moby dick

Coming of Age on the High Seas

The coming-of-age drama  and its conventions are ubiquitous in our culture.  From Moby Dick to Stand By Me to The Wonder Years to The Virgin Suicides and thousands of others, they all share strikingly similar characteristics.  There is the first person narrative, told in flashback, from an older and wiser protagonist.  The requisite group of friends or comrades who fight and bond (and often die) over the course of the story. Often, there’s a love interest who the narrator cannot pursue until he’s completed some adventure.  And, there’s the life-altering event, a confrontation with death, which forever changes the narrator from an innocent to an adult.

What is most fascinating about this genre is how durable it is.  Despite being predictable and formulaic, works in this category are often brilliant pieces of storytelling which somehow encapsulate the human condition and what it means to grow up.

Case in point – Carol Birch’s  Jamrach’s Menagerie.  While adhering almost religiously to the conventions of the genre, it captivates the reader with a whimsical, harrowing story.

The aging protagonist of this story is Jaffy Brown.  As a child, Jaffy scoured the filth of London’s sewers for pennies until the day he approached a tiger on the street and literally escaped from the jaws of death and poverty.  The owner of the tiger, the titular Jamrach, is impressed by Jaffy’s pluck and offers him a job cleaning cages at his private zoo of exotic creatures.  Jaffy proves particularly adept at dealing with the animals so, in due time, he’s recruited on a shipping expedition to capture a fabled dragon from a South Pacific island.

Throw in the best friend, a love interest, a host of exotic locales and characters, hardship and, eventually, disaster, on the high seas – you’ve got yourself a coming-of-age tale.

Why is this coming-of-age on the open seas tale different from the dozens of others out there?  For one, the writing is quite good – Jaffy is a wonderful narrator for this kind of tale.  He’s serious, funny, emotional, stoic – all in just the right proportions.  You can palpably feel his fear as he and his band confront a Komodo dragon somewhere in Indonesia.  You understand completely when he punches Tim, his best friend, in the face early on in the story.  And you long with him for his mother and for Ishbel, the girl he loves, during some long nights at sea.

The eventual ordeal, the one that truly makes Jaffy confront who he really is, is no surprise to anyone familiar with seafaring adventures.  Yet, in its rawness and brutality, it stands out.  Especially through the eyes of Jaffy who, despite all the prior adventures and dangers, remains an innocent up until this point.  Yet, the reader is never, can never, be judgmental because of the implicit question: If Jaffy could be driven to such extremes, could I?   If that’s a bit cryptic, I hope that you’ll pick up a copy to find out what I mean.

As the convention dictates, Jaffy survives the ordeal and learns that you can never truly go home.  He is changed and will forever be so.  Perhaps that is the underlying appeal of coming-of-age tales. The inevitability and immutability of change and the lengths to which this change will drive us.

Whatever the reason, the genre seems to not get stale, certainly not with the addition of Jamrach’s Menagerie.

A Bit of Educated Guesswork

This week’s question over at the Blue Bookcase’s Literary Blog Hop is:

What makes a contemporary novel a classic?  Discuss a book which you think fits the category of modern classic and explain why.

Hopping about and reading other’s responses, there seems to be almost universal agreement on some basic points.  First, while the time frame differs slightly for different people, a contemporary author is one who is currently writing or has been writing in the past few years.  That seems like a fair definition to me.

Secondly, all seem to agree that a classic is a book that can withstand the test of time.  A book, no matter how good, is not a classic if it ends up being consigned to the rubbish bin of literary history.

After these two points, perspectives begin to differ.  How many years does it take for a book to earn the label of “A Classic?” Must a book have a particularly high degree of literary merit to qualify?  Good questions, but open to a great deal of personal interpretation. I choose to think about this whole question in this way:  What contemporary books will people still be reading in 50 years?  I realize that 50 is a bit of an arbitrary number and it could just as easily be 40 or 60, but 50 rounds out nicely and, if people are still reading a book fifty years later, it must have some sort of lasting appeal.  As for so-called “literary merit,” I don’t really factor that into my equation at all.  If a novel can maintain appeal over the decades, I’ll assume there’s something inherently meritorious about the book.

As for the books that people will be reading in fifty years?  I’ve seen Cold Mountain, The Kite Runner, Middlesex, The Road all nominated as candidates.  All of these are all wonderful books.  However, I’m not certain they’re destined to be ‘classics’ in the sense that people, outside of some literary specialties, will be reading them in 50 years.   Certainly, any of them has the potential to become a ‘classic’  – but so do hundreds of other well-written novels from the past ten or fifteen years.  From our perspective in the present, it’s almost impossible to predict how any single book will fare in the eyes of time.  Take Moby Dick, as an example.  It’s now considered by many to be THE Great American Novel.  Yet, it was received with mixed reviews and fell into obscurity after its publication until it was resurrected in the early 20th century.  In hindsight, its easy to say that this rediscovery was inevitable – such a magisterial novel was undoubtedly destined to be recognized for the great work of art that it is.  However, it could have just as easily languished in obscurity and eventually forgotten.

That doesn’t mean that I’m not up to making any predictions.  If I was going to put money down on what books people will be reading in 50 years, I’d easily go with the works of Stephen King and J.K. Rowling.  Call me an uncultured philistine, I’ve got thick skin.  If history serves as any guide, these two authors are the safest bets.  The authors who become ‘classics’ are often the ones who are cultural behemoths in their own time.  Take Charles Dickens, for example.  While his literary merit was debated in his own time (and has been ever since), he was a genuine celebrity.  People loved him and still do – and not because of his original literary genius.  The man simply knew how to tell a good story.  That’s what people remember and that’s why his books continue to be read generation after generation.  Love him or hate him, Stephen King tells a story as effectively as anyone writing today.   And, through his books and their many movie and television adaptations, his characters and ideas have been ingrained into the cultural landscape.  Same goes for Rowling’s Harry Potter series, perhaps even more so than Stephen King’s works.  Rowling hooked an entire generation of kids who will remember those books for the rest of their lives and will undoubtedly read them to their own children.   People will be reading about Hogwart’s and He-Who-Cannot-Be-Mentioned well into the next century, I guarantee it.  And, to be perfectly honest, I think the works of both these authors deserve to become classics.

Other, more ‘literary’ books are certainly destined to become classics as well.  But, for works that don’t come with a cultural zeitgeist driving them forward through time, a lot more is left up to chance.  I’d like to think that my great-grandchildren will be reading Jonathan Franzen and Haruki Murakami, but I can’t be certain of it.  As with almost any aspect of life, the role of luck and chance is just as important, if not more so, than skill and merit.