Take a photo of a barcode or cover
sowalsky 's review for:
This makes my short list of the worst books I've ever read. Described as a "documentary novel," almost everything about the execution of this book is deeply flawed. I'll do my best to be succinct, but this work is so deeply riddled with flaws that I'm not sure how possible that is.
Let's start with the basic premise, which wouldn't be a bad one if it were handled more carefully. The idea that the author seems to be trying to get across is that a single event can be reported in vastly different ways by different observers. Simple enough. But instead of delineating this clearly, the perspectives of the characters gradually shift in a meandering manner as they each, in short, try to cover their own butts or promote their own agendas. The title might well have been "Anything But the Truth."
This tendency of the characters to shift their account of events to serve their own needs is exacerbated by the fact that they communicate so poorly with one another. The author asks us to suspend our disbelief to a ludicrous degree, as every single act of communication between the characters amounts to an act of misinformation. I've never read a book in which the characters are so persistently obtuse when trying to elicit and/or convey information to one another. And this is where the format of the novel becomes an aggravating factor.
Most of the text in this novel consists of verbatim dialogue (the nature of which I'll address further in a moment) presented in pseudo-dramatic form. Each such section begins with a perfunctory description of the setting, followed by a back-and-forth exchange between the characters involved. Because this consists strictly of their dialogue—lacking the stage directions that might flesh out a full-fledged dramatic script—there is no action, per se. And this, of course, results in an oddly flat style. The remainder of the text consists of equally neutral transcriptions of written materials, such as school administration memos, newspaper articles, diary entries, and so on. The upshot of all of this is exceedingly thin characterization. For example, we don't even know what the protagonist, Philip Malloy, looks like.
Add to this problematic stew some of the poorest dialogue I've ever read. The characters, almost without exception, speak in clipped sentence fragments, often omitting the subjects of sentences, eschewing the use of articles and pronouns, and generally exhibiting no variation from character to character. When every character speaks in this way, it gives the impression that the author has almost completely ignored characterization. It would be one thing if only one of them did. In fact, I started to hear every character in this book in the voice of Dragnet's Joe Friday. Here's a representative sample:
PHILIP MALLOY: Well, see, there's this teacher.
MR. MALLOY: Go on.
PHILIP MALLOY: Miss Narwin, English teacher, and she doesn't like me...
MR. GRIFFEN: No. Tell her what you told me.
MR. MALLOY: This is part of it.
MS. STEWART: Tell it your own way, Philip.
PHILIP MALLOY: In the mornings, at school, in homeroom, before morning announcements, they play "The Star-Spangled Banner."
MS. STEWART: Who plays?
PHILIP MALLOY: The school. On the sound system.
MS. STEWART: Just want to get this down. Go on.
This sort of harshly clipped dialogue abounds throughout the narrative and becomes exceedingly irritating. In short, all the characters sound exactly the same, and since all we're left with is dialogue, the novel descends into an endless exchange of terse, colorless quips.
To make matters even worse, calling the central conflict far-fetched is being charitable. Philip Malloy wants to join his school's track team, but his grade in English is too low, and he's disqualified from trying out on that basis. Blaming his English teacher, Miss Narwin, he sets out to irritate her to the point of transferring him to a different class. So each morning when the national anthem is played over the loudspeakers, Philip starts to hum along, which is an ostensible violation of the instructions to "stand at respectful, silent attention for the playing of our national anthem." We are to believe that Miss Narwin is so fed up by the second day of Philip's humming that she ejects him from the classroom, and that after being ejected two days in a row, the assistant principal decides to suspend him for two days. From there, we move into hair-splitting over who is responsible for the suspension (Miss Narwin or the vice principal), whether Philip has broken an official rule or not, and whether he was suspended due to disrespect for the anthem or for being disruptive in class. In any case, it certainly comes off as much ado about very, very little, and it is hard to stretch the imagination to the point where the issue becomes a matter of national press coverage and hot debate.
