.
It's a great book for teaching what I want to teach--thematically rich composition, moral complexity, subtlety of the narrative focus and voice, plot structure, suspense, characterization, tone: it's all there and all working beautifully. And people like the book. And I like it, which is a bonus in teaching. Teaching a text I don't like is tolerable for one semester, maybe even two, but after that I can't stand the rereading.
Anyway, so, I loved Stitches, let's have no mistake about that. Nothing but praise for the design and the execution. And, I largely share what I take to be the author's moral assessment of the characters. The parents have clearly not done a good job of parenting: the failure to give their son appropriate medical attention is appalling. "Neglectful" and "cold" are a generous description of the mother; many people if not most might call her abusive, though perhaps her methods aren't way out of line with cultural norms: David is shouted at and slapped when he runs off to play where he was told not to, losing his shoes in the process.
Make no mistake: I do not approve of the mother's behavior. Small shows her slamming around the house in resentful silence for days on end; I don't think it's right to give little children a punitive silent treatment for more than a very brief time, though what constitutes brief I shall leave as an exercise for the reader. (I don't favor hitting, but a parent has to have some means of indicating disapproval in moderation. Though maybe a childless person shouldn't pontificate too long on the subject.)
I don't believe the author intends us to read this narrative in the simple way some people like to read: identifying wholly with the boy and having zero compassion for the mother, investing 100% of their empathetic imagination in his perfect innocence and her perfect contemptibility. Look: the boy calls out for his mother's protection against a roughhousing older brother and against his harsh, unstable grandmother; doesn't that mean she must have provided him some degree of maternal protection on some occasions? In fact, we see David's mother's spontaneous impulse to shield him from her own mother's menace, and, by a short imaginative hop requiring only a one-link chain of inference, we realize that as bad as David's childhood may be, his mother's was likely worse on the average day.
Even the grandmother is handled with some measure of compassion in the narrative. She is discomfitted when her grandson can't understand her country speech, and does a pained double take when David asks what a crucifix is and she realizes the extent to which her daughter has rejected the religion of her childhood. David then wounds her deliberately when he says "Mama says people who say 'ain't' are stupid!" The grandmother's had a pretty hard life, but--let's have no mistake about this--I think it's worth calling her "evil" if we're ever going to use that word at all for assessing people's behavior. But the evil grandmother is portrayed not as someone animated by an inexplicable force of unprovoked malice and consciencelessness (like the evil people in much popular culture and a certain brand of politics); she's a damaged person, like David, like his mom. If David's misdemeanors--joyriding, truancy, etc.--are mitigated by the suffering and mistreatment he endured beforehand, aren't the felonies of the mothers mitigated by their suffering and mistreatment too? Not excused, mind you. We can understand and pity without necessarily forgiving. I think it hurts to be evil. Maybe there are a few exceptions--joyous psychopaths--somewhere, but not in this book.
There's only one place where I can't quite go along with what I take to be the book's assessment of the characters. I sort of feel I'm kicking over the pedagogical traces even to say this. Shouldn't I keep my own attention on form and technique, leave the students (at least the undergraduates) to work out their moral reactions free from my influence? What do you think of the characters, class? What do you think David Small thinks? Yes, by all means bring your own life experience to bear, but remember to keep coming back to the details of the text....
No, I can't help it. Listen: I think the psychiatrist did a wrong thing. I don't consider it wholesome to start therapy with a 15-year-old by saying "Your mother doesn't love you." What a dangerous, potentially injurious thing to say, even if it were definitely true and the shrink definitely knew it to be true. But I also don't think he had any very good grounds for making that assertion. How long could he have spent with the mother at that point, a couple hours? What arrogance, to be so certain about another person's inner life! And, yes, I think there is an element of Freud-inflected, mother-blaming misogyny there. The mom and shrink probably made mutually poor impressions on each other at their initial interview; the mother thinks psychotherapy is "throwing money down a hole." And, whew, that reminds me: the parents were paying for this. The Small couple paid for a shrink three times a week to reinforce David's worst feelings about his mother. Yeah, the therapy made David feel better about himself, but at his mom's expense. Oh, so, turns out it's the (male) shrink whose love is supposed to be true! Well, it's pretty easy to love someone for only an hour at a time, when you're getting a good salary, and you never have to take that teenager home with you and bear full responsibility for them, bailing out of jail and so forth.
Granted, we know that David's mother certainly didn't love him in a uniformly good or effective way. Granted she made consumer goods and partying a higher priority than nurturing him as she should have done; but it's ridiculous to suppose she didn't care whether her own son had cancer: she was in denial about the lump in his neck, is the reasonable explanation. Do you think love is a blanket of kindness, settling evenly over every interaction with the loved one and (especially in the case of parents) smothering every more self-centered desire? I have loved and I have been loved. I am not a parent, but I have parents, and I am here to tell you that love is not a blanket of kindness.
David, if you read this, I loved your book.
I wish I was back in your classes... :(
ReplyDeleteAimee Wilsher