Thoughts on Hush, Hush...

[glitter_n_gore]

I mentioned this book briefly, in my rant about YA a few posts back. Several things prompted me to read it myself--curiosity, plain and simple; my bizarre liking for books that make me angry; my previously mentioned and still relevant belief that if you're going to scold the teachings of any book, you better read it first to hold your ground in your arguments; and the existence of real life teenagers who flock to dangerous partners against all sense and reason, no matter how hard the people who love them try to talk sense to them. This last one became all too real to me after spending some quality time in the court house, on account of my new job. I won't go detail, but I will say that it made it easier for me to see why some girls might pick up a book like this and, unlike me, be able to see themselves in it.


I'm about halfway through it at the moment, and here's the basic gist of the plot: Nora Gray is a decent but unremarkable student, her best friend Vee Sky is more interested in boys than books, and the new kid, Patch (no, I'm not making any of these names up) is dark, mysterious and handsome. For about thirty seconds. As soon as Patch opens his mouth, he shifts from "mysterious" to "secretive and antisocial" and his allure drops to zilch. Nora is similarly put off by his refusal to cooperate on this biology assignment for which they've been forced into partnership, and by his repeated--and unwelcome--come-ons, both in school and out, sometimes to the point of publically humiliating her in front of their whole class. Nora, in the beginning, hates him for his shitty attitude and begs the teacher to let her switch partners--Patch makes her feel threatened and uncomfortable. Said teacher does not comply.

A few chapters later, Patch continues to show up, harrass Nora relentlessly despite her increasingly weakened pleas for him to leave her alone, and then, while she's stuck waiting for a light to change, a masked figure all in black appears out of nowhere and tries to rip the driver's side door off her car--a door which appears undamaged once Nora is safely back in her own driveway. Later, when Patch bullies her into riding a rollercoaster despite her fear of heights, her seatbelt comes undone and she flies out of the car and down--only to open her eyes seconds later and find herself back in the car, gliding safely into the on-off ramp.

Now, I'm fully aware that this book has been pitched as a YA paranormal romance, and from what I understand Patch and Nora do eventually wind up together as a couple. However, because I'm a reader and writer of supernatural horror and this is the way my mind works, I'm reading this with a slightly different viewpoint which makes it immensely more satisfying.

A few things are indisputable, no matter which POV you take: Patch makes Nora immensely uncomfortable, but at the same time she feels drawn to him for reasons she can't explain even to herself. Someone, whom Nora suspects at first is Patch and then decides must be someone else, is following her and wants to cause her harm, also for reasons she doesn't understand. Her memories and sense of reality are becoming faulty, and she suspects that someone might be controlling her mind. To me, this is not a story about two unlikely people falling in love, but about a girl who slowly starts to lose her mind, and her crumbling sense of reality reflects that. Instead of calling out author Becca Fitzpatrick for contradictions in her own prose when Nora goes from thinking Patch is the one in the ski mask, and then a few chapters later deciding that Patch can't be the ski-mask-wearing type, there's no way he'd do something like that, etc., etc., I feel like I'm watching a narrator succumb to whatever forces are working against her here, and she's just too close to the crazy to see it. (I'm being awful generous, by the way--I'm pretty sure it's just lazy writing and an attempt to rescue Patch from villainhood after setting him up as the bad guy for half the book--but this is the only way I can read this without throwing the thing against the proverbial wall. I can't do that. It's a library book. They'd fine me.)

Those of us who read paranormal YA know that much of it comes with a breaking point after which there's no way to justify the remainder of the reading experience. We always start out hopeful and rationalize away all the slips in continuity or half-baked character profiles. Until we hit the breaking point, and then it's snarking time. (This is a broad generalization, if you can't tell. There is a healthy chunk of good, quality YA that hides on the shelves just behind the shiny display tables with all the discounts and boxed sets and action figures. It just takes some extra hunting to find it.) For me, the breaking point in Hush, Hush comes not after the humiliating biology/sex-ed class, or even after Patch not-so-subtley barges into Nora's house after the rollercoaster incident, but during this conversation between Nora and her mother:

"How did you know you were in love with Dad?" I asked, striving to sound casual. [...]

Mom settled into the sofa and propped her feet up on the coffee table. "I didn't. Not until we'd been married about a year."

Say what now?

It wasn't the answer I'd expected. "Then . . . why did you marry him?"

"Because I thought I was in love. And when you think you're in love, you're willing to stick it out and make it work until it is love."

I'm sorry, but this doesn't make any goddamn sense. You know what my mom tells me regarding marriage? "Don't take him to raise." Also, "Don't marry a fixer-upper." This doesn't mean you should enter a marriage expecting perfection, but you also shouldn't enter one with the idea that everything will be okay if you could just change your partner enough. I have nothing against the idea of "making it work," but I gotta tell ya, after helping out with a few divorces at the office, I firmly believe that people get married WAY too fast, for all the wrong reasons. The idea that this character married someone without knowing she was in love with her husband just baffles me. Uncertainty is not what you want if you're getting into a contract using the words "until death." Seriously.

