I had the good fortune to speak at an event with
Rainbow Rowell at a Tulsa Library Novel Talk series on “Literature and Romance”
in 2012. I was there to give a talk over
Jane Austen as prelude to a reading from her book, Attachments, and a Q
& A with a friend of mine, Laura Raphael, who organized the event. Sadly, I didn’t know a single one of her
works, but my wife and I were bowled over by her presentation and unique
storytelling ability. I knew she had to
be a great writer based on what I heard that afternoon, but nothing prepared me
for the voice I encountered in her books—to say nothing of the feeling I had
when I turned the final page of her novel, Eleanor & Park, last
night. Perhaps it’s for the best that I
didn’t know her work back then; otherwise, I would have felt like a fool for
speaking on the same stage as her, and might have simply yielded my time to let
her go even longer. After all, who
cares what some diminutive professor from a small university has to say about
Jane Austen—we have her direct descendant in the room with us! (more about the Jane Austen connection to
follow).
I suppose it’s redundant to write yet another
laudatory review of Rainbow Rowell’s phenomenally successful novel, Eleanor
& Park, especially when she already has another successful book out (Fangirl)
and a fourth one imminent (Landline).
However, a great work of art demands a response, and perhaps that’s my
only defense in writing this review: to claim this work as a great piece of
literature, rather than Young Adult lit or as some would pejoratively claim,
‘chick lit.’ This book works on every
level that, say, Jane Austen, does, another writer who is unfairly relegated to
the questionable sub-genre of ‘books that only girls like.’ Like Jane Austen, Rainbow Rowell uses the
flowering of an unlikely romance to document our society—its prejudices,
phobias, confusions, ideals, and disappointments. The story of Eleanor and Park, two extraordinarily unique yet
realistic teenagers, should resonate with anyone who tried to piece together
adulthood from the disjointed shards of adolescence. Clearly, we aren’t given all the pieces, and when we try to make
them fit, the edges don’t match—we cut ourselves—and the result is a painful,
frustrating mess that only years later, when we’re older and wiser (perhaps) do
we appreciate why it was all worth it.
That’s what this work does for me: it shows why being a teenager was worth
it, and why the pain of isolation and being ostracized is one of the greatest
gifts you can receive in life.
Halfway through the book, when Eleanor and Park
have begun their tentative relationship, Park reflects on Eleanor’s claim that
she never looks ‘nice.’ He agrees,
adding, “Eleanor was right: She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn’t supposed to look nice; it was
supposed to make you feel something.”
It’s an important passage, since Eleanor and Park are two people who
don’t look “nice.” They aren’t
“pretty,” and they don’t fit the neat ideals of American life sold to us in films, advertisements, and far too many
novels. Eleanor is large, has a wild
shock of red hair, dresses in a hodgepodge of men’s clothing, and just wants to
be left alone. Park is one of the lone
Koreans in suburban Omaha, comes from a loving family, listens to punk rock and
reads comic books, and secretly despises everyone he goes to school with. Fittingly, they meet on the bus, with
Eleanor as the new girl who everyone immediately makes fun of; even Park, no
romantic hero himself (shades of Darcy, perhaps?), thinks she’s a weirdo and
wants nothing to do with her.
Grudgingly he offers her space on his seat, though without a shred of
gallantry; indeed, he hopes she never so much as looks at him in thanks. The kids on the bus jeer her with whispers
and shouts of “Big Red,” and Park simply glowers in silence, wondering why in
the world he offered to be her protector.
From this very unpromising beginning, the two
begin a relationship as only two alienated teenagers could strike up: she
begins reading comics with him from across the seat, and he, feeling a mixture
of guilt and interest, starts leaning over a little more, waiting for her
silently to finish the page before turning to the next. The romance is slow, subtle, yet so entirely
believable—or perhaps, life as it should be believed—that I fell in love with
them myself. Park finally takes the
leap and gives her a comic to take home with her, which leads to short, staccato
conversations about the X-Men and the Watchmen; this leads to
offers of music (mix tapes!) and eventually, to holding hands. The first time Park takes her hand—after
weeks of hesitant attempts to say something real to one another—we get a masterpiece
of literary polyphony; that is, two voices coming together to make a
satisfying, harmonious whole. Rowell
breaks up the chapters between Eleanor and Park’s point of view, and while some
chapters focus on long spans of narrative, others are mere pinpoints of thought
(some are a single sentence). This
moment is first narrated by Eleanor, as she records their pointless chatter
about the Watchmen:
“He was still holding the end of her scarf,
rubbing the silk idly between his thumb and fingers. She watched his hand. If
he were to look up at her now, he’d know exactly how stupid she was...If Park
were to look up at her now, he’d know everything. He didn’t look up. He
wound the scarf around his fingers until her hand was hanging in the space
between then. Then he slid the silk and
his fingers into his open palm. And
Eleanor disintegrated...Like something had gone wrong beaming her into the
Starship Enterprise....Maybe Park had paralyed her with his ninja magic,
his Vulcan handhold, and now he was going to eat her. That would be awesome.”
We then switch to Park’s perspective, as he notes
that “Holding Eleanor’s hand was like holding a butterfly. Or a heartbeat. Like holding something complete, and completely alive.” He goes onto to recall his previous attempts
to hold or kiss a girl, which were not only awkward, but lifeless. He feared he wasn’t attracted to “real
girls,” or perhaps only to “perverted cartoon-sexual” girls found in comics. However, once he took her hand, he realized,
“he just didn’t recognize all those other girls. The way a computer drive will spit out a disk if it doesn’t
recognize the formatting. When he
touched Eleanor’s hand, he recognized her.
