Feeling Your Age (And When Not To)

I just got back from the cool movie theater near my apartment, where I saw the film adaptation of The Perks of Being a Wallflower. This is a young adult novel that I read for the first time last fall at age 22. I got it out of the library in Lincoln Park and read it on the train downtown, finishing it on a riverside bench I found by chance that day. I loved it. It was worth the wait.

The bench became my go-to outdoor reading and relaxation bench; the book, although I didn't know it at the time, became one of the catalysts for the writing I'm doing now.

But forget the bench and forget my writing. The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a book many of my friends deeply connected with in their teenage years. I put off reading it because...well, the reasons have escaped me. Suffice it to say that I have never really read books at the age at which I was expected to read them.

I really, really liked the movie. Was it a Great Movie? Who knows? Who cares? This was not one of my childhood novels, so I was perhaps less invested than some. (Also, knowing the author adapted and directed the film left me with no worries about fidelity.) It left me giddy, mostly. I felt like I felt after reading the Hunger Games trilogy: like a teenager, like I was experiencing emotion like a teenager. At certain points during the movie I had contorted myself into shapes in my seat that I don't think I've found myself in since I watched Pride & Prejudice for the first time. (I was thirteen or thereabouts when I watched Pride & Prejudice for the first time.)

While I was watching the movie, I experienced two overwhelming emotions that had passed me by while reading the book: vivid, happy nostalgia and gut-churning discomfort. I really felt for Charlie, the main character, who struggles to "participate." Watching him struggle to give word to his feelings, watching him inch closer to the people he wants to befriend, watching him understand more than he can express: it all reminded me of moments in my own life--few and far between, but still present--when I feel uncomfortable and unable to connect. Those parts of the film were uncomfortable for the same reasons watching J. Edgar was so uncomfortable last year. I am far, far better off than Charlie (and light years better off than anyone in J. Edgar), but no one ever said that a character has to be overwhelmingly like you for you to identify with them, and when a film or a novel is successful and your connection with the character is strong, it can feel as if that character is forcing you to amplify your feelings to match theirs. (What is tragically hilarious about this phenomenon in the case of Charlie is that this is exactly his problem. He feels too much of what others are feeling and takes it all in, letting too little out in return.)

A beautiful this about identifying with Charlie: his high school friends. This part of the film was pure joy for me (and, if the noises the rest of the audience made were anything to go by, a sizable portion of the theater felt the same way). What a collection of crazy, imperfect people who talk over each other and know all the same stories and have all the same inside jokes. Their circumstances are very different, but they remind me of people I know very well. Watching the movie reminded me of spending time with my high school friends: how effortless it is, how when we're together it's as if we've simultaneously changed and stayed just as we were senior year. My high school was small, and leaving it made me realize which people exactly were worth keeping in touch with. Some people I could have predicted; other crept up on me. When you find a group of people like that, it's worth writing about, as Charlie discovers. It's worth writing about again and again, in different forms, in different genres, across age and time.

Charlie made me think of another boy, younger, and from a different country, in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Little Bill Roach is stuck in a boarding school whose customs he doesn't fully understand, struggling to fit in to a culture that doesn't come naturally to him. In John Le Carré's book, and in the BBC miniseries adaptation, Bill Roach is buoyed along by his friendship with Jim Prideaux, a former spy now teaching French at the school. Jim draws Bill Roach out, making him aware of his natural talents--observation and empathy--and celebrating those talents. Bill Roach feels as if he has become part of something through this friendship, and he realizes for the first time that his character traits may in fact be abilities.

I love this relationship between Bill Roach and Jim Prideaux, natural "singles" and "watchers" both, so when, last winter, I saw the (otherwise great) film adaptation of the novel, I felt let down when Jim, overwhelmed with his own problems and tiring of the ever-hovering Bill Roach, lashes out with, "Go and join the others. Just bloody join in. Go and play, damn you.” This is their final interaction.

In The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Charlie makes his own efforts to join in, but he makes it his aim to participate not because someone has told him he should, but because he knows what happiness it can bring him. His friends accept him because the  qualities that make him struggle to break away from the wall at a school dance are the same qualities that enable him to say to one of his friends, "I know who you are." Knowing that someone is watching--and watching out for--you is a powerful feeling. Charlie made the effort once, to participate, and it won him these wonderful friends. By the end of the novel, he knows he can do it again, and he can do it without trying to be someone else. It's easier to admit to your own good qualities when you surround yourself with people who can see those qualities in you, people who know that some things about you will change but that there are fixed points about you too.

Ultimately, I think what I like so much about The Perks of Being a Wallflower is that it's a celebration of all the things I like most: literature, conversation, observation, introspection, close friendships, loyalty. "Only connect," said E.M. Forster. Charlie connects, and he connects in his own way: "I know who you are." "And all the books you've read have been read by other people."