Dear Friend,
the latest book I read was the famous the perks of being a wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. The little novel was a best-seller when it came out around the turn of the millennium and received renewed interest when it was made into a movie in 2012. It was famous but somehow I never picked it up until late last year when I found a copy at a clearance sale. Guess I was too busy trying to make up for lost time from when I was a high school wallflower before.
The book reads like a diary, in fact it harkens back to the series of books that were the “Secret Diaries of Adrian Mole” back in the ’80s. However, the protagonist of this one, Charlie, writes not in his diary but in a series of often-lengthy letters to an unnamed friend. Charlie is a socially-awkward high school kid who turns 16 during the year-long course of the book and deals with those things a boy turning 16 and who is socially-awkward would. He falls head over heels in love with an older girl, Sam, makes some friends, loses some friends and has the usual stresses of school and home, which in his case is a middle class Pittsburgh family. He gets his first girlfriend, loses his first girlfriend, begins to smoke and dabble in drugs and deal with the pressures of his own puberty and of being the brother of a star football player. He gets embarrassed by his family. He reads and is obsessed with The Smiths. Oddly, and a wee bit creepily, his best friend seems to be perhaps a literary English teacher who gives him books to read and invites him over to his place. All things considered, he doesn’t cope with the stresses of growing up very well.
While Charlie is at times inexplicably dumb for a “smart” kid and very often annoying in both his attitude and self-defeating ways, he is real and Chbosky has painted a very believable story that somehow grips you and becomes a page-turner. At the end of the school break, and the end of the book, you wonder where Charlie will go from there and wish he’d keep writing those damn wordy letters!
the perks of being a wallflower somehow seems relateable to those of us who weren’t the “cool kids” back in high school, and perhaps worse yet, is probably more so for today’s Snowflake generation. Charlie all but set the template for today’s anxiety-filled, sexual ambivalent, politically correct cohort… and did it all without staring at an I-phone no less. That said, it knowingly looks back fondly to Generation X with its references and its’ Douglas Coupland-esque randomness and lack of Upper Case Themes.
I think it’s not a bad book for youth of today who feel a bit cast adrift out to sea … and for us oldies who remember what that feeling was like.
Love always,
Charlie’s reader
Everydave Life 