He knew.”
While the romance is carefully and believably
constructed, what is more important here is how both teenagers
experience love. Not through cliched
phrases and “pretty” emotions, but through their own eclectic sensations and
metaphors. Nothing new happens in the
world, we’ve all seen it before as readers, but as people, everything we
experience is new—all the more so when we’re young, and all those song lyrics
and films and books suddenly make sense (to us, at any rate). How would a teenager like Eleanor, who has
been told her entire life she’s fat, unwanted, unfit to exist in a world of
prettiness and popularity, understand that another boy would want to “eat”
her? And how would a kid raised on
American stereotypes and punk rock rebellion find beauty in a girl who isn’t
afraid to be a work of art—a woman that makes him feel, rather than a
cardboard model blithely sipping a Diet Coke?
The relationship that follows is a true work of art, not just in
Rowell’s words, but in the haphazard, confused, beautiful, sublime manner in which
they find one another.
Yet like Jane Austen (to invoke her one final
time), Rowell uses the teenage lovers to examine our own world—or in this case,
the 80’s of Middle America. Omaha
exists as a real place in her work, with the good part of town divided from the
bad by a single block. Yet this narrow
gulf is an ocean for Eleanor, who lives with her abused mother and four
siblings in her drunk father-in-law, Richie’s, house. Richie, a man who probably grew up in a “pretty” world and became
disillusioned when he couldn’t have it, now sees all women as trash. He kicks Eleanor out of the house—with her
mother’s defeated but total compliance—and threatens worse, particularly as he
scrawls pornographic messages on her schoolbook covers. Eleanor learns early on that “pretty” is
just a sales pitch, which money can buy—and others can only dream of. So she defiantly becomes “ugly,” dressing as
a piece of walking performance art which horrifies her peers (who, in one scene,
stuff her clothes in the gym toilet).
This is not only her defense, but also her artistic manifesto for
small-town Omaha: I’ve seen what you think is beautiful, and if that’s
beauty, I’ll be a festering sore on your beauty; I’ll be the Caliban to your
Prospero, mocking you as you live in splendor on your little island.
In the same way, Park is formulating his own
private manifesto, as society expects him to live up to the ideals of a
suburban American male—and an Asian American male. Yes, he does well in school and takes
martial arts (at his father’s insistence, an American military man who married
a Korean woman), but to him, this is all part of the pretty package he’s
supposed to embody. He longs for the
feelings that comics inspire in him-a world of mutants and heroes who save the
world by being different, who rise from the gutters to reach the stars. Though taught to date a “pretty” girl like Tina
(the popular girl, who secretly likes him), every instinct screams out for
Eleanor, the only girl who looks like a comic book hero come to life. When she cannot understand why someone as
beautiful as Park likes her, he continually tells her, because you’re
“cool.” “Cool” meaning not neat,
trendy, hip, or amazing, but a work of art—something that makes you feel
something. Teenagers are full of strong
emotions but are taught to push these down and emulate ideas and experiences that
only adults can appreciate. Eleanor
gives form to the emotions he has always felt, but has no words for—and only
the frames of a comic book can approximate.
Without recounting the wonderful story and the
ins-and-outs of Eleanor and Park’s relationship, I will conclude with the
ultimate spoiler: we don’t get a happy ending.
That is, we do get one, but it’s not pretty—it’s “ugly,” by which
I mean as unique and satisfying as Eleanor and Park themselves. True art and beauty cannot exist unsullied
in life, especially for teenagers, who can never truly own anything. Yet the book is gloriously optimistic—if never
sentimental—in its view of love, and how love is a necessary step in our
evolution, even if the results disappoint.
We need love, even if we can’t hold onto it, even if we can’t take it
with us. As Eleanor reflects at the end
of the book, “You saved my life, she tried to tell him. Not forever, not for good. Probably just temporarily, and now I’m
yours. The me that’s me right now
is yours. Always.” Here Eleanor shows wisdom beyond her years
as she unconsciously quotes Keats, knowing that the figures in the urn can
never reach one another, can never touch, but the result is art—timeless and
beautiful. After all, love is a mature
experience, and one you rarely get right—or get to savor—the first time
around. Yet your first experience
shapes you for life, and that person never truly dies, but remains evergreen in
your dreams and ideals. So, too, with
Eleanor and Park, fictional characters in a work of art that feels like Keats’
Urn set in motion.
Only one other work I can think of captures this
sense of teenage awakening and social awareness so accurately—Craig Thompson’s
monumental graphic novel, Blankets.
Both works share many of the same themes, characters, and ideas, and
both are unafraid to be ugly when pretty is all we expect. There are many pretty works of art out
there, so many to choose from; but when you read a work like Eleanor &
Park, you quickly lose your taste for them. This is the real thing, the kind of work that reminds us why we
read in the first place. No, not for
escape or for voyeuristic pleasure, but to find ourselves in the lives of
others. Though I read through the book
far too quickly (and I’m sure I’ll read it again soon!), I’ve rarely felt so
much a part of the two characters’ lives; I am desperate to know what happens
next, yet am relieved that I can never know.
Like the best art, it’s not about the future but the present—it exists right
here, in the moment we can hold in our hands as we read the book. There’s nothing else.
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