perks of being a wallflower: why i didn't like the book

Objectively speaking, it's a pretty good book. Nothing spectacular, but not bad either. As far as complete experiences go, it was an okay one. It was pretty coherent and cohesive, self-contained, etc. There's nothing much to criticize if you're going at it from an objective point of view, but once you get personal, you either hate it or love it.

And I hated it. Or rather I would have hated it, but I took into account how good an emotional experience it was, and toned down my dislike accordingly.

Why didn't I like it? Most people did. They also raved about the movie, but I suspect that if I watched the movie I wouldn't have enjoyed it much either.

The point was, the narrator was radically different from any narrator that I've ever read. The first thing I did was to look up when it was published, and it turned out to be 1999, and I thought "aha, this explains a lot", because the narrator was horrifyingly naive and innocent. In fact, if you read the book, you'll find out that he finds out about what 'masturbation' is when he's fifteen. Plus everything in the book was outdated.

Also, he doesn't relate. To people. Throughout the book I thought that maybe the author was making a point, about how a normal person (the reader) would react to a person who was emotionally stunted. Because it seemed pretty consistent.

At first I was fed up with the narrator. He was such a kid. He was disturbingly naive. He couldn't relate to anyone even when it was as simple as breathing. He annoyed me on a personal level, because I especially detest people who are peacefully oblivious to the atmosphere.

Also his writing was strange, stilted, and awkward (okay I get it, I think he didn't use contractions) and I thought "he's fifteen and he's writing an informal letter". I mean, I compared him with myself. When I was fifteen I was practically an expert at writing things that flowed. I'm not saying that I was better than most people, because most people at fifteen are experts at writing things that flow. It is not difficult.

And that fit the pattern - normal people (you, the reader) often get frustrated at people who are in any way impaired at all.

I thought that the narrator must have some impairment. Yet the writing was ambiguous but suggestive, so it wasn't until (page 128/510 on the ebook) - "I used to play sports when I was little, and I was actually very good, but the problem was that it used to make me too aggressive, so the doctors told my mom I would have to stop" - that I figured out that he really did have a legit issue somewhere.

So then I actively tried to make myself tolerate his narrative. Whenever I read something that made me think "why the fuck can't he do the obvious thing?" or "why the fuck doesn't he get it?", I immediately told myself to back off, because he had a legit issue and I didn't exactly think the protagonist of The Fault in Our Stars was whiny. And if I could tolerate a physically disabled person, I should be able to tolerate a mentally disabled person.

So it didn't help. At all. He was every bit as irritating and unrelatable as ever. And I couldn't help but think that it was how a normal person would react in real life, too. Upon finding out about the impairment, the person tries to regulate his annoyance, but it doesn't help much.

The narrator was just so different. He was spacey and participated in dangerous behaviour and didn't worry about his future or about money even though he admits that his family isn't rich. It really says a lot about what ten years or so can do to us. Nowadays every kid with middle-class parents worries about money. Because there aren't any second chances, and if you make the wrong choice now you might starve to death later because no one cares about whether you live or die.

There are basically different spheres of society that people live in. And the experiences are radically different, and there's no way to relate unless you've experienced it. And in the circle I live in, no kid would ever consider taking weed or LSD or even smoking. They might think about it or talk about it but in the end no one wants to endanger their future.

That's how different my life is from the narrator. I am completely unable to relate on an emotional or empathetic level. Intellectually I understand everything, but emotionally it's only so much wet cotton wool. I did not like the book. There was something mildly off-putting about it, and throughout the reading I kept getting sucked into the narrator's spacey narrative, and I started feeling spacey and asperger's-like, and I did not like that feeling.

And then [SPOILER] in the end I find out that he's apparently really fucking smart even though he has great gigantic problems with relating to humans and then I just conclude that he probably has asperger's and that I didn't like him because he was too different from me. The end.

edit 30/11/15: His risk-taking behaviour was incongruous with what I know about asperger's. So I did a search and turns out he's canonically depressed, with hints of PTSD. I still... don't really get it. None of the canon explanations actually explain his weird way of writing, oddly naive manner, inability to connect, and rick-taking activities. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

But objectively speaking it was a pretty good book.

Then again I think every book I've read is a pretty good book, because the effort put into making it a book that sells makes it pretty good. Any book by default garners a rating of three from me. Four is rare. Five is one out of every hundred.

And this book gets a three.

But I do have to repeat. It's not that this is an actively bad book. It's just that I don't actively like it. And it makes a bit of difference.

edit 30/11/15: now that I think back, the book was a bit boring. I couldn't wait to end it. That's not a good sign. It still gets a three, but I think that nowadays there are few teenagers who could connect with the book in a meaningful way.

(I finished the book in an hour or a bit more. How long did you take?)