Books banned in Washington

Leave it to the Midwest to do something like this. However, knowing the area where this news comes from, I’m slightly surprised about it.

Basically, a parent freaked out that her daughter was reading Jeffrey Eugenides’ “Middlesex.” Now, I’ve not yet read the novel, but Amazon says:

“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.” And so begins Middlesex, the mesmerizing saga of a near-mythic Greek American family and the “roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time.” The odd but utterly believable story of Cal Stephanides, and how this 41-year-old hermaphrodite was raised as Calliope, is at the tender heart of this long-awaited second novel from Jeffrey Eugenides, whose elegant and haunting 1993 debut, The Virgin Suicides, remains one of the finest first novels of recent memory.Eugenides weaves together a kaleidoscopic narrative spanning 80 years of a stained family history, from a fateful incestuous union in a small town in early 1920s Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit; from the early days of Ford Motors to the heated 1967 race riots; from the tony suburbs of Grosse Pointe and a confusing, aching adolescent love story to modern-day Berlin. Eugenides’s command of the narrative is astonishing. He balances Cal/Callie’s shifting voices convincingly, spinning this strange and often unsettling story with intelligence, insight, and generous amounts of humor:

Emotions, in my experience aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” … I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” … I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever.

When you get to the end of this splendorous book, when you suddenly realize that after hundreds of pages you have only a few more left to turn over, you’ll experience a quick pang of regret knowing that your time with Cal is coming to a close, and you may even resist finishing it–putting it aside for an hour or two, or maybe overnight–just so that this wondrous, magical novel might never end. –Brad Thomas Parsons

While I have read that this book has some pretty graphic passages, I would imagine they’re not extraneous passages. They likely serve a purpose in the story.

This is just another in a series of parents being scared of the all-powerful gift of knowledge. Sure, things written in books and shown on TV and the like can be graphic and many serve no purpose (Have you watched prime time TV lately?), but if a parent has raised a child right and that child knows to think for, in this case, herself, the book should not influence her life in any major way.

Books are not so insidious that teenagers, after reading them, will go right out and start raping and pillaging because a character in a book did so. If a kid does that, he or she has some serious social disorder which must be treated by professionals and is not going to be cured by mommy dearest protecting the little one from the big, bad books. It’s a similar argument used with the “influence” of music, TV, movies and video games.

Censorship requests have gone by the wayside in recent years after reaching some pretty frightening peaks in the 1950s-1970s. Bonfires where copies of “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Catcher in the Rye” no longer take place, but people are still terrified of the potential effect literature can have on kids.

In my mind, that is the power of literature. It has the ability to change the way people think and view the world, but it’s not going to cause a kid to take any immediate action.

Parents should be embracing the fact that their children are reading, even if it is just for school, and use the “smutty” books as an excuse to have a conversation. But, of course, it’s easier just to complain to the school board and the newspaper than to talk to your own children.

And, on another note, I’m kind of disappointed in the school board for putting this new “policy” into effect. If the district doesn’t trust its teachers enough to choose their own material, sounds as if they have a personnel problem, not a policy problem.

They should have the courage to stand up to this woman and tell her that the teacher knows the literary value of the book and that’s that.