John Green’s wonderful speech on the joys of literature, the joys of the hard fun thing, and what we expect from teenagers.

Too many times, we say to our young people, “Hey, read this. It’s a fun read. Not too serious, you know. None of that English stuff.” As if there is some kind of dichotomy between good and fun. As if Gatsby is oatmeal and vampires are Lucky Charms. Vampires, of course, ARE Lucky Charms—they are magical and delicious and just dangerous enough to excite me. I love vampires, and I love vampire books. And please know that I would never argue against putting books kids want to read in their hands. But I am arguing that we need to make space in our classes—no matter how advanced or remedial the students—for ambitious novels. Because good is not the opposite of fun. Smart is not the opposite of fun. Boring is the opposite of fun, and when we create the smart/fun dichotomy, what we end up implying is that Gatsby is boring.

Okay. I want to write about “The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks.” Okay? This is not a review. This is just a rant.

When I was working at the library in Garner, Christian romances were our most popular thing. I can tell you the plot of every Christian romance novel. It goes like this: there’s a woman who doesn’t have much religious faith, or perhaps lost it long ago as the result of a Terrible Tragedy. So she’s now living far from her family in the Big City. She’s an ambitious career woman, unlucky in love, possibly no kids or possibly a single/divorced mother of adorable kids. Then tragedy strikes in her life, or in the life of one of her family members, and she goes back to the quaintly-named small town where she was raised. And that’s where she meets the policeman or fireman or construction worker she was sort of sweet on in high school — oh, and he’s a fundamentalist Christian. And the girl falls in love and finds God and gives up all her career ambitions.

So, I’m sure you’re astonished that I’m annoyed by this repeated plotline. But when I started skimming these books, what struck me was how often we see disguised versions of this plot. There’s an ambitious career woman. Things Happen, Life Gets Unexpected, and she realizes that she needs to loosen up, and stop caring so much about getting ahead, and make more room in her life for her family.

It’s so hard to get angry about this. Who doesn’t agree that family is more important than career? Who doesn’t agree that the singleminded pursuit of power won’t ultimately get you anywhere? And yet, and yet – cynical people joke that anyone who deserved to be president wouldn’t want the job in the first place, but as long as people in positions of great power exist, as long as those people ARE wielding a lot of control over what happens in our lives, all of this adds up to a condescending, head-patting smile: “This? Why would you want THIS, it’s so much more trouble than it’s worth!”

And here comes this young adult novel, all of a sudden, that engages with this issue absolutely unflinchingly. This question of women, and power, and what you give up to gain power.

Frankie starts out at the beginning of the novel with her father calling her “Bunny.” Bunny: small, soft, helpless, harmless (Monty Python nonwithstanding). Shortly after she has this Scarlett O’Hara moment: she will never be Bunny again. And for the rest of the book, she sees the world with a very narrow depth of field: she focuses in with razor precision on Power.

I love it when books give me a “You aren’t ALLOWED to do that!” moment — not about the character, or the situation, but about the way the book is playing out — to joyously and brazenly violate the conventions of genre. I had a moment with “Frankie Landau-Banks” when I realized that it was between a rock and a hard place; the author couldn’t say, “Yeah, ruthlessly pursuing power is awesome, you should try it.” As smart and as ambitious and as sharp (in some ways) about the ways of the world as Frankie is, she’s a total train wreck and she’s no more immune against stupidity (especially the stupidity of love) than any other sophomore. But she also couldn’t say that Frankie shouldn’t have gone after power, shouldn’t have tried to break out of her role as Bunny. And I didn’t know how the author could navigate between those two.

Well, she’s smarter than I am. Frankie ends up broken and broken-hearted, crashing on the rocks of her own self-righteousness, but beautiful in her failure and foolishness; I can picture her, a year later, convinced that she can’t play by the rules of her prep school and the Basset Hounds… making up her own brilliant, crazy rules.

This is one of my favorite song lyrics, and so many other people love it that it’s a total cliche to say it’s one of my favorite lyrics, but just listen and you’ll see why:

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That’s how the light getst in

-Anthem, Leonard Cohen

(Leonard Cohen, I note, is from Montreal. He is my homeboy.)

Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad is about a lot of things, but I think it’s about this more than anything else. Everyone in the book is trying to make a “perfect offering” of some kind: Cass is trying to ride her bike across the country as a way of understanding her feelings for her dead best friend Julia, and as a kind of memorial to her; Oliver is trying to stage to play Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad, for Julia, who was his girlfriend, and who wrote the play before she died; and Heather is trying to apologize to Cass for treating her badly when they were in middle school. I think she has the hardest time of it, because it collides with the cold reality of other people’s angers and grudges and resentments; she’s not the one who gets to decide when she’s done enough!

I don’t want to spoil the book by going into the specifics of how they succeed and how they fail, but here’s the thing: there’s not going to be such a thing as a perfect success, for any of them. No matter how well they do, they’re not going to reach this transcendent moment where suddenly everything is made right, and I think… I think that’s what they’re hoping for, whether they let themselves admit that or not.

But one of the things that you hear in Leonard Cohen’s lyric, is that there’s something better than a perfect success. I think the light that he’s talking about is how the people we love pick us up when we fall down, how they let us lean on them when we fail. And how we pick people up, and let them lean on us. There’s another song — “The Origin of Love,” from “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” It talks about that story Plato told, about how humans started out conjoined to each other, with four arms and four legs, but because they were already whole and complete, they “never knew nothing of love.” Being split apart — as painful as it was — was also… the origin of love.

So: this is a story about forgetting that perfect offering, and learning to see the light that remains after you fail, after you fall down.

Actually, it’s not nearly as depressing as it sounds. The ending is happy! Seriously!

Sorry for construction — I haven’t the sense to make sure my CSS is the way I want it before I start diving in and playing around. Legible colors should resume shortly.

Edit : Index page seems to be playing nice now, but I know I’ve still gotta fix up the others.

So, having gotten my revision letter, I’m working on my revisions and I’ve put the new novel aside for now. In an ideal world, this would let it gel a little better so that I can come back to it with a firm idea of what to do with it next. I have too many experiences of getting distracted from novels midway through, but that is what a contract is for!

I’m very happy with my revisions. They fit into what I’ve already imagined in the world of Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad – tuning up some things that had been into the background, fleshing out some details, refining away what doesn’t fit as well as I thought it did. It is just plain fun going back to these characters!