Argos: The Story of Odysseus as
Told by His Loyal Dog. By Ralph Hardy. Harper. $16.99.
Anatomy of a Misfit. By
Andrea Portes. HarperTeen. $9.99.
The Fall of Butterflies. By
Andrea Portes. HarperTeen. $17.99.
The Iliad and The Odyssey
continue to enthrall modern readers even though the original oral-tradition
poems, steeped in Homeric similes and a plainspokenness for their time that has
become complexity and pretentiousness in ours, are very difficult for
non-classicists (and even some classicists) to read. The underlying stories,
though, of the Trojan War and of the 20-year postwar meanderings and adventures
of Odysseus, still have tremendous narrative power. The question is how to make
the tales meaningful, or at least understandable, to modern readers. Ralph
Hardy has an intriguing idea for retelling The
Odyssey to young readers: give the story from the viewpoint of an invented,
ever-faithful dog named Argos, waiting patiently and longingly for his master’s
return and learning something about Odysseus’ deeds and perils from birds that can
cross Poseidon’s waters far more readily than Odysseus can and thus bring news
back to Ithaka. Inevitably in a book for young readers, this is a sanitized
version of The Odyssey, with violence
downplayed (although scarcely absent) and sexuality missing. Yet the highlights
of the tale are here and are well told, and the well-known faithfulness and
devotion of dogs neatly mirrors the faithfulness and devotion of the
long-suffering Penelope, awaiting her husband’s return year after year while
fending off increasingly demanding and distinctly unpleasant suitors seeking
her hand, status and property. To interest young readers further, Hardy makes
Telemachos, Odysseus’ son, a major character in the story: “Now in his
thirteenth spring, Telemachos has turned even more inward, for there is no man
about to teach him the ways of the hunt, as boys learn at this age.” Argos
becomes Telemachos’ tutor as well as his companion, with Hardy at one point having
Argos remark, “one day Telemachos will be a king. Burt now he is a boy who
misses his father.” The boy-dog relationship provides continuing interest in
the events in Ithaka even as Argos learns from bird after bird about the
wanderings of Odysseus in distant lands. Hardy bends the reality of dogs’ lives
by having Argos, a very large dog who claims to be “bred of a wolf and a bear,”
live almost to the end of his master’s story, but also manages a touching
transition to a new generation by having Argos pass on his knowledge, beliefs
and concerns to another dog when he himself can go on no longer – a
well-thought-out parallel to the notion of a human father passing on knowledge
to a human son. Argos communicates with many animals in addition to birds – bats,
for example, and a hedgehog. And he has plans of his own to make: his clever
plotting of the destruction of a marauding wolf pack leads an admiring magpie
to comment, “You have your master’s cunning.” But The Odyssey is a story about times when cunning is enough and times
when it is not, and some flavor of this comes through even in Hardy’s
simplified version. Parents who know and love The Odyssey may find Argos
rather thin gruel, with so many scenes focused on Odysseus’ homeland and family
and with the reports of his encounters on his long trek being given mostly in
bare-bones fashion. Yet readers who do not know The Odyssey – and it is they, after all, for whom Hardy wrote this
book – will find this a fine, rousing story of a bold dog and his family, a
story that intersects with but is not (until the very end) part of the story of
The Odyssey itself, but that will
hopefully whet young minds and imaginations for a later encounter with the
original. And hopefully that encounter, for those not versed in ancient Greek,
will be with a translation of sufficient skill and heft to bring across the
amazing variety within Odysseus’ story and the grandeur and life lessons
integrated into it.
There is nothing grand, much
less grandiose, in Andrea Portes’ teen-focused novels, Anatomy of a Misfit (originally published in 2014 and now available
in paperback) and The Fall of
Butterflies. These are intended as odysseys of a sort different from the
ancient one: they are stories of inward journeys and interpersonal connections,
not ones of grand events and world-spanning travels. There is humor rather than
wit here – nothing like Odysseus’ brilliant identification of himself to the
Cyclops as being named Nobody, so that when he blinds the man-eating monster,
the Cyclops howls, “Nobody is hurting me.” Instead, Portes creates protagonists
who are street-smart and plainspoken in thoroughly modern language that it is
quite certain that no one will care much about a few thousand years hence: “I
know you probably think Shelli bones all those guys because she’s in love with
them, but here’s the funny thing, I don’t think that’s it. I think she just
does it to spend time with them. …I know I couldn’t do it. Especially ’cause
I’m totally petrified of contracting some grody disease. You never know with
these guys. Some of them look like they are like straight out of juvie.” The
words are those of Anika Dragomir, central character in Anatomy of a Misfit and third-most-popular girl in her school.
