In Gary Schmidt’s The Wednesday Wars,
the young narrator, Holling, receives an extraordinary opportunity that
he shares with two other boys. One of them is class troublemaker Doug
Swieteck, and his inclusion in this invitation has an even greater
impact on him than on the main character and his best friend. That much
is plain just from Holling’s observation. But it isn’t until Okay For Now,
Schmidt’s equally remarkable sequel, that we get to hear Doug speak for
himself and come to understand just how profoundly this incident moved
him.
At the beginning of Okay For Now, Doug and his
family relocate to Marysville, still in New York but a bit of a distance
away from the big city. They move into a ramshackle house Doug refers
to as The Dump, and at first glance, he sees nothing in town that looks
too promising. It’s the summer before eighth grade, and Doug is hot and
miserable, keenly aware of being an outsider in a boring town with
judgmental residents. At home, he has to deal with his older brother, a
whirling dervish of destruction, and his father, who seems like an adult
version of his brother. His oldest brother, Lucas, is off fighting in
the Vietnam War, though Doug can’t say he misses him much, since Lucas
wasn’t any nicer to him than the other men of the family. Doug’s mother,
however, is another matter. She speaks very little throughout the
novel, as she is cowed by the fear of an abusive husband, but she
clearly is a woman of warmth and compassion, and Doug adores her.
In Wednesday Wars,
the central relationship of the book is between Holling and his
teacher, Mrs. Baker. Several mentors come into Doug’s life in his eighth
grade year, but his core relationship is with Lil Spicer, a spunky
classmate he meets on his first day in town. It is she who leads him to
the library where he will discover the artwork of John James Audubon and
befriend Mr. Powell, a librarian who gives him art lessons. It is she
who gets him a job working as a delivery boy for her father’s deli,
which leads to several more acquaintanceships, most importantly with
Mrs. Windermere, an eccentric playwright, and the Daughertys, who hire
Doug to babysit regularly for their five rambunctious children. It is
she who becomes his truest refuge in the tumultuous year to follow.
Doug
makes no secret of his devotion to his mother, but he is even more
effusive in his praise of Lil and can scarcely mention her without
remarking on her dazzling green eyes – a trait she shares, incidentally,
with Lily, the virtuous mother of Harry Potter – or her stunning smile
or the warmth of her hand when she reaches over to squeeze his in
encouragement. My favorite of his many descriptions comes toward the end
of the book, in the chapter named after the Brown Pelican print that
hangs in the office of Principal Peattie, a condescending man who speaks
of himself in the third person and is prejudiced against Doug because
of the rumors circulating about his brother. “You know how pretty
someone can be when she opens up a book?” Doug asks us. “Especially if
she has brown hair the color of the pelican’s feathers?”
Just as a series of Shakespeare’s plays provides a good deal of scaffolding for Wednesday Wars,
the birds of Audobon give this book structure and focus. Doug is
startled to find himself so drawn to those birds, and he recoils at Mr.
Powell’s initial attempts to encourage him to artistically capture them.
But they become incredibly important to him. Each is a bird featured in
a magnificent collection of Audobon paintings housed at the library – a
hefty volume that is incomplete because the town council has seen fit
to sell individual prints from the book to collectors. Restoring those
birds to their proper place in the library becomes Doug’s overarching
mission for the year. Having this concrete goal, as well as the
perpetual project of becoming more adept at drawing the birds, is very
good for Doug. Moreover, studying the birds at length helps him to work
through some of his own issues.
Doug frequently asks the reader
some variation of “You know how that feels?” He wants us to be able to
put ourselves into his situation, just as he puts himself into the
situation of the birds in the paintings. It turns out that he is a
deeply empathetic soul, with a great concern for the lonely, the weak,
the disenfranchised, the frightened. He sees these qualities in many of
the birds he studies; they seem to him fellow victims of an unfair fate.
