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May. 29th, 2016 11:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsThe Rest Of Us Just Live Here has a really cool concept that is really hard to effectively pull off. The idea is that the book is about the other kids in the high school at Sunnydale/Forks/Beacon Hills/wherever the high school is where the Chosen Teens are fighting off some massive world-destroying supernatural force -- the kids who are aware of but not involved in the shenanigans, and mostly just want to make it through to graduation. The way Ness structures this is by having a paragraph header at the beginning of each chapter that describes what the heroes of that other book about the world-destroying supernatural force are doing, and then dives us back into the head of our narrator Mikey, whose concerns include a.) his massive crush on his friend Henna; b.) his rising OCD and anxiety disorder; c.) his older sister's eating disorder; and d.) the fact that he and his friends will soon all be leaving for college in different places, with e.) the rash of mysterious teen deaths and the weird flashes of blue light plaguing their town coming in down around fifth on the concern-o-meter. Mikey & co. are perfectly well aware that this kind of stuff happens occasionally, but it always happens to the 'indie kids' and everyone else is usually fine, at least until the epic conclusion.
The worst kind of failure mode for this book would be 'you're writing about the normal kids instead of the foreground stuff, and it turns out the normal kids are just boring.' This is a hurdle that in my opinion Ness easily clears! Mikey occasionally drives me up a wall with his teen jealousy issues, but he and his friends are not boring and I finished the book largely in a sitting.
The part where the book stumbles for me is in the genre commentary -- it just makes a number of choices that I wouldn't have made. I'm not entirely sure why Patrick Ness went with 'indie kids' to define 'people who are just kind of protagonist-y,' but trope-wise I don't really associate 'trendy kids with unusual names and a large friend-group who are just a little too cool for school' with 'standard teen protagonists'? Maybe I'm behind the times of recent fictional trends, but I feel like usually the protagonist-y kids in fiction are the shy insecure kids with intense backstory/family issues and perhaps a narratively convenient small tight friends-group, which ... honestly seems to describe Mikey & co. way more than it does Satchel, the alt!heroine of that other story where the protagonists are off protagonist-ing.
And OK, we don't know very much about Satchel & Co other than that Dramatic Things Are Happening to Them And Also There's A Love Triangle, but the thing is that Ness names like twenty different 'indie kids' who interact with Satchel at various points in the story. This means that the indie kids actually appear to have a social circle that way more resembles my high school reality, in which, for ex., I was best friends with A and B, A and B were also close with C and D and E who I got along fine with but only hung out with in a group, E was good friends with F who was also a good friend of mine although F didn't get along at all with A or B, G and H and J were all kind of part of the friends-group because they were collectively all in love with D, and then I also hung out separately with L and M who were neither of them part of this friends-group at all. And, like, I would in no way say that my high school experience was overwhelmingly typical, but I do think most kid's lives and social circles are much more complicated than you tend to see in high school fiction.
And of course I don't think any author is narratively obligated to try to describe this kind of 'more realistic' social structure -- there are good story-telling reasons for these 'tight group of three or four friends!' narrative conventions -- but in this particular case it did make me sort of uncertain about what Ness thinks are the distinctive markers of 'real' kids vs. 'protagonist' kids, and what exactly he means the book to say.
I guess basically I think it works as a story but not as meta-commentary, which is definitely less of a failure mode than the other way around, so.
The worst kind of failure mode for this book would be 'you're writing about the normal kids instead of the foreground stuff, and it turns out the normal kids are just boring.' This is a hurdle that in my opinion Ness easily clears! Mikey occasionally drives me up a wall with his teen jealousy issues, but he and his friends are not boring and I finished the book largely in a sitting.
The part where the book stumbles for me is in the genre commentary -- it just makes a number of choices that I wouldn't have made. I'm not entirely sure why Patrick Ness went with 'indie kids' to define 'people who are just kind of protagonist-y,' but trope-wise I don't really associate 'trendy kids with unusual names and a large friend-group who are just a little too cool for school' with 'standard teen protagonists'? Maybe I'm behind the times of recent fictional trends, but I feel like usually the protagonist-y kids in fiction are the shy insecure kids with intense backstory/family issues and perhaps a narratively convenient small tight friends-group, which ... honestly seems to describe Mikey & co. way more than it does Satchel, the alt!heroine of that other story where the protagonists are off protagonist-ing.
