Sonderzug nach Pankow
I think I’ll go to Berlin. They understand me there.The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things by Carolyn Mackler
By the time I was half-way through The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things by Carolyn Mackler, I knew that I hated it. As I paused between chapters, I was already composing reviews in my head that condemned it and chick-lit in general and even went to far as to indict Helen Fielding personally for having transformed a generation of young woman readers (and perhaps young woman writers) into a pack of bubble-headed idiots.
When Bridget Jones’s Diary came out, I joined the throngs of women (and men) reading it, giggling madly over the allusions to Wuthering Heights and thinking, “What fun!” at this portrayal of the trials and tribulations of an average lonely working girl. The movie was a bit less rich, perhaps, but it had Colin Firth in it and I had seen him in The Importance of Being Earnest and was already head-over-heels for his curls and the smooth cadence of his words, so I let it slide and enjoyed it for what it was. When the various young adult spin-offs came out, dressed in bright, shiny costumes with hip illustrations on the cover and hilarious eye-grabbing titles such as Angus, Thongs, and Full Frontal Snogging, I added them to my holiday reading and could hardly wait to get through the more serious titles that I had to finish before I could dig in. Angus was fun, but I soon realised that the genre was rife with books that in my hypothetical publishing house would never have made it very far from the envelope they arrived in. You don’t teach a kid to eat healthy by giving her Count Chocula and a glass of Coca Cola every morning for breakfast, and if your generic no-name brand chocolate cereal tastes like sawdust, it makes sense just to stick with the classic Corn Flakes, because at least they taste like food. In my estimation offering her titles such as Alice, I Think and others in the genre in an effort to encourage her to enjoy literature inspires the same dilemma.
Fortunately, that rant can be saved for another day because by the time I reached the obvious turning point in The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, I realised that it was nothing like Alice, I Think, that the author was not making an attempt at humour by creating a character who was so pathetic she was funny (a la Napoleon Dynamite) or transforming anorexia, dieting, sexuality, feminism and other important issues and the people involved in them into jokes, but rather creating a realistic first-person protagonist and narrator who, having not yet realised that it is alright to be different from her cloned colleagues at school, was simply exceedingly aggravating. Once she comes face to face with an incident that shakes the entire way she views the world, the emotional turmoil she suffers and her subsequent rebellion helped on its way by friendly supporters make her quite endearing and prove that the book is not, as I first thought, completely morally bankrupt in same way as Cosmopolitan magazine and others of its ilk are, but actually a very fair portrayal of the adolescent experience in which one fifteen year old girl discovers that she is not such a bad person after all.
Fifteen year old Virginia is the fat, awkward blue-eyed blonde younger daughter in a clan of slim, outgoing, talented brunettes including a sister named Anais who has joined the Peace Corps, and a brother named Byron, a star pupil and athlete at Columbia University and Virginia’s idol. She is painfully aware that she stands out as the inferior member of her family and is sensitive to the treatment she received as a result of this. As a consequence of their treatment of her, of things she overhears, and of attitudes expressed in the media, Virginia has composed a list of rules for life as a fat person that exclude her from many things, including romance, and has a difficult time believing that a boy from her French class named Froggy with whom she shares Monday evening make-out sessions could be interested in her for anything more than sex. Meanwhile, Virginia’s only friend has moved to Walla Walla where her father is doing research for a book he is writing on onions, leaving Virginia quite alone to face up to the challenges of high school as an outsider. When Byron is suspended from Columbia University for committing date rape, Virginia is shattered and begins to re-evaluate her understanding of her family and rebel against them. As she comes to terms with her brother’s crime, she ultimately comes to terms with herself as a funny, talented, fat, and anything but inferior individual.
The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things stands out in young adult literature as one of a very small number of books that manages to address a long list of issues (body image, family conflict, friendship, romance, sexuality, feminism, the media, date rape, college, body modification, dieting, depression, adolescent rebellion, to name a few) without being heavy handed about it and without being reduced to a formulaic “problem novel”. The polar reactions I had to it could reflect a reflection of a flaw in the novel – many people will not continue to read a novel if the first hundred pages irritate them as much as this book did me – but the evolution of Virginia’s character is believable and at the end, I did not find myself questioning whether this character who had the courage to dye her hair purple was the same one who, at the beginning, was afraid to wear anything that might draw attention to her. So, while The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big, Round Things may not be the literary equivalent to a bowl of Muesli, it should at least provide you with the energy to get you through the day.
Apparently I should not write these things while eating breakfast.
