The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks – E. Lockhart

Frankie wants in. Now a sophomore at the elite New England boarding school whence her sister and father graduated, now dating one of the most popular guys in the senior class, she’s sick of her dad’s dropped hints about the secret society at the school and she doesn’t like her boyfriend dropping her every thirty seconds when his best friend, another alpha-male senior, calls. She’s started noticing all the little thing people say or do that lessen women, put us in our place, degrade us, etc. She’s starting to get interested in civil disobedience.

She wants in, and all it implies: she wants her boyfriend to recognize her worth, her intelligence. To not be just adorable. To be on equal standing with his best friend. To be delible¹ to her boyfriend as his friends, not someone who ceases to exist when he isn’t around.

Frankie’s an excellent, full-fledged character, intelligent, gutsy, and ambitious. The book – which won a Printz honor when I was 30 pages in – is quite well written. It does make the reader extra-conscious of the little things people say and do which keep girls and young women on a more juvenile social level than their contemporaries – you can’t walk on you’re own but a boy can, everyone’s glad you have a nice boy to take care of you, your legitimate concerns are dismissed as your being sensitive, your arguments are dismissed as your being adorable. It’s infuriating, and it’s everywhere – not just in the book.

Of course, when a book’s gotten me primed to notice the subtle manifestations of sexism, I’m not particularly inclined to ignore them – even when they show up in that very book.

Yep, Lockhart slips up, damn her.

Passage A, straight from Frankie’s mouth:

Once you say women are one way, and men are another, and say that’s how it is in other species so that’s how it is in people, then even if it’s somewhat true—even if it’s quite a good amount true—you’re setting yourself up to make all kinds of assumptions that actually really suck. Like, women tend to cooperate with each other and therefore don’t have enough competitive drive to run major companies or lead army squadrons.²

She’s on a good track, though I’m on the “in all things moderation (including moderation)” side here – it’s not that we can’t draw conclusions about tendencies, it’s that we need to respect and recognize variations and let people find ways to use their traits to find success in their own ways.

But that’s actually not the point I’m trying to make. I want to show you Passage B:

If she were not a strategist, Frankie would have reacted like most girls do in the same situation: with tears, with anger, with pouting and sulking and petulant responses like “What is it that’s so much more important than hanging out with me, huh?”³

What? What? For one thing, she ranted a hundred pages earlier about people doing exactly what she’s doing now. For another thing… no. Just no. We do not all react to a boyfriend (or girlfriend) canceling a date at the last minute with tears, with anger, etc. Some women do; some men do. We react as individuals, not as monolith gendered blocks.

That’s not all:

It just seems so funny to dress up your boobs. Like when no one is going to see them. Or even if someone is. It seems so undignified to deck out your private bits in flashy bits of lace you’d never where outside of your clothes in a million years.

And then she thought: Boobs.

Boobs are just inherently undignified.⁴

Let’s go through this one offensive passage at a time, shall we?

Yes, it might seem funny to dress up one’s boobs, but that doesn’t make it bad. Wearing sexy bras, or pretty bras, or brightly-colored silly bras, can have an effect on a woman’s day: it can make her feel sexy, or pretty, or fun, or confident, or all of the above. Even if no one is going to see them. Especially if no one is going to see them.

Underclothes and outerclothes have different purposes; it’s okay to have a bra you wouldn’t wear on the outside, or a scratchy sweater you wouldn’t wear right against your skin. And some of us find excuses to wear corsetry in public, and there’s nothing wrong with that, either.

Moving on…

Very few things are inherently undignified; dignity is in how something is used or treated. Boobs in ill-fitting, ugly, or unflattering clothing can be undignified, certainly, though some women can pull it off; it’s in the confidence. Boobs in flattering lingerie or clothing can be dignified, certainly, though some women can’t pull it off; it’s in the confidence. Naked boobs? It’s all in the confidence. Boobs are inherently boobs. That’s about it.

I greatly enjoyed reading The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, and it has many good things to say. The more I think about it, however, the more pissed I become at the undermining of its overall feminist message. If you’re going to stereotype women, assume that we’re all desperate for men (“On what planet would a girl in her position refuse to go to a golf course party with Matthew Livingston?”⁵ Mine.), and insult our bodies, don’t try to pass it off as a feminist treatise.

____________________
¹ The opposite of indelible. Also known as the neglected positive, or so The Disreputable History tells me.
² Page 162
³ Page 277
⁴ Pages 227-228
⁵ Page 70

____________________
The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
E. Lockhart’s Blog

 

Little Brother – Cory Doctorow

A major terrorist attack has hit San Francisco. Marcus and his friends, in the wrong place at the wrong time, are picked up by Homeland Security for a few grueling days. When they return home, they – and particularly Marcus – are horrified by the loss of privacy and civil rights perpetrated by Homeland Security in the name of safety. A computer nerd, Marcus starts to fight back, with computers, cryptography, and the idealistic youth of San Francisco as his weapons. As more and more people become involved in his clandestine XNet, his creation slips more and more out of his control.

The major problem with Little Brother is that it’s trying to serve two masters. People who are attracted to it are likely to be interested in computers and cryptography, and therefore to come to the novel with some preexisting knowledge of the subject. Of course, it cannot be safely assumed that all of its readers have such knowledge. So it has to do a fair bit of teaching. I believe it generally succeeds at imparting the necessary information, but it does not succeed in making the lessons interesting. The novel is narrated in the first person; Doctorow simply has the narrator offer straightforward descriptions of cryptography, binary, Linux, and the like.

