 |
| Photo by: L. Propes |
Okay For Now is a companion book to Schmidt's The Wednesday Wars. Written from the perspective of Doug, Schmidt examines a fraught family dynamic that initially seems as if it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Mr. Swieteck takes out his frustrations on his wife and sons, leading Doug and his middle brother to wonder if the same fate awaits them. Mrs. Swieteck shows Doug that there is room for compassion and sympathy in the world, often managing to thwart Mr. Swieteck's stated wishes in small acts of passive resistance. While the initial relationship between Doug and his brother is antagonistic, they manage to find common ground in their shared fears of turning into their father. Their oldest brother returns home from the war, wounded and seemingly broken.
Doug's struggles are legion and almost seem too much for a fourteen year-old to bear, let alone endure. His early views of Marysville as a prison slowly change as he finds refuge, first in the local public library, then later when he begins to make friends at school. Doug's friends introduce him to a way of thinking about life, art, and music in ways that he could never have imagined. His first positive male influence is Mr. Powell, one of the librarians who notices Doug's rapt fascination with their original volume of John James Audubon's Birds of America. Mr. Powell takes Doug under his wing and teaches him how to draw, using the Audubon prints on display as a teaching tool to explain the finer details of art. More positive influences emerge in Doug's life: some of his teachers at school who help Doug tackle and cope with some of his bigger problems; neighbors who grow to trust Doug, in spite of a spate of thefts that implicate Doug's brother; and Lilian Spicer, the daughter of the owner of the local grocery and deli, who becomes Doug's ally and best friend.
Schmidt's voice for Doug is a little disjointed in the beginning, jumping from thought to thought. As Doug gains more and more confidence, the prose becomes more fluid. The more Doug comes out of his defensive shell, the more he is able to see the world and his own family with more clarity, and that things aren't always how they seem on the surface. It is at this point that Schmidt allows Doug to see his middle brother's humanity. For most of the first half of the book, Doug's middle brother has no name. It isn't until Lucas, their oldest brother, returns home from Vietnam, wounded and disabled, that we learn his name. Christopher. The Christopher that we see in the second half of the novel is a revelation. Schmidt allows his characters' deep-seated emotions to burble to the surface at unexpected moments. It is like receiving a small gift, wrapped in a bundle of conflict and hostility.
The other characters in the book are almost stock characters: the eccentric playwright, the odd science teacher, the bullying P.E. teacher. As lovely as the character of Lilian Spicer is, she almost crosses the line into Manic Pixie Dream Girl territory. With the exception of his immediate family, the other characters in the book are merely players in the stage of Doug Swieteck's memory. Like all characters, they serve their purpose in giving Doug a glimpse at what his life can become. The saving grace for many of the characters is that Schmidt offers a peek at the person beneath the facade. This prevents them from becoming caricatures.
Schmidt frames each chapter with an Audubon print. Events and characters in that particular chapter are often described in terms of the birds in the print and insights gained from Doug's discussions with Mr. Powell. The title of the book even comes from one of Doug's observations about the snowy heron in one of the plates. A hunter lurks in the background, gun poised to shoot the bird. However, in that moment, just before the gun goes off, Doug realizes that the snowy heron cannot see the hunter, and in that particular moment, his life is okay for now. Sharp-eyed readers will be able to read between the lines when Doug talks about certain events. Doug isn't always forthcoming with some of the more painful or embarrassing episodes of his life, and Schmidt withholds details, letting the reader figure them out as the plot unfolds.
The Vietnam War is something relegated to the background, but its presence is a shadow that hangs over the Swieteck family, brought to flesh when Lucas comes home. Schmidt's depiction of Lucas' homecoming matches the manner in which many Vietnam veterans were greeted as they disembarked from airplanes, trains, or buses. In age before the Americans With Disabilities Act, Lucas' struggles to just get in an out of buildings or find a job is hampered by buildings and people who cannot accommodate his wheelchair. Coach Reed, Doug's P.E. teacher is also a veteran of the Vietnam War, but his wounds are much more hidden than Lucas'. Now, veterans would have access to mental health services, but the lack of such services available to Coach Reed and his attempts to deal with his personal demons neatly describe how veterans were expected to bury the past and move on with their lives. Mr. Spicer's efforts to pay the medical bills when Lilian becomes ill are timely in an era before health insurance was a given. Doug's voice sounds just like you might imagine an adolescent boy from a working-class Long Island neighborhood might sound. The vocabulary and attitudes are also accurate for the late 1960s.
There are a few quibbles with the book. Late in the novel, Mr. Swieteck undergoes a radical personality change that seems a little too pat and rapid. Some plot points are wrapped up and tied neatly with a bow at the end. Sometimes Doug seamlessly integrates himself into his friends' lives, but in all honesty it doesn't take anything away from the book. They are basically minor issues.
