Tag: Alabama

Review 2566: Looking for Alaska

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The few John Green books I’ve read are aimed at teenagers (although some are excellent adult reading) and address, fairly subtly, an issue. For Looking for Alaska, it’s death and grief.

Sixteen-year-old Miles is miserable in his school. He has no friends, and the level of education is fairly low, so he convinces his parents to send him to a boarding school in Alabama that his father attended. He is hoping this change will initiate what he calls the Great Perhaps.

He is lucky enough to pull as his roommate a stocky kid named Chip (aka The Colonel). The Colonel is at first dubious of him until some other students overdo it with the initiation for new students. The custom is to haul Miles off in the middle of the night and drop him into the lake, but because The Colonel and his friends have lately pranked them, one of them wraps Miles up in duct tape and then they drop him in the lake. He is in danger of drowning, but he manages to float himself to shore and then get the tape off.

The Colonel is outraged by this prank because it was so dangerous. He has a running feud with the Weekday Warriors, rich kids who board there but return home every weekend to their parents’ homes in Birmingham. It was some of those kids who duct-taped Miles because of his association with The Colonel.

The Colonel nicknames Miles “Pudge” because he’s so skinny and introduces him to his friends, a Japanese boy named Takumi and a girl named Alaska. Miles is immediately smitten by Alaska, a cool girl but with an unstable temperament, usually out-going and dare-devilish but sometimes hysterically unhappy.

The group pals around, teaches Miles to smoke and drink and get into trouble, but they also take studying and grades seriously, especially The Colonel, who is on a scholarship and comes from a very poor home.

Then one of the friends dies.

For once, I thought Green got a little of this wrong. Some of the friends’ reactions didn’t read true, or maybe they did and I just don’t know teenagers. For example, throughout the novel, Miles is fascinated by the last words of famous people, so much so that he reads a lot of biographies. When the friend dies, he is upset, but he regrets he didn’t get to hear the friend’s last words. He is supposedly devastated by the death and blaming himself, so that seems like a flippant reaction, but Green mentions it twice.

Otherwise, Green does his usual masterly job of gaining your sympathy for his characters and presenting them with a difficult situation. He writes well, avoiding that stereotypical “teenage voice” that so many adult authors use; has a good sense of humor; and is good at depicting believable teenagers.

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Day 388: Wise Blood

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Cover for Wise BloodFlannery O’Connor stated that she didn’t understand when her works were termed Southern Gothic or grotesque. She continued throughout her life to emphasize that the theme of her works is redemption. Nevertheless, Wise Blood is grotesque.

Hazel Motes has returned from the service after World War II to find his home town in Tennessee deserted and his house crumbling and decrepit, so he goes to live in the city, the fictional town of Taulkinham, Alabama. Having grown up in a fundamentalist environment, he has decided that Jesus was just a man and there is nothing from which to be redeemed. Soon, he is preaching outside movie theaters about the Church of Christ Without Christ.

Haze doesn’t see anything he’s looking at and doesn’t hear anything anyone says to him. He is totally wrapped up in his obsessions about religion. He becomes fascinated by Asa Hawks, an evangelist who supposedly blinded himself for Christ, and can’t see that this man is a con man who is not even blind.

He also meets Enoch Emery, a whining zookeeper who spends his days peeping out of the bushes at the women bathing in the park swimming pool. Enoch tells Haze that his family has “wise blood,” that is, his blood tells him where to go in life and what to do. Enoch’s blood is obsessed with a mummy in the museum, which he thinks would be a Jesus for Haze’s church, not seeming to fully understand the point of Haze’s church. But Enoch doesn’t see or listen either.

In fact, no one in this novel listens to what anyone else says, and all of the characters are incredibly ignorant and uncultured. They are all grotesque, repellent creatures. Although the novel is supposed to be comic, it only made me laugh despite myself, as the situation becomes more and more ridiculous. O’Connor’s humor is brutal.

Everything in this short novel seems significant, is to be paid attention to, even the characters’ names. Both of Hazel Motes’ first and last names refer to the eyes, and Haze can’t see. Enoch Emery is abrasive. Asa Hawks is the “blinded” con artist who can actually see, and his daughter Sabbath Lily is anything but a lily. Hoover Shoats and Onnie Jay Holy try to take over Haze’s church. And speaking of Shoats, keep an eye out for the pig imagery, and think about what pigs are a symbol for in the Bible.

This novel is deemed a work of “low comedy and high seriousness.” Just speaking for myself, the religious theme is not one I find interesting. Yet, when you read O’Connor, you can’t help but be drawn along to the end.