Wednesday, July 17, 2013

YA Guy Reviews... BUMPED by Megan McCafferty

YA Guy had great expectations for Megan McCafferty’s Bumped.

It came highly recommended, as a sort of YA partner to The Handmaid’s Tale. Its premise--a future world in which a virus has caused adult sterility in the industrialized West, necessitating teen pregnancy to sustain the population--sounded intriguing. And its first few pages crackled with wordplay, energy, and vicious wit.

Yet I’m forced to admit that, in the end, my reaction to the book was decidedly mixed.

There was much I loved. The narrators--twin sisters separated at birth, one raised to be a paid breeder, the other reared in a strict religious community--were engaging, and their voices easily distinguishable. The wordplay could be incredibly clever: girls who produce babies for infertile couples are known as “Surrogettes” (a devastating play on “suffragettes”), the talent agency that recruits such girls is titled “UGenXX,” the stud-for-hire who couples with one of the twins goes by the stage name “Jondoe.” On almost every page, there’s a neologism to attest to the warped reality of McCafferty’s fictional world.

But that ended up being one of my principal reservations about the book as a whole. After a hundred pages or so, the verbal pyrotechnics became so aggressive and omnipresent, they opened up a rift between word and world. Jondoe performs “pro boner” work for those unable to afford his services. A girl posing as a Surrogette is a “doppelbanger.” Teens look stuff up on the “quikiwiki,” and carp about peers who are “starcissistic.” I began to wonder if any society could be so steeped in puns and sexual innuendo, and as I began to wonder that, a key element of any successful dystopia--its relationship to our own world--began to dissipate. I wasn’t sure if I was reading satire or slapstick, and for me, that was a real problem.

The issues this book addresses--everything from the sexualization of young girls to human trafficking to religious fundamentalism--are deadly serious. Satire (in the manner of Swift’s “Modest Proposal”) subjects serious issues to mocking humor in the interest of provoking dialogue, discussion, and debate. Slapstick does no such thing: it reduces all subjects to the same level of absurdity for no better reason than to provoke a laugh. I don’t believe that’s what McCafferty was trying to do. But the more I read, the more the book seemed like a screwball comedy rather than a “frighteningly believable” take on our own sick society (as one of the book-jacket reviewers put it).

I have a teenage daughter. I hate that she’s growing up in a society where, as McCafferty aptly writes, girls “are valued far more for what’s between their legs than what’s between their ears.” I’m glad books like Bumped offer girls like my daughter (and boys like her younger brother) a chance to see the real world through the distorting lens of fiction.

But to me at least, the distortion in Bumped became so extreme I could no longer tell what I was looking at. I'd be interested to hear if other readers--particularly female readers--had a similar reaction, or if perhaps my inability to get into this particular book was a "guy thing."

6 comments:

  1. Hi Josh. I've not read this book, but as a huge fan of satire, it sounds like it would have made a good satire if it could have maintained form throughout. I've never written a satire, mainly because I think it would be terribly challenging to not go too far, either to the point of slapstick or sounding preachy.

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    1. I agree with your analysis, Eric. I published a satirical, alternative-history short story a couple years ago, and it was darned hard to maintain the right tone for 20 pages. It's immensely more difficult to do so at novel length. Despite my reservations about McCafferty's book, I would recommend it to readers as an intriguing attempt to write a dystopian novel in a satirical vein.

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  2. It's on my "to read" list, but my librarian friend gave it a poor review on Goodread. That bumped (haha) it down on my list.

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    1. I went back and forth on my own review--admiring the author for doing something daring and different, but not being able to overcome my basic ambivalence about the result. Still, as I said to Eric, I would recommend that people who are into YA read BUMPED--and I'd love to hear your reaction when you do!

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  3. Oh, what a disappointment! Because a YA version of "The Handmaid's Tale" would have been fantastic. The premise lends itself to YA so nicely. I wonder if the author is a big fan of Atwood ... while Atwood doesn't do the cutesy-naming thing so much in Handmaid, she has taken to doing it more and more in recent novels. Especially Oryx & Crake and its follow-up, The Year of the Flood. I recently finished that last book and it's chock-a-block full of neologisms similar to "pro-boner." (Which did make me laugh.)

    Mixing satire with serious is a tricky business, since the wrong proportion — or confusing slapstick with satire — can reduce the impact of a work. Atwood barely gets away with it in Flood, and it doesn't sound like McCafferty gets away with it at all in Bumped. The only author I've read who can do it gracefully, in fact, is George Saunders.

    Great review!

    -Stephanie

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    1. Thanks for the comment, Stephanie! I admit, I haven't read the other Atwood titles you mention. But HANDMAID'S TALE has some great, effective wordplay (starting with the name of the narrator, Offred). In terms of serious/silly novel-length satires, I'd also add Kurt Vonnegut's works. And maybe the novels of Philip Roth?

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