But gradually, he begins to see other things as well, like nobility,
compassion, devotion and courage. As he looks at these birds in a new
light, he begins to imagine new possibilities for himself as well.
Doug
has a wonderfully earthy pre-teen voice. It’s more direct and less
pensive than Holling’s, and I didn’t really get the sense, as I did in
the first book, that he was looking back on this year from several years
in the future. His gruff, matter-of-fact tone reminds me of LOST’s Frank Lapidus;
his style can perhaps best be summed up in his assessment of his
English class’s poetry unit: “Why can’t poets just say what they want to
say and then shut up?” His words, especially toward the beginning,
often have a harsh edge. He liberally applies the word “stupid,”
particularly if he’s describing Marysville. “Terrific,” he often
grumbles, allowing that sarcastic thought a line to itself on the page.
“So what?” comes up a lot, as does “I’m not lying”; this is a kid who is
used to being on the defensive. He also frequently refers to himself as
a chump – or, conversely, protests that he is not a chump.
Although
Doug’s mind is often an angsty place to be, it has an undeniable beauty
of its own, and his repetitive turns of phrase come to feel enjoyably
familiar rather than annoyingly redundant. He is at his most poetic when
he draws comparisons between the birds and himself, his family members
and Lil, though his rambling run-on sentences, many of which describe
moments of unexpected happiness, also offer a refreshing break from his
typically terse style. It feels as though he’s releasing a whole lot of
pent-up emotion. For instance: “You know how good an orange Dreamsicle
tastes on a blue fall day when you’re full of grilled chicken and your
mother is laughing a real laugh like she used to and once you look over
and your father is holding her hand like they haven’t in a long long
long time?”
One of Doug’s frequent observations is that when
things seem to be going well, they always take a turn for the worse. His
eighth grade year is full of ups and downs, and while many of Holling’s
low points in the previous book are comically disastrous, Doug’s tend
to veer more toward the tragic. It’s hard for him to imagine a truly
happy life for himself. When he does dare to dream, most of his visions
involve baseball player Joe Pepitone, his personal hero. In the first
book, baseball provides a harsh lesson for Holling in just how much
those we look up to can let us down. The lesson Doug gets is quite the
opposite – that sometimes, when you least expect it, people may step up
to the plate. Good things can happen, even to a guy who’s always been
stuck with his brothers’ discarded leftovers and judged by their
misdeeds, and the statistics that he studies so intently don’t
necessarily determine what is going to happen next. Life is full of
surprises, and some of them are wonderful.
As in Wednesday Wars,
the historical context is of the utmost importance to this novel. The
Vietnam War rages on, and eventually Lucas returns from it, changed
almost beyond recognition, which in turn sparks a massive change in the
Swieteck family dynamics. Through Lucas and Doug’s gym teacher, a former
drill sergeant, Schmidt delves into the war’s effect upon those who
lived through it as soldiers. Meanwhile, Doug’s favorite teacher, the
enthusiastic and kind-hearted Mr. Ferris, is ecstatic over the impending
moon landing. Schmidt also sneaks in some sly jokes as he has teachers
contemplate the future. Between Mr. Ferris and Mr. Powell, I found this
book to be quite science-oriented, while faith plays a prominent role in
the first book. This also seems to be a reflection of the differences
between the two young narrators, one more philosophical, the other more
down-to-earth. The differing perspectives deepen each other rather than
detracting.
I loved The Wednesday Wars. Okay For Now
is similar in some ways and very distinct in others, and I honestly
can’t say which of the two I liked better. Each is equally exquisite,
and I am excited to hear that Schmidt plans one more companion novel.
Although there is minimal overlap between the two stories, read the
first book first, as some of the events here will make a greater impact
that way (and a couple of the events in the first will be spoiled for
you if you read out of order). Then crack open the cover of this book
and let yourself get lost in it. Doug Swieteck may be just “okay for
now,” but his story is nothing short of exceptional.
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