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‘The Vast Fields of Ordinary’ is what I’m now calling a ‘Why won’t you let me love you ?!’ novel. It’s not so much that I wanted to love this book and found that it was a disappointment; I did love this book deeply, but it seemed determined to push me away at times.The narrator of ‘The Vast Fields of Ordinary’ is Dade Hamilton and he opens his story on prom night, with possibly the saddest prom ever. Dade sits in a toilet cubicle drawing a large heart on the wall and it’s quickly revealed that his heart belongs to Pablo a closeted football player, who sleeps with Dade, but refuses to admit any intimacy between them (he has a rule about kissing, which automatically made me think of ‘Pretty Woman’). Pablo’s girlfriend Judy rules Cedarville’s teenage social world and spends a disproportionate amount of time keeping Dade miserable, probably because she suspects their relationship. Dade is unhappy; sneaking around practically begging Pablo to accept the true state of their relationship, while Pablo abuses him emotionally and sometimes physically. He’s resigned to riding the summer out in misery until he can escape to Freemont college. Then he meets brave, fun, worldly Lucy and gorgeous, mysterious Alex Kincaid. Suddenly summer becomes even more complicated, but perhaps more optimistic.
When I wrote ‘perhaps more optimistic’ there I had to really think about whether that description is appropriate for the progression of Dade’s summer in ‘The Vast Fields of Ordinary’ because there is a lot of angst in this book. Nick Burd has Dade use a range of images that accumulate to evoke a stifling, angst filled, small town atmosphere. While he often uses nature in sympathy and negative descriptions of objects and people, these elements do not seem like symbols that reflect Dade’s emotions. Instead Burd seems to have created a character whose emotions transform the way he sees places and objects, so that he views them through an especially dark perspective and as a first person narrator passes his feelings of chilly melancholy and depression back to the reader:
'A cool breeze swept through the yard. All around the leaves of the trees resutled in the wind. I looked up at the moon, the only witness to the entire night. I longed to be back in the cemetry with Alex, lying in the grass and staring up at the sky. I wondered where he was right then, if he was home yet or if maybe he was driving around town on that disappointing nocturnal search for somewhere else to go that nearly every Cedarville teenager embarked on at some point.'
He doesn’t skew the way the world is to promote an agenda (although obviously Nick Burd deliberately makes Dade embrace the more angsty side of description to create an emotive aesthetic effect). He doesn’t dissemble about what he sees and reconfigure the world to obscure the positive side of life. His emotions just inherently influence him to see the darker parts of the world more clearly. So although Dade lives in a sunny town, with affluent parents everything seems to takes on patina of maliciousness to him.
I guess that’s the very definition of teenage angst; the world reconfigured through an overwhelmingly dark perspective, but like I said Dade’s reality isn’t necessarily skewed by his emotions (although it does tend to narrow his focus and make him almost hyper aware of the negative side of some of the privileges in his life). Burd has written a view of Cedarville created out of Dade’s emotions, but the town also reinforces and partly validates Dade’s emotional state by being awful. Cedarville, is a waste ground, Dade’s parents can’t seem to keep their damaged emotional state from their son and Dade is ostracised by almost everyone his own age. Burd also completes the overwhelmingly dark aesthetic atmosphere of Dade’s world, by including menacing scenes when the physical darkness of Dade’s world at night encourages a feeling of fear in Dade or the reader. A little girl called Jenny Moore goes missing, then reappears, highlighting Cedarville’s identity as a menacing town where bad things can happen for no reason and then be retracted by the town’s whim. The town and sometimes Dade’s house almost feel like malevolent presences. Dade’s view of the world often feels claustrophobic and the emotional intensity is raised to new heights with each dark image that Burd introduces.
Sometimes Dade describes his world as possessing a more positive, American gothic type of beauty and talks about the happy parts of his life in a conflicting mixture of cracked and conventionally beautiful imagery, for example When Dade meets Alex scenes are introduced where the dark descriptive passages are less claustrophobic, still slightly sinister, but still positive:
'The light from the dashboard made his face look green. He reached down and clicked a button under the steering wheel and the grene light went out along the headlights, and the car was thrown into darkness. The moon lit up the road in front of us. I grabbed the door handle....
I looked out at the pasture. There were thousands of lightening bugs swirling in the air over the field. It was as if a million tiny stars had descended to the earth and were lightly flashing out of synch. I told myself that it was ok to be driving in the darkness with this guy, that I shoudl enjoy the moment.'
These parts of the book, which that provide a release from the tension of Dade’s life increase when he makes his first real friend, Lucy, a neighbour’s niece banished to the country after telling her super religious parents she’s a lesbian. It’s beautiful to see this mix of light and dark and the intersection between them as the teenagers remain cynical and keen to escape, even as their summer begins to be fun. Despite the release of their friendship and the happiness introduced by Dade’s relationship with Alex there’s always Pablo’s increasingly erratic text behaviour, or the disappearance of Jenny Moore lurking in the background. With this fine balance of high tension and cloudy move to happiness Burd keeps reinvigorating the atmosphere of his novel, making sure readers emotions never plateau.
