Hey! I am going to discuss the endings to Homer’s Odyssey and Walter Dean Myers’s Lockdown in this post. You have been warned!
I cannot hate this article enough.
Alexander Nazaryan sounded full of himself back in January when I first read his take on Walter Dean Myers, and now that I’ve read Lockdown I can make counter-arguments based on my own reading. Here, have some pompous excerpts first:
I am an unashamed, unapologetic believer that the purpose of literature is to elevate. Not to entertain, to problematize or to instruct, but to take what Hamlet called our “unweeded garden” and revel in its thorns. Not to make the world pretty, but to make it true, and by making it true, make it beautiful. All real art is high art.
Myers’ books on the other hand, are painfully mundane, with simple moral lessons built into predictable situations: the projects, prison, redemption. Dostoyevsky (whom I despise – but that’s another post) of a darker shade. His stated goal is to make urban children think, but his books rarely have to make them think very deeply at all – they are about those kids’ own sad lives, and the sad lessons too many of them have already learned. To me, from the front of the classroom, those kids were, by and large, smarter than the books he wrote for them – if not, just yet, more sophisticated.
Nazaryan does not read Myers very deeply at all if his analysis is really that simple. Having read Lockdown and The Odyssey, I believe they are functionally the same story. Both involve a man trying to return home during the aftermath of a major conflict. Both include friends and enemies along the journey who enact catastrophic setbacks and mistakes of good intention.
If there is any comparison in which Lockdown falls short, it would be the final act. In The Odyssey, when Odysseus comes home in disguise and sees how the men of the community have ruined all of his property and harrassed his wife and son (and left his dog to die a horrible death!), he throws off his disguise and murders everyone who refuses to leave his family alone. It is a cathartic bloodbath rooted in justice — Odysseus takes pains to ensure that everyone he smites totally deserves it. He is able to reclaim his home and the company of a family that never forgot him.
Lockdown ends with a “one year later” epilogue that shortchanges all of the character development and foreshadowing the reader has been following for the entire book. Reese was supposed to figure out a plan for normal life while he was in juvenile jail, and the fights he started to protect mousier inmates would set him back in the eyes of the supervisors. The guards can tell Reese is smart enough to prevent the cycle of imprisonment, and get angry at him whenever he stoops to the inmates’ levels. He worked in a hospital and gained some empathy for and from a racist old white man on his deathbed (this sounds like the most contrived element of the plot, but it actually works quite well). All of these developments are thrown aside for a phrase like, “Now that I’m out, I’ll just have to keep on trying until I get to the good stuff.” The good stuff?! Reese does not have to reconcile any of his difficulties with his family members or the drug dealers who led Reese into theft and tried to drum up false charges to intensify his sentence years after the fact. But at least the journey was worth the read, right? Right.
Lockdown was on its way to saying something harsh and true about what it takes to improve oneself in a country that only believes in certain kinds of second chances. For reference, consult Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Several characters lecture Reese about how getting out of jail won’t magically solve any of his problems, then the epilogue more or less magically solves them. Among the criticisms of Lockdown out there is the complaint that the reader is not given enough of Reese’s thought processes, which could not be less true for me. Reese provides a lot of descriptions of the people around him and how he reacts or ignores them, and that speaks worlds to me. When he shuts up around a guard but makes small talk with a nurse, that is Reese’s thought process on display. When he describes the different things that you could do in a cell versus a detention block, that is a diagram of every internal monologue and rumor mill in the jail. And when he describes the windup before each fight, I see a young man who can be egged into a conflict but is by no means a violent guy.
Nazaryan uses his experiences as a schoolteacher to speak with authority about teens’ reading habits. I have a place of authority, too – booktalking at my local schools. I held up Lockdown and The Odyssey. More teens had read Lockdown, but guess what? Teens enjoyed both books. There’s enough room in the school year and the library to consider more than one storytelling style and era.
