It's Got "a Lot of Bad, Bad Words in It": Chris Crutcher's Whale Talk
Written: Sep 30 '09
Product Rating:
Pros: powerful story of the evil done by small minds
Cons: disturbing in spots
The Bottom Line: Like everything Chris Crutcher writes, Whale Talkis routinely challenged by word-counters. Would that they had read all the words instead of just the "dirty" ones.
Rumor has it that for most people, "high school" turned out to be little more than a variant spelling of "hell" - head cheerleaders and varsity quarterbacks excluded, I guess. I can't speak from experience: my usually well-ordered memory seems to have misfiled most of what happened during my teens. I don't know why, although the few lingering scraps don't seem to suggest that the rest is hidden out of self-defense. The renowned young-adult author Chris Crutcher, however, clearly does not suffer my peculiar memory malady: oh, no, Crutcher clearly remembers high school just fine, in all its excruciating, humiliating, embarrassing detail. He's been making a living remembering those years for a couple of decades. Not only does he remember them, he shares them in all their glory - and Whale Talk is one of his best.
Somewhere in northeastern Washington, not far from Spokane, lies the town of Cutter. This bucolic little logging burg is, like many an American small town, proud of its high-school athletes; though Cutter might take things to extremes. As are most small western towns, Cutter is pretty homogeneous, which is just a fancy way of saying that almost everybody who lives there is White and Anglo-Saxon, and most are at least nominally Protestant. Cutter just happens to be where T. J. Jones lives with his adopted parents. The name on his birth certificate is "The Tao," having been named after her favorite book by the birth mother with whom he spent his first two years. Considering that "Tao" is pronounced "dow," it's easy to see why The Tao Jones goes by a nickname (especially after the DJIA shed about a third of its value last year). T. J. also happens to be what lots of locals call a "mongrel" (a little further east in Idaho, he'd be called a "mud person"): his birth mother was Caucasian and his birth father ("the sperm donor"), Afro-Japanese. Sort of like Tiger Woods, T. J. Jones is a walking advertisement for what geneticists call "hybrid vigor," ‘cause T. J. Jones has it all. A superb natural athlete, intelligent, and also darned good-looking; T. J. is everything one expects in a homecoming king - except perhaps he's a little, errr, dusky. Oh, and he can have a wicked temper. Luckily, T. J. has a fantastic support system in his parents, his girlfriend Carly, and his therapist/friend, Georgia Brown (one of the other two people of color in Cutter) - otherwise he might have gone postal by his late teens.
Not all of T. J.'s classmates are so lucky. Like every school, every town - heck, every group of more than three people - there are students at Cutter High who are marginalized by their so-called peers for having the unmitigated gall to be "different." Different can mean just about anything: developmentally disabled or super-intelligent, overweight, stick-like, painfully shy; anything that makes a kid stand out is grounds for exclusion... and worse. T. J. knows all about this exclusion stuff; having missed birthday parties and had dates broken because the parents of would-be friends don't want "one of those people" in their homes. He's getting through it, though, thanks to that support system.
When approached by his Senior English teacher to start a varsity swim team, T. J. is initially dubious. That's for good reason: sure, he can swim; but not only does Cutter High not have a pool, there's just one in the whole town (at the All Night Health Club), and it's not exactly Olympic quality. And then T. J. has a brilliant idea... and soon Cutter High School has its first swim team ever. Only it's a team composed entirely of the misfits, the marginalized, and the otherwise excluded - it's a team with only one swimmer and no hope of ever winning a meet. Swim-team captain T. J. Jones has set his sights far higher than mere athletic accolades, however. He intends to give his six teammates something that the rest of their classmates have been trying to take away from them since first grade: their dignity. And so, the Cutter High swim team takes to the water: besides T. J., there's a swimmer who weighs over three hundred pounds, one who's the ultimate geek, one who's a weight-lifting singer, one who's so "average" that he just plain disappears in a crowd, one developmentally disabled, and one who has a weird limp and the baddest attitude ever - for darned good reason. Throw in a homeless man who sleeps in the health club at night as assistant coach, and you have all the ingredients of the most heartwarming sports story since Robert Redford blew out the stadium lights in "The Natural."
If only it were that simple... but of course, it's not.
