Early in August I ran across a warm review in The Economist about The Falconer, by Dana Czapnik, a novel set in the 1990's about a seventeen-year-old girl whose primary passion is basketball. I am (or was) a high-school English teacher, and I was for many years a high-school girls' basketball coach, so I thought it might be in my wheelhouse. It turned out to be one of the books that was so good the first time that I had to read it again. And I'm here to tell you that it was even better the second time, and the third.
Lucy Adler lives with her mom and dad in New York City. She attends Pendleton High, a private school where she is the star player on the basketball team, a circumstance which provides her with exactly nothing in the way of social status amongst her peers. She's an outsider. She's tall and she's athletic, but she's not cute and she's not sexy in any of the ways that are recognized as acceptable by her peers. She has two close friends: a boy named Percy, her best friend since elementary school who is also a basketball stud and for whom she has harbored a secret crush for years, and Alexis, one of her teammates, who is also a social outsider at the prep school. Lucy spends a lot of time with her older cousin Violet, an aspiring artist, and their conversations are both rich and revealing.
Those are the facts, and there is nothing special about them. Some characters in a setting. What makes the novel so startling, so alive, is the personality of Lucy herself. She's fierce. She's relentless. She pays attention to everything, and turns what she sees over in her mind, trying to figure it out. The entire novel takes place inside her head as she navigates the social landscape and the physical landscape of the city itself. Here, for example, she's considering her experience growing up as a girl:
I've known since I was little that the kids having the most fun were the boys. They got to run through the world, feral and laughing. Girls were quiet, played at being grown-ups with dolls, whispered into each other's ears and giggled behind cupped hands. They imitated each other's expressions, gesticulations. Found comfort dressing like each other and traveling in groups. At the playground, they'd draw flowers and politely seesaw, have competitions to see who could swing the highest. I'd watch the boys with envy from a distance. They didn't want me to participate in their games of war. They'd tear through the playground like animals, and I so wanted to have that kind of abandon. Eventually, I found my place among the boys because I was a strong enough athlete that someone would occasionally want me on their team when they got some sort of organized play together. I was sporadically allowed to participate but never allowed a say in the direction of the game. A bit player. But it was okay not to have any power, as long as I was given a few moments to run roughshod through the world with my skinned knees and shins and hollowed-out mosquito bites, so much surface area of my body red and brown and scabbed. But then when I was given those permissions, as few as they were, I found that there was no place for me with the polite girls practicing penmanship during art class. I was not like them. They didn't understand me. The girls thought I was weird. That I wanted to be a boy. But I didn't want to be a boy. I wanted to be a girl who had fun. My version of fun. (61-2)
So, this is Lucy's dilemma. She has talent, she has ambition, she's smart and she reads with the same ferocious energy she brings to everything else she does in her life. (She's read and thought about Yeats, Shakespeare, Celine, Faulkner, Kundera, de Beauvoir, Nietzsche, Melville, and Tennessee William, among others.) She's drawn to risk, to disorder. At one point late in the novel, she has been watching a caretaker raking a sort of indoor garden in the city, and her response is typical of her mode of processing throughout the book: observant, thoughtful, trying to make connections, trying to figure out what's going on around her and how she fits in, or doesn't:
...He is methodical, walking north to the wall, then turning and walking south until the entire section of dirt is well hydrated. Then he puts down his watering can and gets a rake. Again, he goes back and forth over the dirt so that the moisture is evenly distributed. He does not make a sound. He does not play music. He just goes about tending to the earth. Rake north. Rake south.
