Book Review: A Fine White Dust

I’ve continued my 1980s Newbery Honor readings with Cynthia Rylant’s A Fine White Dust, and I need to share my feelings about this book because it is extremely, uncomfortably, possibly unintentionally gay.

So our narrator, 13-year-old Pete, lives in a small town. The town is fairly religious, so Pete feels a little out of place because his parents rarely go to church... but Pete himself has a religious streak, so he also feels a little out of place at home. And then the Preacher Man comes to town for a revival, and Pete's religiosity skyrockets as Pete falls in love with him.

I’m not sure we’re meant to see it as Pete falling in love with the Preacher Man. Pete definitely does not think of it that way, even as he describes the Preacher Man’s magnetic blue eyes and the way his heart pounds every time that he sees him. This happens, by the way, before he ever hears the Preacher Man preach: he sees him in a drugstore, without knowing who he is, and at the sight of those blue eyes he has to hide behind the comics rack because his heart is thumping. He decides it’s because this stranger is maybe a serial killer.

Then Pete hears the Preacher Man preach, and dreams about him afterward, “Dreams of Preacher Man and his sweat and his face and him pulling me down the aisle, pulling me in and in and in.” He faints into the Preacher Man’s arms after he’s saved, and the next day they spend three hours talking in the drug store, and the day after that Pete goes to the drugstore determined to wait till he sees the Preacher Man: “I just wanted to be with him.” When they’re apart, Pete’s life feels like “one big empty box.”

Then one evening as Pete and the Preacher Man are chatting, the Preacher Man starts talking about how he’s always been different (!) and lonely (!!!) until a Russian boy came to his class when he was 16 (!!!!!)... but he never exactly finishes that story. Instead, seeing how Pete is vibing with his story (different! lonely!), he asks Pete to run away with him when he leaves town.

“PETE NO,” I screamed, as Pete says, “Yes”: thrilled, terrified, but clearly without a single solitary clue of the true possible danger.

Pete packs his bag! He goes to wait at the filling station at the end of town! And he waits and he waits and… the Preacher Man doesn’t show.

Pete is devastated, but he doesn’t fully break down till the next morning, when he learns that the Preacher Man skipped town with Darlene, the waitress at the drugstore. “He left with a girl. He left with a girl and me waiting for him.”

So the Preacher Man is a sexual predator, right? We are all agreed on this? He got Pete on his string, but then he hooked Darlene, and an eighteen-year-old girl was more to his taste than a thirteen-year-old boy, so the Preacher Man went off with her and left Pete flat at the filling station. Of course really that’s the best way this could turn out for Pete, but JESUS.

(Darlene comes back three weeks later and will not talk about the Preacher at ALL, by the way, in case you were worried he really was a serial killer.)

Pete, however, with an extremely believable and terrifying teenage naivete, doesn’t see it this way. “He never meant to hurt me,” he muses, in the final chapter, as he looks back from the exalted age of 14 on the events of the previous year. “I really believe that.”

It’s a wonderfully written book - Rylant is incredible at portraying overwhelming, half-understood early-teenage emotion. But it’s VERY STRESSFUL. My own heart was pumping just as hard as Pete’s, although for a very different reason. He’s so vulnerable: he doesn’t understand his own feelings, he can’t see that any grown man who would ask a thirteen-year-old to run away with him is clearly the WORST news, and I spent the book terrified that this would blow up in his face much worse than it did.