Portes labors mightily to make Anika with-it, up-to-date, contemporary, and
just “the coolest raddest hottest girl in the US of A” (actually Anika’s
description of someone else). Reader reactions to this book will depend totally
on their response to Anika, who is either delightfully offbeat or dismayingly
unidimensional. Certainly the characters around her are all types. Anika’s
father is Romanian, which means he looks like a vampire and lives in a
castle-like house. Anika’s parents are divorced and her mother has remarried,
so that means her stepdad, being a typecast stepfather, weighs 300 pounds and
“never talks to us,” the “us” being Anika and her sisters. The sisters, who are
“sluts” (there are lots of those in Anika’s world), spend their time “talking
on the phone to more guys who don’t like them.” But guys do like Anika, which is surprising, since she considers herself
“hideous,” which by her more-or-less-objective description she certainly is
not: “blond hair, blue eyes, pale skin” and “a boy jaw, like a square jaw, and
cheekbones you could cut yourself on.” On and on and on this goes, with Anika’s
world eventually intersecting with that of Logan, one of two guys who
especially have the hots for her (the other is the one everyone in school
wants, but he may be, like, you know, a player). Logan and Anika become a
couple after he tells her he is going to kiss her and she is going to like it,
and he does and she does. But Logan is unacceptable in the Queen Bee world of
Anika’s school, so the relationship has to be kept secret, or maybe has to end,
or something. The way it does eventually end is supposed to be both climactic
and deeply tragic, but it is so abrupt and so out of keeping with everything
that has come before that the likeliest reader reaction to it is something
along the lines of, “Wait. What just happened?” It is almost as if Portes tags
the end of one book onto the initial 90% of another. That first 90% means well
in its own way, but that way is distinctly peculiar. For instance, it is
against racism – but includes putdowns of homosexuals, Christians and other
groups, so this is not exactly PC-ism run riot. Ultimately, Anatomy of a Misfit is about the bad
things that happen when you care too much about the opinions of the wrong
people. And that is a trope of
teen-focused novels that may not be as old as The Odyssey but seems even more formulaic.
The Fall of Butterflies takes much the same approach, but here the
downside of life is in the form of drugs rather than sex. Again there is a
snarky protagonist whose narration either works for readers or does not: “If
you ever want to see a bunch of people look like idiots, go to an audition. Any
alien from Andromeda Galaxy beamed down into this auditorium would assume he
had just blasted his way into the funny farm. Trust me.” This time the main
character, whose name is Willa Parker, goes (at her mother’s insistence) to a
fancy boarding school across the country from her home in What Cheer, Iowa,
where Willa deems herself the 646th and least popular resident.
Willa ends up with a haunted bathroom (an element of the book that is either
oddly endearing or ridiculously overdone, depending on your point of view) and
a new friend who is rich and wonderful and everything that everybody wants to
be except that she is, you know, drug-doomed to destruction and may pull Willa
(whom she befriends, not very believably) along with her. Like Anika, Willa
makes what are supposed to be clever comments and observations that are really
kind of mean: at the very start of the book, for instance, she denies some
classmates any human names and refers to them only as Peanut Allergy Boy,
Headgear Girl and OCD. This is not quite the same as calling multiple girls
sluts, but the objectifying comes from the same place and is scarcely an
endearing characteristic. Portes makes some effort to have Willa become
self-aware of the destructiveness of the drugs in which she and her friends
indulge, but in the voice she has created for Willa, the looking inward comes
across as whiny and formulaic: “I can’t help but wonder, what’s the price this
time? What’s the price for this ride?” Eventually there is enough talk of
suicide and enough free-floating angst so that Willa actually lapses,
apparently unknowingly, into a snippet of Shakespeare: “oh, what a noble mind
is here o’erthrown.” And that is about as “classic” and as close to The Odyssey as this particular
troubled-teens odyssey ever gets. Clearly Portes’ intent is to reflect the real
world of teenage girls today – some of them, anyway – and to create a kind of
gritty and insightful coming-of-age story or two. But there is so little
originality in the plots of Anatomy of a
Misfit and The Fall of Butterflies,
so little sense that they are anything other than teen-girl-targeted “poor me”
genre novels, that the attempt to draw readers in through snarkily offbeat
narration quickly comes to seem like manipulation to take the place of
character development, or rather to draw attention away from its absence. It is
certainly possible to enjoy the snide sarcasm of these books’ narration, but on
the whole, readers will find more wit and even wisdom in Argos the canine than
in all the cattiness of Portes’ central characters.
No comments:
Post a Comment