Voice and Genre in Young Adult Literature: Chime (2011)

Trade paperback, 361 pages
Published 2012 (originally 2011)
Acquired November 2016
Read March 2017

Chime by Franny Billingsley

In my young adult literature class I wanted to pair with The Hero and the Crown a contemporary YA fantasy novel, and ideally one with some kind of representation that would have been lacking in the 1980s: racial, sexual, whatever. A recommendation from my wife led me to Chime; she was very fascinated by its portrayal of intellectual disability. The protagonist, Briony Larkin, has a sister named Rose who could be called autistic, I suspect, were the novel not set in an alternate early twentieth century, and Briony herself suffers from depression.

Unfortunately, the book is a bit of a slog at 360+ pages, and all the interesting stuff seems to happen near the end. The book for a while implies that Rose's disability has a magical cause: Briony thinks she did it, and thus your tendency is to think that Briony's evil stepmother did it, but both of these things turn out to be untrue, and Rose just is disabled. Which is a nice undercutting of how disability often works in fantasy stories, but the whole thing is underdeveloped.

I taught the book alongside an essay by an old colleague of mine, Abbye Meyer, called "'But she's not retarded': Contemporary Adolescent Literature Humanizes Disability but Marginalizes Intellectual Disability." Meyer build on the work of disability theorists who argue that disability should be seen as a political category, and thus YA literature should treat it as it does other underrepresented minorities, with humanization and representation. Unfortunately, then, Meyer argues, YA often falls short, as depictions of intellectual disability typically fall into three categories: 1) those without intellectually disabled characters, where the physically disabled prove their worth via a lack of intellectual disability, 2) those where only secondary characters are intellectual disabled, usually show the protagonist can demonstrate virtue through behavior toward them, and 3) those where the narrator/protagonist is intellectually disabled... but then proves that they're not by the story's end.

Meyer also argues that YA fiction can compensate for these problems by doing a few things, including humanizing disability, arguing for disability as an identity category, celebrating difference, and arguing for accommodation. Chime definitely treats Rose as a side character, and frequently as a side character who frustrates Briony and prevents her from doing what she wants, which seems to dehumanize her. The switcheroo that reveals that Rose's disability isn't a curse is a nice one in emphasizing disability as an identity category, but pushes against the weight of a novel where Briony seems to think it is a curse. Not in the magical sense, but in the sense of a burden that weighs her down. Rose does get to show romantic interest (which might even be reciprocated), which is also nice. So really, I don't think Chime does what Meyer thinks it ought very much.

But all this is largely to the side in Chime, and my students found those first two hundred pages as much a slog as the magical swamp in which the book takes place. Nothing reveals a book's pacing problems like teaching it, because for the first two of our three classes on Chime, I felt like nothing had happened worth talking about in class. My students also reacted very poorly to Briony's boyfriend, who borderline assaults her near the end of the novel... and then they just reconcile! I didn't read the scene that way, but once they pointed it out to me, I couldn't not see it.

I do think it's a decent depiction of depression, and through that it does some nice meta stuff about the stories we tell ourselves, but again, all these concepts are really paid off in the last fifty pages or so, which make it hard to teach. Which is maybe unfair, but that's the context I read it again; if I ever teach a YA literature course again, Chime will not be on the syllabus.