It's been a while since I've done a rambling book review, but I recently read King Dork Approximately, by Frank Portman, which comes out in December, and I have some Thoughts and Feelings about it. Said Ts and Fs (as Tom would say) are under the cut due to spoilers and some light feminist ranting.
Before reading King Dork Approximately, I reread King Dork, which I first read in 2008, and loved. Like, a lot. This time, however, I wasn't quite as into it, and a lot of that was because I was put off my Tom's sometimes merely misguided and sometimes incredibly gross approach to and opinions on women.
Aside from that, I came to the conclusion that yeah, Tom might not be "normal" by his definition, but he is a little bit of a sociopath (again, by his working definition of the word). As a sort of defense mechanism, he views everyone who doesn’t support him as subhuman, which leads to him not really thinking there are any consequences for treating them like shit (or, indeed, bashing their head with a rock and then walking away).
Though it's at moments such as the above head-bashing that we must remember how unreliable a narrator Tom is, and, I would argue, be aware that we’re not really supposed to believe anything he says, at least not without corroborating evidence. I don’t think even necessarily think we’re supposed to sympathize with Tom Henderson, our Holden-hating, Holden-like narrator, which I guess makes the next part a little more able to be rationalized.
So yeah, that takes us to the issue of Tom Henderson and the Ladies. In my reread, I was struck my the way Tom seems to view making out, etc., as a reward for a powerful vocabulary or for being in a band. Like girl only exist to be subtly manipulated into giving boys what they want (to this end, the entries in the glossary about "uncooperative females" are especially troubling).
Tom has the wrong or mistaken idea about almost everything, despite how much time he spends thinking about his ideas about things. But I do honestly hope, for my own sake as well as that of both boy and girl teen readers, that Portman is portraying Tom's attitude toward girls in this way in order to showcase the (sometimes destructive) idiocy of teenage boys, not to say that this is in any way how the real world works.
In King Dork Approximately, there were still some passages that bothered me, but it pleased me that all of the women "given" to Tom in the first book as a prize for being in a rock band or whatever (from his perspective, anyway) essentially dropped him in the dust, and overall I felt that the new girl characters had a lot going for them (obviously I super love the Female Robot, I mean, come on). And the narration seemed a little more self-aware (but in an unreliable way, naturally) of the fact that Tom sometimes thinks about girls (the world, everything) in a reductive and super biased way.
Overall, by the end of the novel, I think I'm willing to give Tom the benefit of the doubt and hope that when he stops being quite so young, quite so consumingly influenced by the music he listens to and his ideas of who or what he's supposed to be, and starts listening to thoughts that come from other people's heads instead of his own (it is encouraging that he reads the Robot's letters, and even the fact that he calls her "the Robot" I'm willing to see as cute rather than something more nefarious), he'll start to figure out (more than he already has) that the world doesn't owe him anything.
I know that it can be problematic, also, to feel that characters (or even books) should uphold some ideal view of how the world should work or what's right, instead of being a collection of flaws and problematic ideas mixed in with all the "good" stuff. (But I'm also aware that I don't want that to let people off the hook entirely just because I don't want to be thought of as touchy and uncool.)
But in the end, you know, I am usually willing to let myself be convinced of people's goodness. In the end, I can't help rooting for Tom despite his many faults, and I very much want to believe that he really did get his Sex Alliance Against Society. Because you've got to believe at some point, you know?
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