Burd’s shadowy vision of Cedarville and teenage life is gorgeous. It reminds me of the sumptuousness of the background of depression and dark corners in Joe Hill’s ‘Heart-shaped Box’. I don’t want this to sound like I think that negative emotion automatically makes a book more worthy and artistic, but I am attracted to authors that use dark and negative imagery to give a feeling of gothic beauty to the worlds they create. If this dark imagery emphasises the claustrophobic, heavily emotive situation that characters find themselves in that rings my bell too. There’s a case to be made that books with this kind of artistic style glamorise depressing lives and tragedy. I’d definitely like to take some time to think about that idea in relation to this book, because it’s complicated to disconnect a beautiful, gothic sensibility that makes the ugly beautiful and a harmful glamorisation of staying in a permanent negative state. My gut instinct is to say Burd avoids the latter, but really I’m so in love with the imagery and the feel of this book I need some separation before I can assess it.
What I can distinguish right now are some of the reasons why despite falling headlong into Burd’s writing, empathising with Dade and admiring of the way Burd brings complicated parents into a young adult novel, despite the racial and sexual diversity of the characters Burd, despite the hot, well written scenes of boys kissing and the fun, knowing group dynamic that the supporting characters Lucy, Alex and Jay create, things get in the way of my love for ‘The Vast Fields of Ordinary’. (bolded and in a run on sentence to indicate huge enthusiasm for all these things which were brilliant).
Let me start with Dade’s economic privilege. He seems totally unable to embrace how lucky he is to have money and I guess that’s because money has negative associations for him, as moving up in the world seems to have ended his parents’ marriage. However, he seems completely oblivious to the fact that he is actually privileged. I mean his refrigerator has a television in the door and he has a pool. I’m not saying he has to be happy about his material wealth, but he should at least acknowledge that not everybody is lucky enough to have a pool. Burd gestures at Dade’s lack of understanding about how privileged he is by having Lucy comment that ' "...Dade has a pool. He's over pools" ' which gives a knowing and insightful look at how an economically privileged boy misses how privileged he is without being heavy handed. However it is clear that Alex’s economic situation must affect his whole life, but Dade neglects to ever wonder if everything from Alex running drugs, to his refusal to leave Cedarville is perhaps down to his lack of financial support. These things are just quietly put down as a natural part of Alex Kincaid and his misfit background.
Dade’s failure to really engage with Alex about this area of his life brings me round to the fact that Dade is possibly the most self-centred character I’ve ever encountered. He’s a sympathetic character, but he’s often a jerk. That’s fine, I don’t need him to be a wonderful person, I actually like that he’s not, but when his self-centredness obscures the equally interesting stories of his best friend and boyfriend his personality starts to make the book poorer. There are at least two potentially interesting undiscovered stories in ‘The Vast Fields of Ordinary’, but only tantalising flashes are offered up, before Dade reroutes the conversation back to his own issues. It could be argued that the unexplored secondary character is an innate drawback of using a first person narrator, but I think the reason we miss out on Alex and Lucy’s storylines in ‘The Vast Fields of Ordinary’ is because Dade has no interest in exploring their personal tragedies, especially when it comes to Lucy. I mean she’s been kicked out of home and may have to go back to an intolerant family who seem to be involved in a fanatical church, but Dade never tries to investigate what she’s going through. It feels as if Dade’s is only interested in how his friends relate to him. Despite their sketched in complexities they only function as he wants them to, as sounding boards for Dade’s experience, or to provide him with positive reinforcement. I want books full of these characters stories please.
Then there’s something about Burd’s presentation of women which makes me uncomfortable, but I’m not sure why, none of the arguments I start with when I examine the book again. All the women in this book are portrayed negatively – um no, what about Lucy? There’s a lot of antagonism from Dade towards the popular female characters – well yes, but his dislike of them isn’t (always) expressed in gendered terms, he explains how miserable they’re making his life. Still I feel uncomfortable reading about Judy and her friends, more so than the occasional bit of sexist language really warrants. Maybe this book hits the truth too hard for me and shows how fucked up a closeted, homophobic society makes every kind of interaction, but it can’t go quite far enough to show how everyone is fucked up because the reader is following Dade’s first person narrative and so is subject to his own, understandable biases. The result is that fucked over, stalkerish, abusive Pablo and fucked over, cheating enabler Dade come off more forgivable and sympathetic than an equally fucked over, homophobic, vicious Judy. As a consequence I found myself feeling so sorry for awful Pablo by the end of this book, but still completly antagonistic towards Judy and her awful (female) friends. I can see Burd trying to bring in other voices to add alternate view points to Dade’s, for example when one character says her sister is in pain but Dade’s commentary on these voices and the fact that the entire narrative comes from his point of view just crushes the slight inklings of sympathy for other characters who are getting fucked over by a society intent on closeting gay men and pushing everyone into boxes.
Finally (argh this got long) I just want to mention something that came out of reading Renay’s review of this book. She makes a great point about Dade’s relationship with a character called Francesca, nicknamed Fessica. Despite being unpopular himself Renay says Dade continues to keep her in her lower social place by unnaming her. Now I’ve seen lots of other unpopular characters turn away from people who are even less popular than them, because when you’re low you want to know there’s something worse, but I was really bothered by the resolution to Dade and Fessica’s relationship. They both have things to apologise for by the end of the book, but he invites her to a party because it will ‘make her millennium’ (get over yourself Dade) and they just wave at each other from across the room. I just couldn’t get behind a wave as an apology from either of them, yet I feel like that action was supposed to indicate closure and growth for Dade. Personally I didn’t get it.
Conclusion: I want more books from Nick Burd, because he’s managed to shake me emotionally with a kind of doom and gloom beauty, but it would be nice if his characters could be more aware of others. You ahve to be ready to get your angst on to get into this book, but if you're angstless you can always try reading this with some vodka - it's probably what Dade would do.
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