Jared

While there are certainly moments here that feel way too edgy for its own good, overall it’s a pretty stellar novella.

I low-key feel like this is just what the first Joker movie thought it was. Rage works better because it’s not an outright endorsement of Charlie Decker as a person.

The last moments are what’s really disturbing here. Over the course of the book, each character slowly starts to side with Charlie. Despite him being an incellian loser, they start to treat him like a hero. It all culminates in everyone violently beating on the popular kid.

Everyone supports Charlie because often people don’t really want change. People support violent causes because they find catharsis in violence.

The final chapter of the book is a letter that a student wrote to Charlie in his mental hospital. Everyone loves Charlie and their lives are all peachy.

Nothing ever happens.

A large reason this books works is because of the restraint it has.

This one really shook me to my core.

I always appreciate art that manipulates the mind of the audience and makes them truly self reflect and I think that's something this book does expertly. I hate to admit that I found Neil to be somewhat annoying. I found his attitude and general apathy immature and his reaction to the inciting incident to be dangerous. But that's the point. Neil is meant to break down the myth of the "perfect victim."

Contrast him with Brian, who is meant to stand in as this perfect victim. Brian is a "good" kid who was truly traumatized by the event. He tries to push it out of his mind. We don't even get full confirmation that it happened until there's less than 50 pages of the book left. Meanwhile we know exactly what happened to Neil in the first chapter.

Pedophilia is a deeply sensationalized crime. Due to this, Americans expect victims to act a certain way. We want them to be like Brian, to skirt around the conversation, to resent intimacy, to be afraid. So when a victim doesn't fit that cookie cutter profile, we find them "annoying." We react to them with authority we don't have. It's honestly sickening. I'm disgusted by how I reacted to Neil just a few days ago.

The other characters help reinforce this. Eric's experience as a gay teenager in the midwest gave him a trauma that bonded him to Neil. He might have been in love with him, but really I think he just wanted to relate to someone. It's a similar thing with Wendy. Wendy wants to relate to someone, but the way she goes about it is more harmful. She *wants* to be traumatized. That's what drags her towards Neil. She doesn't experience any hardships, yet she *wants* to have that post-trauma aesthetic.

Halfway through the book, Eric meets Brian. It's a few weeks after his last friend left and its the first time he's met one he needed. Brian has a perfect life from the outside, but Eric doesn't view him as a poser, like he does with every other straight man in this book. It's almost like some Mysterious Force brought these two together, and allowed them to help each other. Eric needed a good friend and Brian needed to find Neil and come to terms with his past. They couldn't have done it without each other.

And the book just ends with one of my all time favorite quotes, "It was a light that shone over our faces, our wounds and scars. It was a light so brilliant and white it could have been beamed from heaven, and Brian and I could have been angels, basking in it. But it wasn’t, and we weren’t." This line is said by Neil as he finally fully grasps what happened to him that summer. We shine an unnecessarily bright light on victims. We expect them to be perfect, to be traumatized the way we want them to be. We tell them to be angels. But they aren't.

Times change and ultimately the worst people you know are going to thrive from it.

I really liked the difference between Yasha and Petya, both extremely irritating and purposeless men, yet Petya has a reason to keep going and Yasha's already given up. Petya seems afraid of the love he feels for Anya, while Yasha's love for Dunyasha is unreal and unrequited. He sees her as a workplace fling and disregards the love because he sees himself as above her, whereas Petya's love for Anya is genuine, he just believes that he's too far gone in a loveless world.

Varya's the goat. She's so easily ragebaited and Petya knows exactly how to push her buttons, I almost wanted to see the two of them fall in love. But ragebaiter x ragebaitee is not a common ship dynamic, especially in early 1900s Russian theatre.

I had to read this for a class. My professor absolutely adores Chekhov and I can see why. We had to read The Lady with the Dog earlier, and that was a truly beautiful short story. It made me cry by the end of it. That's probably the best short story I had to read for this class. Either that or Hills Like White Elephants, which also made me cry.

The Cherry Orchard didn't make me cry, but it's a comedy so that's expected. It didn't make me laugh either, but I'm sure these jokes would work a lot better if I saw them performed in a theatrical setting. I absolutely loved the characters, though. Especially Firs, I bet he would have had me hooting and hollering if I saw this live. That's a funny character. And his death is really funny too, I should really seek out a production of this play, because ending it with such a stupid death scene is comedy gold.

This was rad as hell. I LOVE that Jekyll wasn't the main character until the last chapter, it made everything so much more intense. I bet this would have been incredible to read as a surprise and not see the big reveal coming.

Literature is so awesome. This would be perfect to teach my students if they could get used to the Victorian language and random references to random stuff they wouldn't understand.