As a teacher, I've seen many boys like Doug come into my classroom. Sometimes we can help, like Mr. Ferris and Miss Cowper. Sometimes we cannot. The book hearkens back to an time in education where a teacher would have had the time to commit to reaching out to a boy like Doug, to give him time to settle into place, and work through some of his issues with school, without standardized tests hanging over their heads like the Sword of Damocles. The book also illustrates how easy it would have been for a boy like Doug to slide through the cracks at the time.
Excerpts of this book could be used in an art class, in conjunction with the Audubon images, to teach the concepts Mr. Powell explains to Doug. Students studying the Vietnam War, or indeed, the effects of any war on its service members, could use this book to examine the issues veterans face when they return from the war front. Students in a creative writing class can use this book as an exemplar text for writing historical fiction. While the history forms the backdrop of the novel, it doesn't beat the reader over the head.
Students can also use the book as an entry point to become involved in veterans' groups. The Veterans of Foreign Wars, Disabled American Veterans, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, or the Wounded Warriors Project might be good places to start.
Okay For Now was a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature in 2011 and the audiobook version (read by Lincoln Hoppe) was an Odyssey Honor audiobook in 2012. You can find an interview with Schmidt from the National Book Awards Dinner here and a video of Schmidt reading an excerpt from Okay For Now here.
Schmidt is also the author of the Newberry Honor book The Wednesday Wars and the Newberry and Printz Honor book Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy. Schmidt has also written Trouble and What Came From the Stars.
Students might also want to read Walter Dean Myers' Fallen Angels, Dean Hughes' Search and Destroy, or Lt. General Hal Moore's We Were Soldiers Once... and Young. Readers can try Laurie Halse Anderson's The Impossible Knife of Memory if they would like to read a novel that deals with a family coping with a loved one returning from a more recent war.
_________________________________________________________________________________
"It's the summer of 1968 and Doug Swieteck has just moved to Marysville, New York. His father is a mean drunk, his older brother seems to be a juvenile delinquent, and his mother his just trying to hold the family together. Before the summer ends, Doug has a friend (Lil), an obsession (the work of John James Audubon), and a job (delivering groceries). Over the course of the school year, Doug begins to change from a wary, closed boy into an open, engaged young man, despite the challenges he faces... The book closes on a bittersweet note, with hope tempering a character's serious illness; but a really happy ending would have felt out of place. There are laugh-out-loud moments here, and passages that will move a reader to tears; it's brilliant, and beautiful, and very nearly a perfect book." -- Susan A. M. Poulter, Library Media Connection, 2011
"Schmidt incorporates a myriad of historical events from the 1968 setting (the moon landing, a broken brother returning from Vietnam, the My Lai massacre) that makes some of the improbable plot turns... all the more unconvincing. Still, Doug's story emerges through a distinctive voice that reflects how one beat-up kid can become a young man who knows that the future holds 'so much for him to find.'" -- Betty Carter, Horn Book Magazine, 2011
"Fans of The Wednesday Wars will find that this companion novel has more in common with it than just a charismatic narrator and pitch-perfect details of daily life in the 1960s. In addition to a mix of caring adults and comically unreasonable authority figures, Schmidt also revisits baseball, theatrical escapades, and timely preoccupations like the Moon landing and the Vietnam War. But Doug's blue-collar story is much darker than Holling's in the earlier novel, and, as a narrator, he more psychologically complex...through study of Audubon's [Birds of America]... the volume itself becomes a metaphor for his journey from fragmented to whole self. Schmidt manages a hard balance of relatable youth-is-hard humor and nuanced family trauma." -- Riva Pollard, School Library Journal, 2011
"We slip conventionally enough into "Okay For Now" when a city kid behind a whole rack of metaphorical eight balls heads to a new school in a Catskill backwater. He's Douglas Swieteck, an eighth grader last seen in Gary D. Schmidt's much praised "Wednesday Wars"... In the literature of outsiders, Doug is as far out there as any... But beneath the jumble of tragedy and tragicomedy is a story about the healing power of art and about a boy's intellectual awakening... The story takes place in 1968, with Doug's family driving their pickup down to Port Authority to collect a brother, home from Vietnam. But centered on lives badly balanced on the ragged edge of survival and uprooted by poverty, with a distant war rumbling in the background... this is a novel that could easily have been set in the present." -- Richard Peck, The New York Times Book Review, 2011_________________________________________________________________________________
Works Cited:
Carter, Betty. 2011. Okay for now. Horn Book Magazine 87 (3) (May): 102-3, http://ezproxy.twu.edu:2048/login?url=http://ezproxy.twu.edu:2060/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=60126141&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
Peck, Richard. 2011. The comeback kid. 05/15; 2014/3, http://ezproxy.twu.edu:2216/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA256390002&v=2.1&u=txshracd2583&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w&asid=fb2de0db339be62d6d6a93023f360969.
Pollard, Riva. 2011. Okay for now. School Library Journal 57 (4) (04): 184-, http://ezproxy.twu.edu:2048/login?url=http://ezproxy.twu.edu:2060/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=59966743&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are welcome. Please be polite and courteous to others. Abusive comments will be deleted.