Here’s a confession: I’ve never made it through more than a few pages of The Catcher in the Rye,which has resulted in some sheepish sidestepping when I am asked to speak in my capacity as an author of young adult fiction. Admittedly this came up more frequently in the years when publications ran hand-wringing think pieces about why adults were reading so many books written for teenagers (simpler times, those were), usually when a grown man sporting a gotcha leer would ask whether they’d shelve Salinger in YA if his most famous book were published now (the horror!). My suspicion in these situations was that a man who had loved Catcher in his youth was trying to argue against it being besmirched by association with teenage girls. (Their taste, that is.) My point is that what I imagine, from my place of ignorance, to be so enduringly captivating about The Catcher in the Rye is immediately and blazingly present in Michelle Tea’s new novel Little F. That is, an energetically impious narrator acidly describing the hypocrisies of the child world and adult world alike as they set out on a coming-of-age adventure that seems as likely to be the breaking as the making of them.
“What do you think about when you’re getting your ass kicked?” Tea’s novel begins, and what follows is a book-length answer. Spencer, the thirteen-year-old first-person narrator of Little F,is literally getting his ass kicked, but he is also a vulnerable young person in a world arranged around beliefs and agendas inimical to him, with only the buoyancy of a long, imaginative inner monologue for protection. That inner monologue is very good company for the reader (brisk and confessional and studded with references to ancient history, The Bell Jar, and Botox gone wrong), but it also feels like a matter of life and death, a shouting back at a world hell-bent on telling him who he is and then hating on what they see.
“I am little,” Spencer tells us, “and not only a faggot but the kind of faggot who never even told anyone I was a faggot, never even kissed a male person or anything, therefore hardly even a faggot, really, not yet, not unless faggot is something you do, like a dance—Do The Faggot!—but something you deeply, irrevocably are, something others can see on your skin before you have even fully come to grips with it yourself.” So: Spencer is visibly gay in Phoenix (“the hot dust, the hate-criming sun, the strips of identical houses where people’s souls were buried”; “hell itself: Arizona”) and thus subject to a terrifying onslaught of homophobia, while being also physically small and unfortunately under the protection of parents deeply mired in their own confused thinking. His parents are (or seem to be) “solid, stable, functional, miserable straight people,” who have given Spencer, along with a comfortable, Southwestern-style home and a preppy wardrobe, a masterclass in denial as a way of life, i.e., “when you deny things all the time, things that are happening right in front of you.”
After a homophobic assault sends Spencer to the hospital and his parents prove less than ideally compassionate or protective, and after he takes the fall for his closeted father’s gay porn, Spencer runs away, seeking an imaginary gay uncle in Provincetown, a fantasy figure of unconditional love and acceptance. What he encounters, however, are mostly the real-world havens of the down-and-out—bus stops, pawn shops, strip clubs, and dumpsters. At the local Greyhound depot, he encounters Velvet, a streetwise unhoused teen who carries a knife. Velvet (“sort of beautiful . . . like a shard of desert stone, a slice of crayon”) becomes Spencer’s guide and love interest on his gritty journey. They are moving east, but not fast enough, it seems, to arrive in safe territory before something truly bad happens.
Tea is the author of many titles across several genres, including Valencia—that classic of the 1990s San Francisco lesbian scene—books for young people, memoirs, and magic how-to. She tells Spencer’s story like a true pro with brisk dialogue (“it’s like they’re children, parents. You have to protect them from life’s harsh realities”), flashes of beauty (jumping into the Mississippi “did occur to me, letting its thick, gray muscle push me to my saddest destiny”), and always that motor of Spencer’s funny, sad, clear-eyed voice (“Jesus People were always trying to help everyone, but obviously they had a terrible agenda, and all their help came with a price”). If Little F is occasionally overwritten (“I didn’t realize what saying the truth to Velvet would do, how the moisture in the New Orleans air would take my words and hold them, hang them in the air like art on a wall; how they’d vibrate, absorbing the humidity like a sponge, growing fatter, floating upward until they were the gray clouds that hovered over the river”), that over-the-topness only serves to authenticate the speaker’s voice and the genre of his tale. Young adult literature is so often a literature of entrapment, a literature of extremity, and one of its purest pleasures is the way it can, within a few sentences, move from arid (sarcasm, the rhetoric of the unemancipated) to melodramatic (that Sturm und Drang of first experiences).
The sharp-elbowed urgency of young adult literature is, I think, why it appeals to readers of all ages, and its urgency comes from the fierce motivation of adolescent protagonists to hurry up and define themselves, in their own language, before they’re defined by someone else, someone without their best interest at heart. In Little F, the characters are more than once called upon to tell their stories, explain what they are doing far from home. One of their interlocutors is a Houston drag queen who, after hearing their confessions, compares Spencer and Velvet to Jean Genet. “He is your ancestor,” she tells them. “You are his children. He would love you.”
And though Spencer is trying to figure out what it means to be a gay man with all his force, he still gives his unvarnished review of Genet. Genet’s work “turned out to be kind of boring. Which is a weird thing to say about a book with a lot of criminals and drag queens in it. It just didn’t move along the way I think a story ought to move, but what do I know?” He does know, though—the bite of his point of view is what we came for. And Tea knows, certainly. Her novel moves. In every sense of the word, it moves.
