When I'm giving my first grader her practice spelling tests, like most people giving first-grader spelling tests, I come up with a sentence to give her context for the word. Yesterday, the word was "woke," and I said, "I woke up after having a bad dream."
"Mom," she said. "Could you please change it to, 'I woke up after having a good dream'?"
Well, I'll be darned. Just as good a sentence, if not better, and much more positive.
She corrected quite a few more of my sentences before I got the hang of it myself. I long ago accepted that, of the glass-half-full and -empty dichotomy, I tend to be either an equivocator (looks two-thirds empty, one-third full) or a straight up pessimist. I've never liked this about myself, but I think it's tied up in a belief that if you get too positive, you risk a higher fall when things don't work out. (See? I can't help it.) But I'm wondering if perhaps 2011 will see the worm turning. Already, I'm back on my 1,000/words a day, rain or shine, that I've been known to engage in religiously. (I'm on day 10, so no party hats yet.) Also, I had the experience yesterday, upon finishing Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen, of realizing he wrote a kind of swashbucklingly happy ending! Not that such a thing is out of the realm of possibility, but it was--nice. Very nice.
[caption id="attachment_2140" align="alignright" width="150" caption="A quirky, fun--but still moving--approach to dystopia."]
[/caption]
And, and, and--I read my first post-apocalyptic, dystopian novel that's actually kind of lighthearted and fun. Ron Tanner's a terrific writer, and his novel, Kiss Me, Stranger, is unlike any I've ever read before. It's not exactly a graphic novel, but there are plenty of hand-drawn illustrations throughout, some of them with a pop art feel. The story itself is a loose retelling of the Odyssey, only from an uber-woman Penelope point of view. Her dreams become our access point to other POVs, such as her husband's and son's, both off fighting in an obliterating civil war. (The novel's setting is a country built on a landfill--not typically the stuff of fun and humor.) "Love sneaked up on me," Penelope tells us, early in the novel, "it threw a hood over my head and kidnapped me."
Check out this mini-movie-slash-trailer for the book:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JpU7CjeyDI]
This combination of dark and light keeps the novel in its own jaunty cloud, and it does so without compromising our belief in the world of brutal scavengers, trash-as-earth, and dictators who resemble Gregory Peck. By the end of the novel, we feel our perspective on our own times slighly altered. Unlike immersing yourself in, say, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the feeling of alarm is not soul-crushing. Reading Tanner's Kiss Me, Stranger will affect your dreams (and sorry, youngest daughter, they're kind of creepy, twisted dreams), but it may also broaden your sense of hope.
--aed
