I'm a Man, and I Read "Girl" Books

Reading Lauren Oliver’s novels Delirium and Pandemonium made me self-conscious. Last Saturday, I went to a concert at Cerulean, a local restaurant, featuring the excellent band The Vespers, and I brought a book along with to read during the lulls. This is standard operating procedure for my life—I’ve brought books to read when I waited for doctor’s appointments, job interviews, and while eating at fast food restaurants. I also read when I’m watching sports on TV. The ones with a lot of downtime work best—like football and baseball—but I have also figured out how to sneak in a sentence or two when the point guard dribbles the basketball court. 

Normally, I don’t give a second thought to who might see me reading in public, or to which book I take with me. I brought Pandemonium with me to the Vespers concert, and I was very aware of how it might look for me—a 27-year-old single guy—to be reading a novel whose target audience is teen girls. And as you can tell from the cover, Pandemonium is clearly a "girl" book.

Oliver’s trilogy—the third book, Reqiuem, will be published next year—is set in a world where love has been classified as a disease (Amor Deliria Nervosa) and is “cured” by a government-mandated procedure. The plot follows Lena, a normal girl who—you guessed it—meets a boy and “gets the disease” the summer before she is due to be cured. That summary turned me off initially, but I kept seeing Oliver’s name on “best YA sci-fi books” lists, so I finally decided to give Delirium a try.

(By the way, I’m writing a YA sci-fi novel, so reading authors like Oliver, Julianna Baggott, Neal Shusterman, and Scott Westerfield counts as research. And I just like reading them.)

 

The further I got into Oliver’s fictional world, I was impressed by the detail and thought she put into all the ways a cure for love would reshape the world. Religion, education, literature, and family all get woven into the story. As for the love story, I could take it or leave it. And aside from all the world-building, Oliver is just a good sentence-level writer. The quality of her prose is quite a bit higher than most YA novels I read.

So…there were plenty of perfectly defensible reasons for me to be reading Pandemonium, but as I walked across the parking lot to the concert, I held it so that the back cover was facing outward and the front cover hidden against my leg. I probably could have found a chair to sit in, but that might have attracted attention, so I sat in the grass to the far right of the stage. And just in case someone recognized me, I kept the book flat in my lap, so he wouldn’t see what I was reading.

Of course, someone did. A friend parked his bike at the nearby rack, waved, and came over to say “hi.” He mentioned how absorbed I seemed to be in my book and that it must be good, and I nodded and agreed. I’m usually eager to talk about whatever it is I’m reading, but on that evening I didn’t mention the author or title, and I certainly did not lift my book up so he could see the cover.

It’s like I was a character in Oliver’s world, scared an undercover Regulator would see my inappropriate reading material and arrest me on the spot. No one did, of course, because I don’t live in a totalitarian police state, but I still think I would have gotten some weird looks if I had been caught.

There are no laws against reading, but certain kinds of books do carry a stigma with them, and as a *sci-fi* *Young Adult* *girl* book, Pandemonium is a literary ghetto hat trick. Even though it’s a good book, and I enjoyed reading it, and it gave me helpful instruction on world-building and plot structure, I didn’t want you to know I was reading it. 

The Fireworks Factory Plot

Itchy and Scratchy, the subjects of an embedded cartoon series on The Simpsons, are basically Tom & Jerry’s ultraviolent cousins. In the episode “The Itchy and Scratchy and Poochie Show,” Itchy and Scratchy’s ratings have been dwindling, so to resuscitate the show, they add a new character, Poochie, who is kind of like Goofy if Goofy had a surfboard, wore shades, and smoked weed.

In Poochie’s introductory episode, which you can watch here (sketchy YouTube version), Itchy and Scratchy are driving to a fireworks factory, where all kinds of explosive mayhem will surely ensue. Before they reach the factory, however, they meet their new friend Poochy, who introduces himself with a catchy rap song. At this point, the show cuts away from the cartoon to show Millhouse (and this part was cut out of the clip above), who voices the audience’s collective frustration, shouting, “When are they going to get to the fireworks factory?”

That is, the audience (of characters on The Simpsons) has come to expect a certain level of violence from Itchy and Scratchy, and the sign for the fireworks factory has whetted their appetites. Instead of delivering the payoff the audience expects, though, the cartoon is waylaid (or derailed) by the interpolation of Poochie.

This episode led to the concept of what I (and others) have called the “Fireworks Factory" plot, wherein the story is set up for an audience to expect a certain kind of payoff or resolution, but which is either absent or significantly delayed because the story goes in a different direction.

Is a writer’s job always to give readers exactly what they’re expecting? No. There can be good and valuable reasons for playing with an audience’s expectations. That isn’t quite what I’m talking about here, however. In a Fireworks Factory plot, all the story elements have been pointing toward a necessary and significant catharsis, which is then not delivered. Instead, the story goes off in an unforeseen direction that pushes aside the very scene readers have been eagerly waiting for.

Here are a few examples of Fireworks Factory plots:

Pretties, by Scott Westerfeld

Around 2/3 of the way through this YA science-fiction novel, the protagonist, Tally Youngblood, is on a journey to reunite with her friends, who have been absent for the entire novel. On the way, she is waylaid and ends up hanging out with a bunch of characters who are basically Ewoks. She stays with them for a rather long time.

Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo

There are probably several in this 1200+ page novel, but I’ll highlight two. Early in the book, there is a lengthy description of the Battle of Waterloo. It goes on for close to a hundred pages, the last two pages of which are relevant to the plot of Les Mis­. Later, during the climax of the story, when Jean Valjean is carrying the wounded Marius through the sewer, Hugo breaks off to give you an unbelievably detailed history of the Paris sewer system. Seriously, it goes on longer than the Waterloo part does.

The Tree of Life

This film, directed by Terrence Malick, seems to be a simple drama about a family dealing with tragedy. Around half an hour into the movie, Malick breaks away from the family story to depict the creation and history of the universe. I think it’s a brilliant move (it mirrors God’s responses to Job in the Biblical story of Job in order to show the turmoil the mother character experiences), but I have heard that a lot of people left the theater at this point, screaming, “When are they getting back to the family?” They do get back to the family, although it does take a while.

Golden Sun: Dark Dawn

In this RPG video game for the Nintendo DS, the story kicks off with the heroes accidentally damaging a flying contraption and then setting off on a quest for a part they need to repair it. At the end of the game, they still have not fixed the darned flying machine. I’m not making this up. You go through half the game trying to find the part to fix it, and then once you finally find it, you never get to fix the thing.

The time-travel season of Lost

Self-explanatory.

Again, having a Fireworks Factory sequence in a story isn’t automatically a bad thing. But it will disrupt the rhythm of the plots--might be want you're going for--and can potentially turn off readers--almost certainly not what you're going for--so if you’re going to do it, the payoff that results from the side-trip really needs to be worth it.