters independently, carefully differentiating one from the other, making each of them plausible, partial people. When they're together, even with the stereotypes and goatishness of Catholic boarding-school comedy, Murray's teenagers turn chorus-like into something more than their parts. Their individual insecurities, dissolved into a collective, cancel each other out, and their idiosyncratic personal talents contribute to an immature but powerful certainty.

The certainty of a peer group is a different sort of assurance than the kind Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee looks for in Adam Levin's The Instructions (McSweeney's, Nov. 1). Ten-year-old Gurion, who believes he might be the Messiah, wants affirmation. And in Levin's hands, events take outsize resonances, scriptural and otherwise. For instance, a discussion Gurion has with the captain of the basketball team allegorizes the biblical story of Goliath and transposes it to a school bus circle; the scene pulls in overtones of the Temptation in the Desert, adds a pinch of American cultural history, and concludes with the captain doing his best to manipulate Gurion: "Look at Holden Caulfield — you don't wanna end up like him, do you?" The Instructions covers four days of Gurion's life, told entirely in its hero's exuberant narcissistic hyperliterate voice, with the carefully observed events of those days (first kiss, general student rebellion) providing an armature for the layers of commentary and allegory Levin wants to drape over them.

Both of these childish books, set up on a shelf, appear full-grown: Skippy Dies covers 661 pages, and The Instructions is an insane motor-mouthed thousand-page cinderblock. Both books reward the investment, but they're a different kind of huge than this year's Big Important Book, Freedom (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Aug. 31). Jonathan Franzen's compulsion to show The Way We Live Now paws over everything within reach, smearing middle-age angst, multiculturalism and advocacy politics with the same ironic fingerprints. Both Murray and Levin wisely limit themselves. This may seem a fine distinction after Levin's digressions on the Talmudic ethics of intermarriage — but even he restricts himself to four days and a limited perspective. Murray likewise centers his book squarely on the event of his title, which occurs in media res on the first page, and plays out again later in the book after a buildup so subtle you forget the inevitability of Skippy's death.

It's an impressive achievement, that Murray can make you hope against hope that his book's title and first page are inaccurate. Much more than even Gurion's Messiah-hood, Skippy's death spotlights his potential. By cutting it off (in the middle of a doughnut-eating contest), and then remaining to watch its repercussions and gauge its absence, Murray's teenage tragedy resonates beyond the strict boundaries of its story.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)