This would be boring even if one has not already read Neil Stephenson, but for someone who has all of this material taught in Stepheson’s brilliantly creative narrative digressions, it’s rather interminable.¹ I’m not asking for Doctorow to try to be Stephenson² – few things are worse than a novelist who doesn’t trust his own voice – but I think it’s valid to ask that teaching in a novel be delivered via a more interesting medium than a visit from the Exposition Fairy.

This frequent mini-lectures also have the unfortunate effect of increasing
the didacticism of an already didactic book.

Little Brother is largely an expression of Doctorow’s dissatisfaction with the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security, much as William Sleator used Test to express his dissatisfaction with No Child Left Behind. In both cases, I generally agree with both authors’ liberal biases, but I wish both had expressed their points of view with a touch more subtlety. Little Brother is a much better book than Test, but it is ultimately dissatisfying; while a major point of the book is “Don’t Trust Anyone Over 25″ – after 25, ways of thinking are too set and one is too invested in the status quo – it seems 37-year-old Doctorow doesn’t trust his teenage readers to see the flaws in the system without his help.

____________________
¹ For instance, in The Diamond Age, he teaches binary using a clockwork castle.

² Or other authors who need to present a lot of facts in their narratives. Another example would be Junot Diaz’s use of humor footnotes to impart large chunks of Dominican Republic history in The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

____________________
Little Brother ~ Cory Doctorow’s craphound.com

 

Gideon the Cutpurse – Linda Buckley-Archer

Peter’s mad at his dad. Kate’s annoyed that she has to spend part of her weekend with Peter, but she wants to show off, so she has her dad take the two of them to his laboratory to look at Nifty Science Machines. An accident happens, and off they are whisked to 1769. There, they are unusually bad at resisting the time-traveler’s urge to talk about the future, meet some amazingly kind and generous people, and, of course, meet a few villains.

It lost points early on for improper description of the effects of a Van de Graaf generator. And even if one ignores the bad science – and I have a problem doing that – it just never rises above being an okay book. While it’s purportedly about Peter and Kate, Kate really falls to the background, and it’s not just because eighteenth century skirts make it hard to chase highwaymen and the like. In many small ways, I felt that gender stereotypes were being reinforced – girls cry easily, have weak stomachs, and are closer to anything emotional/spiritual/metaphysical. Kate expresses frustration about her skirts and about Peter’s thoughtlessness when he doesn’t question eighteenth-century gender roles, but the smaller, more insidious things slip frustratingly past.

____________________
Gideon the Cutpurse

 

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian – Sherman Alexie

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is an almost brutally honest portrayal of life as a smart, nerdy, awkward, disabled boy from the Rez – specifically the Spokane Indian Reservation – and the year he decides to go to the decent high school in the nearby white town. The white kids hate him. The Indian kids hate him. Things get better for Junior and things get worse, but the sense of being slung between worlds never quite goes away. There’s humor, there’s clever cartoons, there’s, well, honesty. There’s also periodic Profundity Syndrome (that pernicious malaise which makes authors tell us point-blank why what we’re reading/just read is Terribly Important and Deeply Profound). It starts about once every 50 pages – an acceptable rate – but it just keeps accelerating till the end. To a certain extent this is fair; it’s first person and the narrator deserves his epiphanies. Still, that creeping Profundity Syndrome keeps it from being a great book. As it stands, it’s a very good book.

 

The Emerald Tablet – P.J. Hoover

Definitely a fun, entertaining, and quick read. Real-world sci-fi/fantasy/modern mythology (I don’t know if that term existed until just now; basically, I’m referring to anything in which it turns out the myths were real. The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel books are a great example, as well as being great books.) In this case, the central myths are Atlantis and Lemuria (less well-known than Atlantis, and actually more of an 18th-century attempt at science than a myth, it’s a sunken continent in the Pacific), with bits of the Greek myths and Xanadu thrown in. Our hero, Benjamin, is a teenage boy, who suddenly learns that the reason his family are all telepathic and telekinetic is that they’re Telegens, who are, as the name suggests, a race of people with extra smarts and psi abilities. Anyway, he and all the other 13 year old Telegens raised in the human world are sent to Lemuria for summer school. Naturally, being our hero, Benjamin quickly turns out to have a role prophesied, and he and his friends must do a quest while at school.

Stuff ensues.

And it’s generally pretty fun stuff, although it had me stopping and scratching my head periodically at the mysteriously absent details. An example from early in the book: their first day in Lemuria, the kids go out into the city for lunch, instead of eating in the school’s dining hall. Cool. How did they pay for it? Do the restaurants take human money? Did the school have a place where they could exchange currencies? Or vouchers to use at places in the city? Do they use money at all? If not, why? In all its forms? A good 50 pages/one week later Benjamin’s mother sets up a DNA-linked charge account, which belatedly answers the question of how money is dealt with in Lemuria, but since we then know Benjamin had no access to money before that point, it makes the question of how they paid for their lunch even more perplexing.

I know, I know, it’s totally not important to the plot. But I like details and I like learning how alternate civilizations work, so having these holes bugs me. And I know I’m not the only one.

Still, it’s pretty absorbing, and was a lot of fun to read. It’s also the first in a planned trilogy, and it’s laid out enough to make me curious about what they’ll do with the next two. With luck, they’ll make sure they have all their details accounted for, and the end result will be even better.