And OK, we don't know very much about Satchel & Co other than that Dramatic Things Are Happening to Them And Also There's A Love Triangle, but the thing is that Ness names like twenty different 'indie kids' who interact with Satchel at various points in the story. This means that the indie kids actually appear to have a social circle that way more resembles my high school reality, in which, for ex., I was best friends with A and B, A and B were also close with C and D and E who I got along fine with but only hung out with in a group, E was good friends with F who was also a good friend of mine although F didn't get along at all with A or B, G and H and J were all kind of part of the friends-group because they were collectively all in love with D, and then I also hung out separately with L and M who were neither of them part of this friends-group at all. And, like, I would in no way say that my high school experience was overwhelmingly typical, but I do think most kid's lives and social circles are much more complicated than you tend to see in high school fiction.
And of course I don't think any author is narratively obligated to try to describe this kind of 'more realistic' social structure -- there are good story-telling reasons for these 'tight group of three or four friends!' narrative conventions -- but in this particular case it did make me sort of uncertain about what Ness thinks are the distinctive markers of 'real' kids vs. 'protagonist' kids, and what exactly he means the book to say.
I guess basically I think it works as a story but not as meta-commentary, which is definitely less of a failure mode than the other way around, so.
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Date: 2016-05-29 06:41 pm (UTC)The premise sounded v. intriguing--though I had doubts since it can be trick to pull off. I'll get to it eventually, but I'm in no hurry to do so. *hands*
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Date: 2016-05-29 10:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-05-29 09:03 pm (UTC)I was recommended this as something light and fun and quick, with no mention of the mental ill health stuff -- which, um, kind of made the whole thing not the reading experience I was expecting or in any way wanted. But with that caveat, I was charmed by it. I felt like it was very, very grounded in Buffy rather than a more generic YA supernatural thing, so the "trendy kids with unusual names and a large friend-group who are just a little too cool for school" worked for me -- without the slightly weird choice about the Finns, it could easily have been me trying to explain the plot of Buffy season 3 to my dad.
I'd be interested in what you think about Jared ascending. (I LOVED JARED THE BEST. HE CHOSE AND KEPT CHOOSING TO VALUE THE ORDINARY. ALSO HE HEALED CATS.)
The friends who recommended this to me (and I suspect, thinking about it, that each of them assumed the other one had told me about the MH aspects!) both found the choice to have Jared ascend at the end kind of weird. I'm probably doing their argument a disservice, but I think they thought it was weird in a book about how normality was also valuable and important to end with one of the characters moving that far away from normality.
But for me it worked really well as being about how all these things that the book values (love/loyalty/family/friends/ordinary problems) are what let us make good choices and compromises when we have to put away childish things and face the duties and responsibilities of adulthood.
Did you have THOUGHTS?
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Date: 2016-05-29 11:02 pm (UTC)-- huh. I am surprised to hear that a.) it was recced without mention of the mental health stuff at all and also b.) it was recced as light and fun and quick, because that's definitely not the vibe I got from it -- like, I enjoyed it, but I super didn't feel like it was or was intended to be fluff! Jared and Mike's fight was EMOTIONALLY ROUGH, man.
The Jared stuff I found SUPER interesting but is also one of the reasons I kept poking at all the stuff about the indie kids more than I otherwise would, because, like, Jared is the MOST protagonist-y child, it's even lampshaded multiple times in the text when he's like 'I'M SO PROTAGONIST-Y AND I DON'T WANT TO BE AN INDIE KID >:(' so then -- okay, why isn't he, when it seems like indie kid-ness is basically a function of narrative causality? Do you have to want to be a protagonist to be an indie kid? Except the indie kids don't want it either, and there's that end where it's like 'oh I guess the indie kids are also just kids having a rough time,' all of which ends up by making me REALLY CONFUSED about what the point is meant to be in re: destiny and making your own choices and being a Protagonist.
Like, I want the point to be that everyone is Narratively Protagonist-y and also a Real Person in their own weird and complex ways, that there isn't as much of a divide between Protagonist-y People and Non-Protagonist People as it seems, and all of them have to make serious choices about their life, whether it's dealing with mental health or dealing with semi-divinity. But I'm not sure that actually is what the point is.
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Date: 2016-06-05 08:03 pm (UTC)Also, thefourthvine pointed out on twitter some of the tropes that Jared falls into and now I am a bit like, oh, oh well, yes, fuck everything.
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Date: 2016-05-29 09:30 pm (UTC)Have you read any of Ness's other books? I read his Knife of Never Letting Go series and had VERY mixed feelings that sum up to "holy shit did that devolve fast."
