Jared
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.
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.