Note: If you think this review is haphazard and poorly structured. . . it is. This review comes from the depths of my Google Drive, but I liked this book so much I had to feature it. Perhaps another day I will revisit this and improve it. For now, here are the unedited thoughts I had some time ago:
The novel opens with Charlie, the main character, beginning a letter to an older anonymous confidant, who we never learn the identity of. These letters that Charlie drafts, detailing his hopes, days, memories, and struggles make up the book. We learn that Charlie’s friend Michael committed suicide last spring, and that Charlie has had a rough go at life since this time and in addition to the death of his Aunt Helen. We meet Charlie’s family: the worrisome mother who distracts herself with household duties, the father who made something of himself but is possibly plagued by thoughts of possible success he didn’t achieve, the smart older sister who struggles with an abusive boyfriend throughout the book, and the star football player older brother who is off at college and aspires to play for the NFL. And then there is Charlie, the freshman who is nervous to begin high school. He doesn’t ask for much, and is fairly complacent, which becomes one of the main aspects of his character that is tracked throughout the book, as his English teacher Bill urges him to ‘participate’ in life, and his first love Sam tells him that he must advocate for what he wants so life doesn’t pass him by. Thus, the main plot of the novel revolves around Charlie finding his place in high school and the world, with the help of his senior friends Patrick and Sam, and all the escapades and struggles they go through together. I won’t spoil the ending here, because if you haven’t read it, no matter your age, I sincerely urge you to do so.
The aspects of Chbosky’s Early Life and Career as discussed on his Wikipedia page that I found most interesting were his catholic upbringing in Pittsburgh, his love of authors such as Salinger and Fitzgerald, his sister, and his attending USC.
To begin, his catholic upbringing interested me because while the book lacked religious overtones, the inclusion of themes such as sexual abuse and physical abuse were at the forefront of a lot of what Charlie went through. While I know these are not synonymous with the Catholic Church, and I mean in to way to link them together, the topics of corporal punishment and sexual abuse have been tied to events within the Catholic Church in the past, and as a result I wonder if this had any impact on why Chbosky included these issues as central themes. On the other hand, these two entities could be completely unrelated, and very well are. But as I was reading his Wikipedia page, this fact struck me.
Loosely linked with the one above, is the author’s connection to Pittsburgh/Pennsylvania is very apparent throughout the novel. Charlie’s brother goes to Penn State, as does Sam later on, the inclusion of the tunnel into the city that has become symbolic of Charlie’s feeling of being infinite, and the nights at the clubs in the city all show these ties to life growing up in the suburb around a major city. As someone who grew up in California for most of her life, the changing of the seasons within the novel(especially the inclusion of snow) pointed to this being a characteristically east coast novel.
