The Perks of Being a Wallflower

I picked up this slim volume, published by MTV books, after hearing good things about it online, and began it with little idea what to expect. The novel is epistolary, a year’s worth of letters from a 15-year-old American boy starting high school to an unknown recipient. The intention is to make the reader feel directly addressed, thus making more of a connection with Charlie, the writer of the letters, and while it’s a simple trick, it works, giving more of an impression of a confessional than a diary would. Charlie goes through several typical teenaged experiences: falling in love with a girl who doesn’t love him back, dating a girl who he doesn’t particularly like, experimenting with drugs and developing his tastes in music and literature.

I got off to an uncomfortable start with the book. I at first assumed the boy must be a preteen, for he seemed to write, behave and think like a ten-year-old. But then it was revealed that he was fifteen, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was reading something like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and that Charlie was in some way handicapped or emotionally subnormal. After all, he has his first wet dream, aged 15, and promptly goes up to the subject of said dream and informs her of it. Later, we hear he was sent to a psychiatrist as a boy, and there is a clumsy tacked-on revelation about abuse, but ultimately, the character is a mess, sometimes ordinary, sometimes extremely insightful, sometimes rather dull. I wish I could say that this was a good reflection on the teenaged psyche, but it’s not; it’s just bad writing, and clumsy characterisation. Stylistically, the whole thing is sloppy. The author, Stephen Chbosky, tries to do clever things with the boy’s writing style, having it go from something close to a stream of consciousness to a more polished style, then lapsing again, but it’s so ham-fisted and blatant that you can’t possibly believe it’s anything but a literary device. But worst of all is the plot. It was extremely tedious, and for all its purported realism, was extremely hard to swallow. Chbosky, for all his light-hearted jibes at pseudo-intellectual liberal teens, has constructed a fantasia on left-wing idealist themes: a universally popular gay kid who secretly dates a star footballer until they can have a deliciously histrionic tiff in the school cafeteria; a teacher who dotes on one ‘special’ student, giving him all his favourite books and saying a teary goodbye to him once he’s made him a better person; a group of pot-smoking friends whose nonconformity is not only accepted but indulged with sing-a-long-a-Rocky-Horror-Picture-Show nights; and people who actually LISTEN to the mix-tapes their friends make…all I can say is that if this is merely Chbosky’s memoirs, he’s had a charmed life, and as fiction, it’s painfully trite. However, I WAS pleased that the love interest actually did point out to the protagonist how his submissive behaviour (letting his male friend kiss him in order to help forget his ex, for example) was only harmful – I thought that he was going to spend the rest of his life thinking that was fine. The characters were all rather thin and inconsistent, meaning that I finished the book without feeling familiar with any of them. I think perhaps that this is a danger of basing characters on real people, but this is only a “hunch” – to borrow one of Charlie’s annoying punctuation habits.

That said, I did rather like the simplistic sketch of Mary Elizabeth, the girl Charlie begins unenthusiastically to date, and ends up hurting. She’s a pompous, opinionated, pretentious and insecure person, who makes kind gestures only for the reflection on herself and doesn’t have the confidence to relinquish control. I saw myself there, in a distorted, grotesque sort of a way, and heeded the warning well…

There were some interesting moments, and once or twice the cod-profundity fell away to leave some nice, simple examples of the pleasure of teenaged life, but in the end, an insipid gloss of wish-fulfilment, a dull story and what seems to be an attempt to be more highbrow than the author can possibly be bury these instances like pretty shells lost in the sand. And why he seems to think Hamlet is a ‘kid’ I’ll never know. He may have been a young man when Shakespeare first wrote the play, but in the version that’s survived, he certainly ain’t. And even before the changes made to accommodate a fat, aging actor, you certainly can’t say Hamlet is about ‘being a kid’. But then, nor, really, is The Perks of Being a Wallflower; it seems to me that it’s about looking back at being a teenager through a slightly misty lens of adulthood and wishing it into slightly tortured perfection. For what is more perfect to a smiling adult than a teenager whose ‘golden years’ were gilded with romance and friendship, but underneath were just that little bit stormy and dramatic?