Later on in this same conversation, when Nora opens up enough to talk about Patch:

"Ooh, a boy," she said mysteriously. "Well? Is he in the Chess Club? Student Council? The tennis team?"

"He likes pool," I offered optimistically.

"A swimmer! Is he as cute as Michael Phelps? [blah, blah, blah]"

I thought about correcting my mom. On second thought, it was probably best not to clarify. Pool, swimming . . . close enough, right?

This is the Head Meets Desk part of the narrative. First, how do you mistake, "He likes pool," for "He swims." This is egregiously bad. Clearly Fitzpatrick wants a misunderstanding between Nora and her mom (who are speaking face-to-face here for the first time in the entire novel, by the way), but this is a sloppy, ham-handed way to do it.

For a good example, I cite the film version of American Psycho: Patrick Bateman, out at a crowded, noisy, nightspot with a colleague and a pair of girls from the office tells one of the ladies that he works in "murders and executions." She mishears him and starts to talk about a friend of hers who also works in "mergers and acquisitions." This works because the setting is loud enough that we can believe the girl genuinely thought Bateman said "mergers and executions," partly because of the background noise and partly because of the oblique similarities in the two phrases. The thick slice of irony that goes along with it just makes it funny.

The phrasing in the Fitzpatrick example isn't close enough to work. Frankly, I don't even know how to fix it. If Nora had said, "He likes the pool," I could've understood her mother's reaction, but why would Nora say that? There's no "the" in billiards-pool. It wouldn't make sense.

I know I'm spending too much time on this when the biggest complaint about this book is Patch's appalling behavior. And it is appalling. But remember I'm reading him as the villain, and Nora as a victim of thought control. And she's a remarkably self-aware narrator, believe it or not, which makes her descent into passive acceptance of whatever Patch is doing to her all the more chilling. The reason I can't get past the poor use of syntax is that it removes me from the story. No matter what I think of the story as a whole, I will not enjoy the experience of reading it if simple things like this get in the way.

Some examples of good YA fiction:

Scott Westerfield's Midnighters and Uglies series.
Catherine Jinks's Evil Genius
Koushun Takami's Battle Royale
John Connelly's The Book of Lost Things
Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book

And a couple more I haven't read yet, but boy do they look interesting:
Brenna Yovanoff's The Replacement
Rick Yancey's Monstrumologist

(Cross-posted to glitter_n_gore.)

Comments

[xerinmichellex.livejournal.com]

Re: The first quote -- This actually makes more sense once you read the sequel, Crescendo. I'm not defending the book, but Nora's mother's comment is understandable once all the context of the situation is explained.

I think what bothers me most is Ms. Fitzpatrick said she wanted to create the ultimate bad boy with Patch. First, if you're going to create the "ultimate bad boy" don't then try to make him the love interest. It is not going to work out well. Second, being a bad boy, in my opinion, doesn't mean the guy is a complete jerk to everyone he meets. When I think of a bad boy, I think of a guy who goes against what society says is the right guy for any girl. Take the Greasers from the '50's: They smoked and slicked back their hair back, which was the opposite of what the preppy jocks all the mothers wanted their daughters to date were doing. Most of the Greasers refrained from trying to kill people; and yet, they are the quintessential example of the bad boy. There's a difference between being a "bad boy" and being a sociopath.

[rhoda-rants.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Still not buying the marriage-with-uncertainty thing, but I'm impressed you stayed with the series. Is the second book better?

And I totally agree on the bad boy thing. There seems to be a misconception as to what that phrase actually means. Someone who doesn't necessarily follow all the laws society tells him too, but is still a decent human being, is a bad boy. Someone who takes advantage of a girl like Nora, based on the fact that she finds him attractive even though she hates him, especially at first, is a full-out misogynist. The two things are not the same.

[xerinmichellex.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the second thing that Nora's mother says is a little disconcerting. (And really makes no sense even after reading the sequel.) I was referring more to her answer to Nora's first question--totally makes sense when everything is laid out.

It isn't so much that I "stuck with series" as curiosity. (I also have major series-loyalitis to things.) Patch is less of a jerk, but that's because he isn't trying to kill Nora. The sequel was less rage inducing...may be worth checking out of the library.

[rhoda-rants.livejournal.com]

Oookay, still not sure which quote you're referring to... But I'll just take your word for it. I'm not too interested in pursuing this story any further.

I will say the writing is far and beyond much better than a lot of paranormal YA I've read lately. It's weird, because it's rage-inducing, but highly readable.