Ok. So. As previously mentioned, everyone who can understand the English language by age 15 or so should read Crutcher's Deadline. Yes, I have expanded the original requirement. I have my reasons.
Crutcher's novels are generally sports-related, and Deadline is about football. I've already discussed this - I know sports lit means more to team athletes than it does to me. That's not to say I can't appreciate it, because I do understand what people get from participating in or watching football (see previous entry: The White Gates). And if at some point I have a kid - boy OR girl - and they get into football...well, my parents went to all of my band concerts, so you'd better believe I'd be there and would learn the lingo fast.
Granted, Crutcher doesn't only write about football - the first book of his I read, Stotan!, is about a swim team, and I know he's covered track. But like all good books, there is a balance of pure action (the games/meets) and plot. They tie in together, but reading a Crutcher novel for someone who doesn't follow certain sports isn't like reading the sports page. It's an addition, not the glue that holds it together.
So this works in two ways - you've got appeal to folks who don't follow sports, but you have a hook for any readers who do. This is what I like about sports lit and the presumably "reluctant reader" - you can have enough description of a sport to appeal to its young followers, and then balance it out (or use it for) plot/character development, symbolism, etc. I am convinced that is why my entire 7th grade English class reacted the way we did to S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders - we were 12 and, having recently seen and most likely misinterpreted Dangerous Minds, were into the idea of gang fighting.
The thing with Crutcher is, he's both real, and represents reality. Make no mistake, these are two separate things. He's real in the sense that his characters are real teenagers. They drop the F-bomb. They think about, and talk about, and have sex. They are full of that energy that is both euphoric and terrifying, and aren't quite sure where to direct it. Crutcher is the second YA author who I thought was much younger than he actually is, because his descriptions of high school, of teenagers, were too pure to be written by an adult. As we grow up, we lose that sense of what being young really was - the good and the bad and what we really did and said - and idealize it in our minds and gloss over it in our writing. But that's not how it is, and I always admire those writers who, for lack of a better description, keep it real.
Crutcher also represents reality in the same way that the Degrassi series does. That is, his characters are facing issues that might be overlooked in other works of fiction. Crutcher routinely writes about mental illness (and we're making that a very umbrella term: not just depression/anxiety), about rape, about molestation, about alcoholism, about suicide, about drug use, about abuse (again, very broad), and about illness...just to name a few. And these aren't issues that are brought up, like, one-per-book: you'll have run the entire gamut by the time you get the the end of Deadline.
Even writing that, I know it sounds like his work is melodramatic. But what separates Crutcher's writing from ye old "problem novel" is the fact that that he doesn't just focus on one problem. Narrator Ben Wolf is dying, yes, but by the time you reach the final few chapters of the book, it almost seems like he's getting off easy compared to what's going on with other characters. It puts things in perspective. Ben doesn't tell anyone what's going on with him, just the same way other characters aren't up front about their own demons.
So, what's the rationale for making this required reading for all of humanity (yes, one last expansion)? It isn't the previously described drama, which Crutcher handles with an impressive, delicate distance (in fact, if you read reviews on Amazon, some readers feel there should have been more emotional outbursts to such situations...but at some point, we need for fiction to show how reality should be, not how it most often is). Rather, it is Ben's response to his one-year "deadline" - his dedication to his final year of school, his persistence in his final football season, and his passion at leaving "something" behind before he's gone. What he starts out to do is to challenge the school's "traditional" teaching of American history (and props to Ben for referencing James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and David Sedaris). What Ben winds up attempting is a seemingly futile request to have a local street name changed to "Malcolm X Avenue," and thereby force his small, all-white town to recognize that racism still exists.
The book is back at the library now, but there's a line towards the end about how Ben "lived like [he] was going to die tomorrow, but with the understanding that any action affected others." In context, that was such a powerful idea - to live without fear, but to recognize that things said and choices made have an impact on others, even after we're gone. And "gone" could mean anything here - graduating, moving - though Ben is focusing on a more permanent departure.
There's so much more to the book that what I've said. Ben's coach...I could write so much about that character, but I'm pretty sure 80% of it is due to the fact that I was seriously infatuated with him by the time the book was over. Essentially, Crutcher really hit a stride here. I'm plenty happy to embrace this as his magnum opus, but personally, I'm still hoping the best is yet to come.
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