YA or STFU

Marcelo in the Real World, by Francisco X. Stork

Stork, Francisco X. (2009).  Marcelo in the real world.  NY:  Arthur A. Levine Books.  312 pages.

In spite of my populist ways and commitment to questioning the often elitist adolescent books awards, reviews and ratings systems, I was curious to read Stork’s well-reviewed novel for young adults.  Plus, it had a pretty cover.

Told from the first person perspective of seventeen-year-old Marcelo, a teenager with a challenge he describes as similar to Asperger’s Syndrome, Stork’s novel describes the protagonist’s first summer job outside the comfort zone provided by his special education school.  When Marcelo’s father convinces him to take a job in the mailroom of his law office, promising Marcelo that he can continue to attend his special education school if he succeeds in “the real world,” he discovers information about one of his father’s biggest clients that threatens a pending lawsuit.

Using Marcelo’s “almost-Asperger’s” as something of a metaphor, Stork describes his protagonist’s gradual disillusionment with a world he was never really interested in joining.  As Marcelo weighs his options with regards to his father’s case, he discovers that the mental music into which he often disappears is fading and the incoherence of the “real world” is taking its place.

While I did enjoy the book, I do wonder at the appropriateness of “Asperger’s as metaphor,” especially since the primary symptom that kept Marcelo from really interacting with the “real world”–the distracting and absorbing mental music–seemed to disappear as Marcelo’s awareness of the world increased.  In an odd way, the novel seemed to both challenge and preserve dominant conceptions of childhood, almost arguing that the innocence and self-absorption we associate with immaturity is necessarily abandoned on the path to growth while at the same time suggesting that we should work to retain aspects of this childishness (Marcelo’s sexual innocence and “pure” selflessness).  This reading places Marcelo into more of a children’s book camp than the one associated with the YA novel; however, can’t we argue that the YA novel means to do much of the same work that the children’s novel does?  The character of Marcelo, the “disabled” protagonist on his or her way to becoming a “type” in contemporary young adult fiction, represents the new adolescent ideal (as imagined by adults):  whip-smart and autodidactic, sensitive, innocent and, most importantly, different but “mainstreamable.”  Because isn’t “mainstreaming” the dominant theme of YA fiction?