"Well, darkness has a hunger that's insatiable" -- Emily Saliers
"Forget the dark things. Take a drink and let time wash them away to wherever time washes things away to." -- Sutter Keely
THE SPECTACULAR NOW is such an achingly humor-filled, intensely sad story, that it has taken me a couple of days of processing the emotions it stirred up before being able to talk about Sutter Keely. Having previously included KNIGHTS OF THE HILL COUNTRY (Tharp's previous book for teens) on my Best of 2006 list, I was well aware of the author's abilities, but this second book is Something Else. It is one that absolutely should be added to high school collections and to required reading lists for YA Lit students.
High school senior Sutter Keely is great friends with a long line of ex-girlfriends. He has a superb sense of humor, plays well with his peers, is forever the life of the party, and professes his affinity for embracing the weird. But as his latest relationship crumbles, he asks himself, "Why is it that girls like me so much but never love me." And, of course, as we come to learn, it is the damaged young alcoholic himself, and not the girls, who has the real problem. Or a number of real problems.
But then he has a chance pre-dawn meeting with a girl he's never noticed who is so unlike his partying crowd:
"She jerks back, startled to see me move. 'You're alive,' she says. 'I thought maybe you were dead.'
"I'm like, 'I don't think I'm dead.' But right now I can't exactly be sure of anything. 'Where the hell am I?'
"'You're in the middle of the yard,' she says. 'Do you know someone who lives here?'
"I sit up and look at the house -- an ugly, little, pink brick one with a window air-conditioner unit. 'No, I never saw it before.'
"'Were you in a wreck or something?'
"'Not that I know of, Why? Where's my car?'
"'Is it one of those?' She points toward the street where two cars are parked along the curb on our side and a junky white pickup is parked on the other side. The pickup's engine is idling so I guess it must be hers.
"'No, I drive a Mitsubishi,' I say. 'Jesus, I must have gone to sleep.' I look around, trying to gather my wits a little. A scraggly elm tree hangs over us and you can just see the moon through the branches. There's a rickety lawn chair stationed in the middle of the yard, and two beer cans lie in the grass a couple of feet away. I vaguely remember sitting in that lawn chair at some point, but I don't remember how I got there.
"'So,' she asks. 'You don't know where you left your car?'
"'Let me think for a second," I say, but my head's not really up for thinking. 'No, it's no good. I don't remember where it is. Maybe I parked it at home and just went out for a walk.
"She shakes her head. 'No, I don't think you live in this neighborhood, Sutter.'
"That surprises the hell out of me right there. 'How did you know my name? Were we talking a while ago or something?'
"'We go to the same high school,' she says, but she doesn't say it like I'm an idiot. She has a kind voice, kind eyes. She looks at me like I'm a bird she found with a broken wing."
Fellow senior Aimee Finecky has struggled to create order amidst the chaos that permeates her home life. She sees the path out of town and she has attained the grades necessary to head there. She has created a sanctuary of a bedroom. And then, as she completes her mother's nocturnal paper route alone -- while mom is off to the Indian casino -- she finds her schoolmate Sutter passed out in that front yard. So begins the story of Sutter and Aimee.
"'Oh yeah.' I take a long pull on the martini. 'Childhood was a fantastic country to live in.'"
There is so much more to this tale. For instance, Sutter's observations on the superficiality of the interaction taking place at his married sister's party -- in contrast to what he's experienced in hanging with his friends -- are hysterically funny and incredibly thought provoking. And Sutter's friend Ricky's meditations upon the longing desire for the miraculous, the role of drugs and alcohol in trying to resurrect the miraculous, and the built-in obsolescence that causes such remedies to ultimately fail when they are relied upon for filling the emptiness, are the kind of jaw-dropping amazing introspections that are so rarely developed to such an exquisite degree in young adult literature.
THE SPECTACULAR NOW impacted me so emotionally that I couldn't even think about reading something else for a few days.
"This stage in the life of the buzz is truly fabulous. It's not even a buzz anymore. It's a roar. The world opens up and everything's yours right here, right now. You've probably heard the expression -- All good things must come to an end. Well, this stage in the life of the buzz never heard anything close to that. This stage says, 'I will never end, I am indestructible. I will last fabulously forever.' And, of course, you believe it. To hell with tomorrow. To hell with all problems and barriers. Nothing matters but the Spectacular Now."
