The Handsome Reader - The Hunger Games

It is with no small measure of irony that I cop to devouring The Hunger Games today. I had been planning to do just a little bit more
with my summer and learned today that I will not be quite as busy as I had heretofore planned. Thus, summer reading camp. I've knocked
off quite a sequence a books in the few weeks past, trying to get my reading brain back in shape for school. (I think I am a funny and charismatic
instructor. I am dull shit as a student, but at least I am old enough to know that my brain weren't where it should be for upper-level coursework.)

Few books catch me enough to write about, or maybe I'm just lazy. Collins' The Hunger Games has been on my read list for quite some time. I'm not necessarily one of the carefree pushers of YA lit (avoiding an MLS partly to avoid that ghetto), but I genuinely continue to enjoy books written for and marketed to (Bill Hicks says "kill yourself") that audience. L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time series, several Ursula K. LeGuin and the excellent Roald Dahl novels populate my bookshelves with scars of honor and love down their spines. I don't know quite that THG will be joining them.

I may instead be reserving a corner of my darker bookshelf for THG. This is the section where lurk Philip K. Dick's androids dreaming(or not) of pneumatic, positronic sweaters on the foot, and where Atwood's seamy survivalists squat in squalor. This is at least what I was thinking as I entered the first chapter.

The first page (SPOILER ALERT!) reveals a disembodied speaker in the first person, which in a novel ostensibly about survival, could be telling. A saintly, cherubic little sister, a bashed-up cat who survived a drowning attempt in kittenhood at the hands of the as-yet-identified main character and a difficult maternal relationship.

This voice resolves itself into a grim, yet plucky heroine, a capitalistic Dickensean femme urchin who is the man of the family. At one point, Katniss is coaxed into particular behaviors in attempt to make the public, the revolted and compelled viewers of the book's namesake Games, like her. Look, after the first page, after the kitten thing, there's really not much I don't like about this character. She's a, ahem, fucking hardass. Collins has placed these Games in a brutal future Panem, which the reader assumes to be North America. Katniss is from the poorest of the poor districts, a literal coal miner's daughter (albeit a coal miner who was blown to smithereens in an industrial accident five years before) who lives by her survivalist and entreprenurial impulses. She has spent enough time in the forbidden forest, hunting, to have learned to become one of the animals. Katniss is both a symbol of a human and animal connection, but also of a teenage girl in the wilderness of school hallways - predators, schemes, arbitrary rules and no real self-control. As such, she's brilliant. Maybe I'm sheltered, and being reductive in believing that the gender of a protagonist has anything to do with anything, but I like the fact that Katniss is a sharp, hard girl who has a silly moment here and there. I heard a piece on NPR over the winter, and heard about another girl from coal country, quite a bit like Katniss. I don't remember this girl's name, but she is simultaneously head cheerleader and an avid deer hunter. Katniss is hardly head cheerleader, but once she is inserted into the pressure cooker of the media frenzy surrounding the Games, she navigates the system and responds with strength to many of the situations designed to manipulate her into making mistakes. She's honorable, offering herself for sacrifice in place of cherubic, goat-milking sister Prim, in a way that few female characters are allowed to be. I am put particularly in mind of L'Engle's Meg Murry, on a quest in A Wind in the Door to save her little brother, and in Wrinkle in Time her efforts to save both her father and brother.