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Date: 2016-05-29 11:05 pm (UTC)This is the first one I've read! I've heard generally good things about some of his other work but am not really sure where to start with it.
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Date: 2016-05-29 11:08 pm (UTC)"Todd!"
"Viola!"
"Todd!"
"Viola!"
"Todd!"
"Viola!"
If you ever saw Fushigi Yuugi (which I still love and I am not one bit ashamed) and mocked the endless "Miaka!" "Tamahome!" "Miaka!" "Tamahome!" Ness's books are like that but even more so.
Also, single dumbest way to avoid a moral dilemma EVER.
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Date: 2016-05-29 11:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-05-29 11:31 pm (UTC)If you do read the Ness books, there's a spoilery thing in book one that might be upsetting (Gur qbt qvrf.) and the screaming only comes in with the next two books, which I REALLY disliked. Like, I REALLY REALLY disliked them. However, you might want to read just the first chapter of book one, because the voice is so good it's worth just getting a taste of it.
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Date: 2016-05-29 11:38 pm (UTC)Gur RAGVER FREVRF vf nobhg ubj Gbqq vf hajvyyvat gb xvyy nabgure uhzna orvat, rira gubhtu ur npghnyyl qbrf xvyy n ybg bs crbcyr naq cnegvpvcngrf va trabpvqr bs gur cynarg'f angvir crbcyr ivn pbapragengvba pnzc, ohg vg'f fbeg bs vaqverpg. V sbetrg gur qrgnvyf. Ohg V jnf naablrq orpnhfr vaqverpg vf whfg nf onq nf qverpg, rfcrpvnyyl jura vg'f TRABPVQR.
Ohg naljnl, gur evqvphybhfyl rivy Znlbe, jub vf gur rivyrfg Qnex Ybeq gb rire rivy, xrrcf chggvat Gbqq va gurfr qhzonff zbeny qvyrzznf gb sbepr uvz gb xvyy, naq Gbqq jba'g. (Rkprcg jura ur qbrf, ohg vg qbrfa'g pbhag orpnhfr nhgube fnlf fb.) Naljnl, Gbqq svanyyl qbrf raq hc va n fvghngvba va juvpu ur zhfg rvgure xvyy gur Znlbe be frr rirelbar ur ybirf qvr…
naq gur Znlbe fnlf, SBE AB ERNFBA, "Lbh xabj, guvf ernyyl vfa'g snve bs zr, lbh fubhyq fgnl cher naq hagneavfurq, V jvyy fbyir lbhe qvyrzzn ol qebjavat zlfrys." Naq gura ur jnyxf vagb gur bprna naq qebjaf uvzfrys.
JGSSSSS!!!!!!
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Date: 2016-05-31 01:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-05-29 09:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-05-29 11:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-05-29 10:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-05-29 11:17 pm (UTC)Spoilers: he ends up going on anxiety meds, the OCD is in a controllable place by the end of the book, his friend who ends up acquiring divine healing powers offers to divinely heal his anxiety disorder and he says no, he'd rather make sure he can handle it without divine intervention. Ditto his sister, who actually spends most of the book in a recovery-trying-to-avoid-relapse place and is lowkey managing her coping mechanisms throughout the story.
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Date: 2016-05-29 11:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-05-29 11:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-05-29 11:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-05-31 01:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-05-30 02:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-05-31 09:39 pm (UTC)(I mean there's also the meta-meta-narrative issues that the actual protagonist has to have a relatively small circle or else the storyline gets too crowded, but you can also read that - in the context of something like Buffy, for example - as that the main-plot version of the story focuses on this small tight group by necessity, but they do have all these other connections in their downtime, which you don't see much of in the main-plot but from a true outsider POV don't seem any less important. Especially as a series goes on and they accumulate more and more recurring characters but still keep a small group of main protagonists.)
(Like, we think of Harry Potter as being this kid who's really closely tied up in his two best friends and is kind of myopic outside that tiny circle, but if you were, say, Draco Malfoy watching from outside, he's got Hermione and Ron and Ron's family and Fred and George's friends and Luna and Colin and Dennis and the entire Gryffindor Quidditch team and their friends and all the other Gryffindors in his year and Luna and Padma and Viktor Krum and Viktor's friends and Fleur and Fleur's friends and half the teachers and by the end all of Dumbledore's Army in his friend circles.
*We* know that if Hermione and Ron aren't around he just sits in the empty common room alone thinking about death, but Outsider POV doesn't.)