The weird wranger chick and the mixed race kid hook up. Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park.
Where I’m from, a wranger simply means a red-headed individual, but I prefer saying it cos it just sounds better. The cover of the book for me was a bit misleading. Two silhouettes, one boy (that’s Park) and a girl (that’s Eleanor). The boy wears a cap with a bag slung on his shoulder, sitting on the bench. The girl is wearing a dress listening to music on her headphones. They’re both quite slim there’s little that we can discern of their appearance, race, ethnicity and what not.
It’s the type of cover that’s supposed to sell, but it’s fucking lies cos Eleanor is not slim and she doesn’t wear a fucking dress. She wears boy clothes with neckties around her wrist. She doesn’t let her hair down. And as much as I hate to say this, her appearance matters to the story as this affects how Eleanor perceives the world around her, how she interact with others and how others interact with her.
This is the same thing with Park, whose father is an all-white all-American Korean War vet and whose mum is a stereotypical Korean hairdresser with imperfect and loud English. Sure, these are formative years when you’re teenagers: the clothes you wear, the music you listen to, how your body looks. In this mutual strangeness, and by their proximity in the school bus, Eleanor and Park started to become a thing.
How does Eleanor & Park fare compared to other young adult novels of the genre? I don’t know as I tend to avoid them like priests avoid casinos. But once in a while, these books tend to come up in book lists and you just gotta pick them up. You might even enjoy it. And I did, until they actually started going out, then the cringe tropes started to rear its ugly head. Maybe there is no way of writing romance well, for any age, maybe romance isn’t for me, maybe I’m just a humbug. But fuck I feel the cringe when the romance is floating around.
This is not to say that the book is terrible. I think there’s quite a fair bit that I liked, such as the very real poverty of Eleanor who was kicked out of her house for a year, living practically as an orphan; how Eleanor only imagines what bands sound like based on their looks, based on music magazines; and the conversations here (minus the romance) are what you imagine teenagers would sound like with unnecessary swearing and ennui-like sarcasm.
It is still, minus the romance, a decent book. Park’s struggle to reconcile his identity as a half-white, half-Asian kid affects his choice of music, and him picking up an eyeliner. Eleanor, with her limited means have to think pragmatically about every move, what to wear, the politics with her siblings and also her vulnerability with a stepfather who’s a ticking time bomb.
This is also a time before mobile phones and social media, where you actually need to go to the person’s house to see how they’re doing, and you can’t just make up a playlist in Spotify in 15 minutes. Sharing music takes effort, and burning tapes was the only way to go. The year the story was set was the year of my birth, and that’s ’86 for you. I honestly thought that the kids would grow up at some point (in a version where Eleanor wears a dress and becomes thin, just like on the covers).
But for the life of me, I’m not sure why she picked this era than any other eras, which confised me. Is the book meant for older audiences who grew up during that time? I don’t feel much of the nostalgia factor, as I grew up a decade later. Was it because anything 80s is considered retro and Rowell was banking on that? Not sure. The story could be set in the ’90s and I don’t think it’d make a lot of difference.
Then again I’ve got heaps of useless questions. Does it matter if we use “and” instead of the ampersand in the title? Maybe not. But these are the questions that harangue me like telemarketers during my quarterly planning meetings.
Still, it is a cut above most young adult books, but it did not manage to escape the tropes fully. Come to think of it, out of all the books that I’ve read (and I’ve read a few), I don’t remember a lot of books that do romance well, especially this delicate teenage love nonsense. The only one I could think about was Alain-Fourner’s Le Grand Meaulnes, that book cut deep, and it’s waiting to be reread on my shelf.
But the biggest flaw of the book for me is not the cringeworthy romance, but the fact that it dragged. Between the time that the two kids found out they liked each other, nothing much really happens except for some blue-balls, and before you know it, the big thing in the end happens and there’s the end of the book. And when I reached it, I was quite thankful.
