At first glance, Where
Things Come Back is utterly boring. If I
hadn’t been taking a class on the Printz Award, I would never have finished it.
By page five I hated the main
character. Cullen is simply a pretentious writer stuck in a teenage body. He’s
deeply introspective, in love with love, picked on by jocks, and hopelessly
self-important. He’s comfortable with being “an insecure shell of a man” and
goes so far as to pick friends who allow him to be this way. He’s misogynistic
in his descriptions of Ada, his brusque toleration of Meena, and his ignorance
of Laura Fish’s emotions. He broadens these offensive ideas to all women in
this ridiculous statement, “Pretty girls always want guys who treat them, and
most everyone else, like complete shit.”
His voice grated on my nerves.
The “When one does X, he begins to imagine Y” pattern used to distance himself
from his fantasies throws me out of the narrative many times. The insertion of
super-extra-clever book titles for his journal sometimes make me want to gag.
Zombies and dark humor just seem like a contrived part of this emo package.
The setting felt cliché. Lily
is a tiny town where nothing important happens; however, this tiny town has
much more than it’s fair share of tragedy. Teenagers regularly die, adults who
desperately want to leave get stuck there, parents are abusive or alcoholic or
absent, and by the end of the book, the biggest hope the town has had in its
entire existence turns out to be false.
The interwoven plot was jarring at first. I had no idea
there was a dual narrative to this book until I was jolted out of Lily,
Arkansas and plopped down into third-world Africa. Even after several switches,
when an experienced reader would be expected to easily shift mindsets between
narratives, the completely disjointed plot still made me want to throw the book
across the room. I didn’t begin to sympathize with plot B until late in his
story when I read, “He had traveled halfway around the world, slept in
dirt-floor huts, given food and water to the poor and dying, but still hadn’t
impressed Mr. Jackson Sage.” I finally felt something for him, and stopped
feeling like trashing the book, but I still had no clue why he was there.
As I rounded the corner to the second half of the book, I
began to understand why it won an award. I was happily surprised by the beauty
and style of lines like these:
“He imagines heaven to be not some huge
city with streets of gold and tall, white building, but a simple room filled
with just enough of the good people to make him smile and feel like the center
of attention as he tells a funny joke or talks about a new idea for a book. He
sees his brother standing in the corner wearing green flannel pajamas like he
did at Christmas five years before, and he sees his mother and father holding
hands at the kitchen sink as he caught them doing on time when he was eleven.
He see Lucas Cader tossing a football across the room to his older brother
Alex, who looked just like him, and he hears his aunt Julia singing a hymn that
he heard in church when he was eight or so.”
“I was trying to figure who I was back
then. Trying to figure out why I said and did the things I said and did. Trying
to understand why I cried ten minutes after Lucas told me Ada was at Russell’s
but never shed a tear when my cousin dropped dead. Wondering why I had written
nearly ninety titles, but not one single book. Questioning why I couldn’t do a
damn thing to bring my brother back.”
Cullen’s quiet, intense emotion broke through my spite and
confusion and began to draw me in. The two plots began to come together. I
couldn’t stop turning pages to find out what had really happened to Gabriel.
The parallel of themes, the merging of disparate stories, the beauty of
Cullen’s emotions gave the feel of something almost supernatural at play in the
previously boring story.
When I finished the book, I had to stop and think for a long
time. There are so many themes and symbols at play in this book, a literature
class could probably spend an entire semester on it. The symbols of
resurrection – Gabriel, the bird, the revived town, Benton’s crazy ideas,
Russell, and even Cullen himself, combine to create magical realism. Whaley
puts it this way, “things could come back from the dead, mistakes could be
rectified, lives could be started over.” Whaley provides social commentary on
short-lived fame, law enforcement, and religion. Themes include interconnected
fates, false hope, cynicism, death, grief, and friendship. Cullen points out
something important about the way other people handle grief:
“I wanted to be offered help from
people because they cared about me, not because they felt some strange social
obligation to do so. If you feel sorry for someone, don’t pretend to be happy.
Don’t pretend to care only about their problems. People aren’t stupid. The
world can’t be satisfied but that need to fix it all can.”
A more prominent theme, traceable through both stories is
obsession. The townspeople are so obsessed with the bird, they overlook a
15-year-old’s disappearance. Cabot’s obsession is aptly described here: “He had
taken Benton's notes and not blown them out of proportion so much as he had
strapped an atom bomb to every letter of every word.”
Over all of this, the theme of second chances transcends the
story. Cullen says, “People can’t give up on other people yet. We all get a
second chance, you know. We get to start over like Noah after the flood. No
matter how evil man gets, he always gets a second chance one way or another.”
Second chances make this story something newer, something beautiful, something
that deserves to be read a second time.