L'Engle's Meg Murry, however, didn't dodge fireballs, and there were no impalings of pixie-ish 12 year olds in the Time quartet. That's where I find that the book takes a strange turn, combining gore, sci fi (tracking wasps that hold grudges and vile psychotropic fatal poison? Yeaaaaah.), amped-up Hollywood special effects (makes me certain I will never see this as a movie), post-climate change/political apocalypse and commentary on reality entertainment media. Strange, but I like it. Theme-wise, it reminds me of a couple of Stephen King's early novellas, sold as the Bachman books when I was a teenager, particulary "The Long Walk" and "The Running Man." His blurb on the back of the book, then, seemed to be in place. Thematically, I'm wondering how much anime or manga Collins has read. Gore is a bit of a theme in my entertainment media at the moment, and this one didn't skimp on it either, though it was typically more of the exploding green wasp pus gore, instead of being like literal, visceral gore - and I mean the kind that involves actual viscera. There is a sword wound (YES a SWORD wound - no guns, I don't think I read any, anyway) and more pus gore, and a protracted way fucked-up death scene at the end, but it's mostly in the narrator's mind instead of in her vision, which is kind of worse and a very sweet classic way of pushing the audience's buttons (it's the difference between old movies that are scary and never show the "monster" vs new special effects CGI candyshop things that are dull as shit because the viewer can see the Evil One's wide pores. The theme of setting the teenagers to kill each other isn't quite new (see also Battle Royale), but these teens also have a post-reality-television attitude towards the game of survival, and the adult public uses it as a politcal, sporting, gambling and clan-pride type event.

Ahm, because yes, I will be passing the book on - I'm not going to make space on my shelf for this one. I will burn through the entire series in no short order, and will hopefully be as grabbed by those as I was by this initial installment. That's actually part of the issue - the serious action wraps up at a certain point and there is a strange dragging ending to the book. I think part of this may replicate what Katniss experiences, the aftereffects of the stress of survival compounded with the much more subtle and sinister games being played after the gladitorial event. At a certain point, however, it becommes completely obvious that THG is the first installment. I think that there are several more elegant ways to deal with the segue into the next piece, but I didn't really need the heroine to be back at her District in order to begin the next installment. I don't know, though, and I guess reading it will tell me more. But there's more on why I'd not put it on my heart-pounding read shelf.

I am guilty of judging books by their covers and the blurbs thereupon. I've mentioned already King's blurb, and now I have to talk shit about Stephenie Meyer's blurb. (Uum, for someone who's not ever seen a rated R movie, this must not have been an easy read, or, as I suspect, Meyer has no imagination, so the twelve year old on the stake didn't present as a revolting picture in her mind. This must be how one writes a birth scene involving gnawing. But this does remind me, I do need to read Lord of the Flies this summer. Unbelieveable that a Lit major and book dork avoided that one. How?) Okay. There's purpose and there's audience, and I understand writing to appeal to one's audience. It's totally necessary and a central concern to a writer embarking on a writerly exercise. For example, I'm writing for an audience of about 5 (Hi there! Love you!) and myself, and it's on the internet, so I can say "fuck" and things like that. Meyer and Collins both write for the YA market, and muchly for girls, although I've noticed many young male readers engaged in both series, and almost tackled a guy teen at the library when he got the branch's copy of THG right before me the last time I had time enough to read it. I would have looked like a child abuser and book pervert. Weirdo. The fact that the book is marketed to teens, however, does not give the writers excuses to write like teens. Like sentence fragments. Just about everywhere.

I remember writing. Just like that. I can't do it anymore, at least not in prose, or at least I make an effort not to, but that's also partially because I am becoming more reflexively aware of my clauses. Not that they sometimes don't get the better of me. The sentence fragment thing alone gives rise to my objections to Meyer's works (or the selections there of that I've read) and the Collins novel. Why the fragments? Why the breathless lack of subjects or verbs, and why the attachment to prepositional phrases and dependent clauses flying solo?

This is why, when people give me the lame, well, at least the kids are reading bullshit, I call bullshit. If the kids are reading, let them read something with some grammatical style. I mean this trend does have a grammatical style, but it's a bullshitty grammatical style and the readers pick up on it. I know Atwood's not perfect, and she way influenced my short lines in poetry - I came to Atwood's fiction through her poetry (thanks again for long ago gifts, Nick), but she's got some pretty serious control over her clauses. This is a crucial skill that Meyer and Collins could work on. (Perhaps they've never read any R-rated poetry?)

Story-wise, it's a beast. I'm going to enjoy thinking over levels of potential symbolism that I read in the book -I especially like the idea about Katniss navigating the Games and games culture as a stand-in for a young woman's progression to adulthood in a culture of extreme pressure. Again, I'm going to read the sequels, and probably wish for different transitions/endings, but that's just armchair novel-writing. But the fragments. I will not forgive.