A Certain Slant of Light

Virginia Hamilton’s 1972 Newbery winner The Planet of Junior Brown is an exceptionally odd book. It begins with Junior Brown and Buddy Clark admiring the model of the solar system that Mr. Pool, the school janitor, has hung up in the secret back room that he has constructed behind the false back of one of the school’s broom closets.

I’m afraid that upon learning of Mr. Pool’s secret room for hanging out with junior high students, my instant reaction was, “Is Mr. Pool a child molestor?” He is not, and the book at no point expects you to see Mr. Pool as anything but a fine stand-up guy. Nonetheless I couldn’t get over the feeling that Mr. Poole was bad news, a feeling only exacerbated when it turned out that Buddy and Junior have been skipping school to hang out in this closet for the past two and a half months.

This is especially baffling because it’s apparently motive-less: Hamilton seems to consider sitting in a closet such an obvious improvement over school that it requires no explanation, and thus no explanation is offered. Junior and Buddy are not being bullied. (This is especially noteworthy because the book reminds us constantly that Junior is very fat, as round as the tenth planet that Mr. Pool added to the solar system and called “the planet of Junior Brown.”) They both get good grades, so they aren’t overwhelmed by the classwork. They might be bored in class, but as boring as high school classes can be, they are not more boring than sitting in a tiny closet all day.

(Hopefully you ask: “Are Buddy and Junior making out in that closet?” This would certainly give their closet-dwelling lifestyle an impetus, but Junior and Buddy’s friendship doesn’t give off that vibe at all.)

Near the end of the book, Junior and Buddy get caught playing hooky. Rather than return to class, Junior decides to run away from home. (Buddy is already living on the streets as part of a network of homeless boys, who run safehouses they call “planets.”) Buddy Clark, Mr. Pool, and the narrative all agree that this is the best possible course of action. Buddy assures Junior that his mother (who is prone to debilitating asthma attacks, especially in times of stress) will know that Junior is fine, even though there appears to be no plan in place to let her know that he is, in fact, fine.

Also, Junior is not, in fact, fine. He has started to hallucinate. His after-school piano teacher Miss Peebles has not let him play for months, because the relative who is visiting her can’t stand noise… but it turns out that the only two people who can see this relative are Miss Peebles and Junior Brown.

In a stunning moment of common sense, Mr. Pool says, “Junior needs help.” But this visit to consensual reality instantly collapses. Mr. Pool concludes that clearly the best way to help Junior is for Junior to run away from home to live on Buddy’s planet.

Buddy’s planet is a dark, debris-filled, unelectrified basement, only accessible by rope ladder. The rope ladder is too weak to bear Junior’s weight, so the only way for him to get down there is for Mr. Pool to construct a hoist. I sincerely hope that hoist is going to stay in the planet’s doorway from now on, because otherwise Junior will be trapped in the basement.

I am not convinced! Actually! That the nightmare basement is going to be the best thing for Junior Brown’s mental health! But apparently Hamilton thinks it will be just hunky-dory, because that’s where the book stops.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

A bonanza of Newbery books this week! Nancy Farmer’s The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm (fun, but not as good as A Girl Named Disaster, Elizabeth George Speare’s The Sign of the Beaver (a white boy is left alone to hold the claim while his father fetches the rest of the family; befriended by local Indian boy. It was written in the 1980s and is very eighties), Paul Fleischman’s Graven Images (a collection of three short stories, each one prominently featuring a statue. I have just now realized that Sid and Paul Fleischman are different people; Sid was Paul’s father), AND FINALLY Virginia Hamilton’s Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush (a ghost story, although the ghost is almost beside the point; very sad).

I also finished Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, which I wish I had read back when I was writing Captain America fanfic, as it could have added interesting new depth to the minor plotline of Bucky vs. The SHIELD Therapists… although really I suspect the SHIELD vision of “therapy” is to apply a twisted version of CBT to browbeat agents into submission. These are the people who recruited Skye by kidnapping her, after all.

What I’m Reading Now

Mary Renault’s The Last of the Wine, because apparently I’m a glutton for punishment and I’m going to read all of Mary Renault’s books. (Well, maybe not all. I understand there are some early works about heterosexuals, which I probably won’t bother with.)

Speaking of heterosexuals, I’ve also begun Jonathan Ned Katz’s The Invention of Heterosexuality, by which he means not male-female bonking in general but the specific cultural construction where it is VERY IMPORTANT that men and women direct every single iota of their erotic energy entirely at opposite-sexed people at all times.

I haven’t gotten very far in this yet, but it has a delightfully acid forward by Gore Vidal, who gets distracted from actually discussing the book in question to pursue a decades-old feud with his frenemy James Baldwin. Apparently Baldwin said some mean things about Vidal’s novel The City and the Pillar, and now Vidal is returning the favor by calling Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room “a perfect panic of a book that ends with the beloved one’s head chopped off in Paris.”

What I Plan to Read Next

I was going to say “I think I should take a break from the Newbery Honor books for a while,” but actually I’m on a roll right now, so why cut myself short?