There is something monk-like about him. Has he taken a vow of silence too? I've always been fascinated by the people who choose to do that. A vow of silence is an attempt to tamp down the wild parts. Maybe some people can't handle the disorder of the universe and so they have to impose some kind of order on a random segment of their lives to make the chaos more bearable. That's what I think of whenever someone describes themselves as "type A." Making lists just to cross them off. So silly. I may spend a lot of my time white-knuckling my way through human existence, but I prefer chaos. (189)
Lucy, is clear-eyed, open to experience, and at times emotionally raw. When you are drawn to the flames, it's likely you'll get burned. Some readers may be put off by Lucy's choices and by the language she uses to express them. There's a lot of casual obscenity in the book. There is a sexual initiation that does not go well for her, during or after. Lucy smokes the occasional joint. She steals basketballs from her school because she can't afford to buy them herself. She does a lot of other things that aren't in the good-girl playbook. But she's a fully engaged human being and I, for one, can't help but admire her spirit, her intensity, her intelligence and determination. She's a thinker, a ponderer, and she uses her engagement with the game of basketball as her refuge and centering point:
There is no silence like the silence in your own head when you allow it space to be silent. No sirens. No honking. No ka-klunk kaklunk. No shouting from the games on the other courts. No music. No playground screams. No stroller wheels. No creeping thoughts. No wondering. No melancholy. No happiness. Just: ball on pavement. Silence. Air. Thwip. Ball on pavement. Ball on pavement. Feet on pavement. Ball on pavement. Silence. Air. Thwip. Again. There is a meditation in this. A nirvana. I cannot find it anywhere else but here. A ball. A hoop. And me. (241)
There are stylistic choices made by the author that are interesting to me as well. Often, for example, we will follow Lucy's thoughts through a series of observations that are inventoried more or less in list form. For example, early in the book she is walking through her neighborhood, and that walk is rendered as a list of impressions, with her reactions to those impressions at times interspersed:
Orchard and Grand. Laundromat. Lots of linoleum and rows of machines and a few people folding clothes in the window... Grocers. Dyed tulips and roses that will turn the water purple when they're brought home and put in vases by mothers or girlfriends, keepers of vases. Bruised oranges. Metal vats full of melting ice with Pepsis and Cokes floating on the surface like corporate-branded buoys...Nail salon. Fluorescent lighting and a row of dingy Barcaloungers with water buckets at their base. Only three customers. Asian women with lightly permed hair wearing the same dark blue aprons, filing away at strangers' nails. An emery board orchestra inside. Never had a manicure. You can't have long nails and play ball. (31-2)
Some readers might find such inventories tiresome. But for me, here and elsewhere, they serve not only to bring the neighborhood to life in my imagination, but to characterize Lucy as someone who is a habitual close reader of the world she inhabits. There's a two-part writing move that I often ask my students to practice: "Tell me what you see. Then tell me what you think about what you see." It's a good way for me to get to know the students and to get a sense of how their minds work. It's the same basic principle on display here, although in a much more fully developed way. We get to know Lucy by hanging out with her, seeing what she sees, and hearing what she has to say about what she sees. The book is replete with interesting conversations that she has with Percy, with Alexis, with Violet, and, in a stunningly revelatory turn toward the end of the book, with her mom.
Two other thoughts. The first is that The Falconer, perhaps inevitably, is being compared to The Catcher in the Rye. Fair enough, there are more than enough points of connection to justify that. (Is it a mere coincidence that Holden's school is Pency and Lucy's is Pendleton? That Holden wants to be the Catcher in the Rye and that Lucy wants to be the Falconer (depicted in the NYC statue shown at the top of this post*)? And so on.) But here's the thing: in my judgement at least, Lucy is a more interesting and multidimensional character than Holden, and The Falconer is the better novel. Salinger gets points for being a groundbreaker and writing what was at that time the only novel of its kind, which made it into a classic novel of adolescence. But The Falconer is a better-written and more broad-ranging novel.
The second is that I have read some commentary which criticizes The Falconer for using "too many f-words for a young adult novel." To which I have two responses. First, this is not a YA novel. It's a novel, period. (I have issues with the YA novel as a genre, but that's a topic for another time.) The Catcher in the Rye was not written as a YA novel either, although it seems over the years to have been shoved into that pigeonhole. Second, have you spent any time with teenagers in the last twenty years? I have, and I'm here to tell you that virgin ears are a thing of the past. The characters in this novel talk the way people I know actually talk. And I look at that as a value-add, not as a shortcoming.
* "Our ices continue to melt in our palms as we walk past The Falconer, a statue of a young boy in tights, leg muscles blazing, releasing a bird, only his toes on the ground, the falcon's wings in the midst of opening... I know I'm supposed to love the statue of Alice in Wonderland, being a girl and all, but I've always loved this one. It's reminiscent of the feeling when you hit the perfect jump shot. The way your body goes skyward and the ball is released at the tippy-top of your fingers and you know, as soon as you let it go: that shit's gonna fall in. (61)
