Young Adult Literature (Goes Bovine)

For the project my class is working on in AP English Literature, we were recommended to select a book to read from the library's extensive Young Adult fiction case. I had been eyeing one of the books shown to us (Going Bovine) because it looked kind of strange, and the librarian that showed us the book assured us that it was an exemplary, award winning example of Young Adult literature. Full of hopeful excitement, I picked up the book and began to read.

One of my teachers from a long time ago had a saying about reading. She said that reading a good book was like diving into a nice, cool pool of sparkling water on a warm sunny day. Was reading Going Bovine like diving into a nice, cool pool of sparkling water on a warm sunny day? Not exactly. Was it like diving into a decent, lukewarm algae-filled lake on a miserable, windy day? Almost. The image that entered my head as I read this book was that the experience was more like diving into a boiling pool of cow mucus as the flames and storms of Armageddon split the sky above me, showering me with large chunks of flaming debris. Okay, maybe it wasn't quite that bad, but it wasn't a nice, cool pool of sparkling water by any stretch of the imagination.

The book focuses around an angsty, drug-addicted teenager named Cameron Smith. The book introduces him as he narrates going to Disneyworld and thinking something that included the abbreviation WTF. WTF, coincidentally, was the first thought going through my head as I read the passage. Why was there chatspeak in an award winning work of literature? Was the author merely against swearing in their books? (Incorrect; Cameron Smith swears like a sailor in a storm.) Was the author providing some sort of commentary on teenaged online culture? (If the author was, it was extremely unclear and never mentioned again.) Was the author trying to relate to teenagers? The answer seemed to me to sadly be yes. And as I continued to read the book, I realized that my hands were slightly more tightly clenched, and my eyes slightly narrowed. The author, in trying to relate to teenagers, was merely insulting them at every scene in the book. I, in the course of reading this book, was literally being insulted by it.

The other classmates of Cameron Smith are all presented as drug dealing, cursing, high school failures. I'd like to say that the author was merely trying to show how some people in the school were acting, but the author takes specific measures to make sure that every single person in the school is lumped under that all consuming blanket. Is this the audience of Young Adult literature? Was this what teachers, politicians, and writers endorsing to try to get students more interested in reading? A book that does its best to constantly insult both their intelligence and who they are as people? I'd like to think that the author was merely not writing well enough to portray them as more than just wooden caricatures of every educator's nightmare, but as the author has won an award for her work, I realized that I had to believe that she meant to do this, or that she simply was not a good enough writer to realize that she was doing it. Either way, I found that I was disgusted.

I continued to read over one hundred pages of the book. From Cameron Smith's typical bad relationship with his family to the job he works at, and what happens at his job that shows nothing about his character and little for actual plot development, to when he discovers that he is dying, to when he meets Gonzo and they set off to New Orleans... maybe the book gets better. Maybe the book becomes a truly award winning source of material, that deserves a place among literary giants of the world. Even if it did, that would not be acceptable. A good book, and a competent writer, do not need over one hundred pages to properly set up and begin a story. In fact, an incredible writer can tell an exceptional story in less than twenty words. (For an example of this, I would suggest reading Stephen King's The Jaunt, or Hemmingway's Hills like White Elephants.)The author of Going Bovine barely starts the story in one hundred pages, taking (over, actually) five times as long to do half of what Hemmingway and King accomplish.

I returned the book to its shelf after far too long a time spent reading it. As I put it back, I considered another piece of Young Adult literature near it, Ender's Game. Like Going Bovine, the book has won considerable acclaim and awards for what it did. Unlike Going Bovine, it creates an exceptionally vivid and imaginative look at a horrifying idea of what the future might be, filled with psychological terror and action and actual characters that didn't behave like mere caricatures of very young children. It was an imaginative work of literature that still delights and inspires me to this day, ultimately succeeding without meaning to at what the author of Going Bovine meant to do but failed at; inspiring young students to continue reading and love literature.

To conclude this blog post/rant, Going Bovine is not a good example of Young Adult literature. In my opinion, it is not a good book and should not be an award winning look of literature, and especially should not be viewed by educators as a good way to get young adults to read.