Pros: It won’t make you understand your life. It makes you understand how to live.
Cons: Naming your hero Charlie conjures up all sorts of “Flowers For Algernon” images.
The Bottom Line: Didn’t care for “Catcher In the Rye”? This book will what you hoped “Catcher” would be. Loved “Catcher”? Consider this book in the same vein.
ramseelbird's Full Review: Stephen Chbosky - Perks of Being a Wallflower
They say that if “Catcher In the Rye” was published for the first time today, it would be marketed as a young adult novel. After all, when “Catcher” was printed in 1951 there was no such thing as a serious book meant for teen consumption. Fast forward to 1999. Suddenly YA books are not only hip but profitable. As a result, MTV Books (no, I didn’t know they had a publishing division either) comes out with an all-new little puppy entitled, “The Perks of Being A Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky. Called a novel in “the tradition of The Catcher In the Rye” (USA Today), it’s yet another one of those boy-meets-world-and-smokes-pot-for-the-first-time books. When done poorly, these novels (roughly 7 million of them come out per year) are painful bits of self-absorption. When done well, they’re not only eye-opening but sometimes even a little awe-inspiring. I went into this book fearing for the worst. I found instead that my lowered expectations could have stood to be higher. Much much higher.
Charlie has just begun high school. His best friend committed suicide not long ago and the now friendless confused Charlie finds himself in an alien environment. This could be much worse, but our hero is adept at disconnecting expertly from the life and lives around him. His psychiatrist suggests that he learn to participate in the world but this seems impossible until Charlie meets and befriends Sam and Patrick. Twin siblings, the two adopt our hero and give him something to belong to. With them helping him along he learns to date, smoke, and party. He’s desperately in love with Sam, of course, but since Charlie’s a Freshman and all his friends are Seniors (including Sam herself) this love is seen as impossible. Reading this book through Charlie’s to-the-point narration, the reader comes to realize just how crucial our adolescence is towards becoming our own true selves.
I was fearing that a number of cliched plot points would at some point appear in this novel. I expected that Charlie would find his friends were just using him and he’d have to learn how to make real friends and not just cool popular ones. Nope. I feared this might become one of those let’s-toss-a-bunch-of-problems-into-one-narrative-and-see-if-the-hero-sinks-or-swims books. Nope. I feared that the author would try to be “edgy” and have the male/female twins have sex ala “House of Yes”. Nope. Every fear I had about this book (save one tiny exception) turned out to be entirely unfounded. Charlie’s friends are perhaps the rarest you’ll ever find in young adult literature. They’re honestly nice people. Good AND nice people. Name three teen books off the top of your head where this describes the hero's buds. It can’t be done. Moreover, the way Chbosky writes about teen friends leaving one another after high school is right on the money.
As for Charlie, he’s unique. You begin the book by suspecting that perhaps he’s a twinge autistic. After all, there are some momentary parallels between this book and Mark Haddon’s, “The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Night-Time”. Fortunately, the simple nature of Charlie’s writing hides a far deeper and intelligent young man. He may work through basic everyday interactions with an unnatural depth of attention, but it soon becomes clear that if Sam and Patrick can see something interesting in Charlie, the least we can do is keep an open mind ourselves. At the same time, the book handles big questions (like what it means to be a participatory member of the human race) in a manner that doesn’t bore or distance the reader.
If I had any objections to the book at all, it may be that I find the final why-Charlie-is-the-way-he-is revelation a bit overdone. Predictable even. I had high hopes that this wouldn't turn into a sordid abuse scandal laden tract, and for the most part it isn’t. Still, the book’s final twist is a bit pat. Had Chbosky removed it from the text he’d have had a more difficult time finding an ending for his story, but a stronger text all in all.
I went into this tale without knowing what to expect. Widely considered a crossover book (one of those novels originally published for adults that teen readers latch onto deeply), “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” is top notch. It’s a book that’ll give as much benefit to a fifteen-year-old as to a person of fifty. One of those literary “must reads” we all avoid instinctively but, once read, adore.
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