Remember that T. J. is a "person of color"? Well, there are plenty of people in this corner of Washington who don't much care for any color but lily-white - and chief among them is Rich Marshall, owner of the local lumber mill and the biggest cheese in Cutter's alumni club. He spends more time roaming the halls of CHS with the football team than he does in his company office - and every time he sees T. J. Jones, something nasty just has to happen. See, Rich's high school girlfriend Alicia left him and went away to college, then came back to Cutter with a mixed-race daughter. Rich married Alicia "anyway," but little Heidi is collateral damage in a relationship that goes past dysfunctional to dangerous. When T. J. first meets Heidi, she's attempting to scrub the "dirt" off of her arm - an arm almost exactly the same shade of brown as his.
T. J.'s senior year at Cutter High will be a delicate and sometimes dangerous balancing act for him and everyone around him: his swim teammates, his family, and little Heidi. It's a year that will give him the strength he needs to be someone - perhaps someone great - and it's a year that will take away one of the most precious things he has. To characterize Whale Talk as merely a "coming of age" tale is almost an insult to the growth T. J. Jones undergoes.
One pretty much knows what to expect when opening a young-adult novel written by Chris Crutcher: the protagonist will be an athletic high-school boy who doesn't quite fit into the rigid caste system of his small high school. He could be a jock - the king of the jocks, probably - if he wants, but he finds the jocks small and shallow. He has great (a) great parent(s) and somehow makes a connection with that one teacher who puts him on the right path; meanwhile thumbing his nose at those adults who've never outgrown their high-school attitudes. He participates only in those interscholastic sports in which he competes against himself - track, swimming, cross-country - even though he could be an all-around athlete. He has a smart, slightly quirky girlfriend with whom he hasn't had sex. And he knows in his heart of hearts that the people who run the cloistered little world of his high school are complete idiots. Chris Crutcher's books are all that way; more like a prix fixe meal than a la carte...
That's pretty much the outline of Whale Talk, like Running Loose and Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes before it (and, I'd wager, Chinese Finger Puzzle and Athletic Shorts, too). But even though the basic concept of his young-adult novels doesn't stray far from the one central theme of "Be Your Own Person," each novel also has its own flavor and its own set of issues. In the case of Whale Talk, the flavor is definitely chocolate - and the themes are much darker. Front and center is racism; the ugliest form of hatred - here directed not only at a strapping teenage boy but also at a little girl. Another theme is that of violence, violence for its own sake and violence born of ignorance - especially physical abuse of a wife or girlfriend... or a child. Crutcher does not pull any punches in Whale Talk - you are hereby warned not to come to this book looking for sanitized dialog or simple, happy-days solutions. The ending... is not as happy as it could be.
Whale Talk gets pretty rough in spots. Crutcher has never been one to pull any punches when it comes to his plots or dialog. He's softer on organized religion this time than he is in his other books I've read; though he still takes some shots at other favorite pastimes of the social conservatives. Such "problems" are never the reason that books like this are challenged - and Whale Talk has been challenged regularly ever since its publication in 2001. The reason that's stated most often is "profanity": I haven't any idea what number he or she reached, but I can guarantee you that some stick-up-the-butt type somewhere has gone through the book counting and can tell you exactly how many "dirty" words are in the text. Then he went and screeched to a school board somewhere about how "we don't let our children talk like that at school, so you shouldn't make them read those words."
The shame is, that while those dirty-word counters are making little marks on a tally sheet somewhere and just about foaming at the mouth over the language, they're not reading the book - and so they're not getting the point. There are some sections of Whale Talk that are unbelievably difficult to read. The first scene between T. J. and little Heidi is a race between breaking your heart and turning your stomach - yet it is the utter realism of those hideous words coming from the mouth of a child, the instant knowledge of what a little girl's life must be like, that gives them a power rarely seen in adult fiction - much less young adult writing. One courageous educator in Alabama said of complaints about the language in this book, "[the message of this book] is more important than the language used." Cooler heads don't win, however: s/he was, of course, eventually overruled...
Whale Talk is a tough read, one that your teenager may well find disturbing. It isn't disturbing because it uses "a lot of bad, bad words"; as a school board member in Decatur, Alabama, would have it. Whale Talk is disturbing because what's in there is utterly possible.
Submitted to pestyside's Banned Books Writeoff IV, in honor of the late Judith Krug. Reading banned books is good for what ails you!
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