perks of being a wallflower

For this week, I read The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Reminiscent of A Separate Piece or Catcher in the Rye, this epistolary novel follows high school freshmen, Charlie, through the trials and tribulations of life in the early 1990's. Covering sex, drugs, and rock and roll, the novel's protagonist learns several lessons about himself and his relationship with his family and friends. It was a good book....Okay, so there's my book reportish summary of the novel. It came as a recommendation from a friend of mine and after further research I found that the book is no longer placed in the YA section in most book stores. Though following its publication 1997, it remained classified as YA for many years, recently it has been moved to the regular adult section. However, trusting my source who said this book literally changed his life when he he first read it in high school, I had to give it a whirl. Certainly, it is not a book to be taken lightly.
For starters, nothing in the book is written for shock value. The story takes place over Charlie's freshman year in high school beginning with the suicide of his best friend and culminating with Charlie being re-institutionalized following his friends' graduation and departure for college. His year consists of fights at school, experimentation with drugs and masturbation, exposure to rape and homosexuality, and domestic violence. Still, everything is written as a letter to an ambiguous reader as Charlie simply reflects on what has happened. Similar to Flowers for Algernon in that respect, we see the world through the eyes a boy who excels academically but lacks, for the most part, any sort of capacity for making sense of the world around him. I found myself often struggling with this idea that a person could be so out of touch with reality yet succeed in all of his classes and appear to be fairly popular (his best friends are football players and well known seniors at his high school). More than just a coming of age story, the book presents a realistic account of the tensions with which teens deal in their everyday lives and conveys these tensions through a masculine, albeit naive, lens.
The plot for the book exists only insofar as the sequence of events Charlie recalls, though he tends to jump around a bit, avoiding certain topics until he is prepared to write them down. However, despite the incongruent nature of the plot, the characters contain a strange familiarity almost as if we are reading about people with whom we ourselves may have gone to high school. As a pedagogical tool, I would consider teaching this, and in ideal world I would succeed in my endeavor. However, due to the subject matter and accurate depiction of contemporary teen vernacular (YES!) something tells me, this book will never see the inside of a classroom unless it is tucked neatly away in some curious student's backpack. I'll chat more about it tomorrow in class--assuming, of course, we still have it--as well as the articles we read! Have a great day everyone and see yall soon.