The ending, which reduces the entire tedious story to shaggy dog status with a meager "twist" that amounts to a middle finger to those readers who have slogged through this mess, does not help the author's case. How this book won a Newberry Honor is beyond me and, perhaps, says more about Newberry awards than it does about the book.
Let's start with the basic premise, which wouldn't be a bad one if it were handled more carefully. The idea that the author seems to be trying to get across is that a single event can be reported in vastly different ways by different observers. Simple enough. But instead of delineating this clearly, the perspectives of the characters gradually shift in a meandering manner as they each, in short, try to cover their own butts or promote their own agendas. The title might well have been "Anything But the Truth."
This tendency of the characters to shift their account of events to serve their own needs is exacerbated by the fact that they communicate so poorly with one another. The author asks us to suspend our disbelief to a ludicrous degree, as every single act of communication between the characters amounts to an act of misinformation. I've never read a book in which the characters are so persistently obtuse when trying to elicit and/or convey information to one another. And this is where the format of the novel becomes an aggravating factor.
Most of the text in this novel consists of verbatim dialogue (the nature of which I'll address further in a moment) presented in pseudo-dramatic form. Each such section begins with a perfunctory description of the setting, followed by a back-and-forth exchange between the characters involved. Because this consists strictly of their dialogue—lacking the stage directions that might flesh out a full-fledged dramatic script—there is no action, per se. And this, of course, results in an oddly flat style. The remainder of the text consists of equally neutral transcriptions of written materials, such as school administration memos, newspaper articles, diary entries, and so on. The upshot of all of this is exceedingly thin characterization. For example, we don't even know what the protagonist, Philip Malloy, looks like.
Add to this problematic stew some of the poorest dialogue I've ever read. The characters, almost without exception, speak in clipped sentence fragments, often omitting the subjects of sentences, eschewing the use of articles and pronouns, and generally exhibiting no variation from character to character. When every character speaks in this way, it gives the impression that the author has almost completely ignored characterization. It would be one thing if only one of them did. In fact, I started to hear every character in this book in the voice of Dragnet's Joe Friday. Here's a representative sample:
PHILIP MALLOY: Well, see, there's this teacher.
MR. MALLOY: Go on.
PHILIP MALLOY: Miss Narwin, English teacher, and she doesn't like me...
MR. GRIFFEN: No. Tell her what you told me.
MR. MALLOY: This is part of it.
MS. STEWART: Tell it your own way, Philip.
PHILIP MALLOY: In the mornings, at school, in homeroom, before morning announcements, they play "The Star-Spangled Banner."
MS. STEWART: Who plays?
PHILIP MALLOY: The school. On the sound system.
MS. STEWART: Just want to get this down. Go on.
This sort of harshly clipped dialogue abounds throughout the narrative and becomes exceedingly irritating. In short, all the characters sound exactly the same, and since all we're left with is dialogue, the novel descends into an endless exchange of terse, colorless quips.
To make matters even worse, calling the central conflict far-fetched is being charitable. Philip Malloy wants to join his school's track team, but his grade in English is too low, and he's disqualified from trying out on that basis. Blaming his English teacher, Miss Narwin, he sets out to irritate her to the point of transferring him to a different class. So each morning when the national anthem is played over the loudspeakers, Philip starts to hum along, which is an ostensible violation of the instructions to "stand at respectful, silent attention for the playing of our national anthem." We are to believe that Miss Narwin is so fed up by the second day of Philip's humming that she ejects him from the classroom, and that after being ejected two days in a row, the assistant principal decides to suspend him for two days. From there, we move into hair-splitting over who is responsible for the suspension (Miss Narwin or the vice principal), whether Philip has broken an official rule or not, and whether he was suspended due to disrespect for the anthem or for being disruptive in class. In any case, it certainly comes off as much ado about very, very little, and it is hard to stretch the imagination to the point where the issue becomes a matter of national press coverage and hot debate.
The ending, which reduces the entire tedious story to shaggy dog status with a meager "twist" that amounts to a middle finger to those readers who have slogged through this mess, does not help the author's case. How this book won a Newberry Honor is beyond me and, perhaps, says more about Newberry awards than it does about the book.