Banned in Kansas? Must be Chris Crutcher: Stotan!
Who, or what was a “Stotan”? The four members of Frost High’s last swim team had no idea when coach Max Il Song posted the notice that the first week of winter break would be “Stotan Week.” Attendance was “voluntary”; as if any challenge to a quartet of 18-year-olds would ever be construed as voluntary… Even after they learned that a Stotan was a combination Stoic and Spartan, and that a “hell week” would compare favorably, all four accepted the challenge. For one week, Walker, Nortie, Lion and Jeff busted their tails for four hours a day, swimming like their lives depended on it and then some. Somewhere in the middle they found an aquatic version of Nirvana, and all four came out the other end changed by the experience. Maybe it was the camaraderie, the shared suffering, the trial by fire; but those twenty hours bonded the four like nothing had in their first three seasons together. Along the way, Max dropped a sprinkling of koans on his charges, enough to get their intellectual motors running on a higher level; just as he’d revved their physical motors with the week’s challenges. Not that the young men needed much challenge: one of their classmates was distributing Aryan Nations hate literature and one of the four was dating an African-American girl. Talk about your drama… All four are misfits in one way or another: one has parents the ages of his friends’ grandparents, one took a year off as a Marine, one is an orphan who lives in his own apartment, and one is his father’s Wednesday-night punching bag. After Stotan Week, the bonding experience makes them a sort of quasi-family (with Max and Elaine honorary members). And if families give each other strength, then this is a family that is going to need strength. Good thing they’re Stotans! If there’s a poster child for banned books, it pretty much has to be either Judy Blume or the author of Stotan!,Chris Crutcher. Crutcher – a therapist by trade – has made a name for himself as an author of young adult fiction aimed at a tough audience, the adolescent male. Of his dozen novels, an autobiography and a short-story collection; nearly all have been challenged or outright banned. According to the American Library Association, Crutcher has made the list of the ten most-challenged authors six times, including five years in a row (2005-9). It’s a safe bet that his latest novel, Period 8, will vault him onto the list again this year or next. Crutcher, bless his heart, revels in his status as an “affront to decency” in the narrow minds of middle Americans. More power to him. Stotan! Is Crutcher’s second novel, published in 1986 (three years after Running Loose). As do most of his works, this one made the annual list of ALA Best Books for Young Adults in 1986 – the author himself received the ALA’s Margaret A. Edwards Award for cumulative contribution to children’s literature in 2000. The novel itself has been challenged several times, including two challenges each in Texas and Kansas. Parents of the Blue Valley school distric in Kansas cited the following as reasons for their request that this book (among others) book not be “inflicted” on their teens: "vulgar language, sexual explicitness, or violent imagery that is gratuitously employed." So let’s take a look: Vulgar language? There are 0 occurrences of the f-word, three occurrences of the s-word (one in the name Takeshita), 6 of the d-word (of which one is preceded by a G-word), and a sprinkling of g-dd-ms. You hear worse than that on the playground of the local Christian grade school… Sexual explicitness? Excuse me? Not one person gets naked with any other person (well, OK, in the locker room, but – except in East Texas, based on personal observation – that’s acceptable), no mention of private parts. At the worst, the narrator tries to get a peek down his girlfriend’s cleavage (no, they are not “doing it” and neither is anyone else). Violent imagery? Have you seen a video game lately? But I digress: one kid is beaten up twice, once by his abusive father and once by a racist classmate when he comes to the defense of his black girlfriend. Maybe that’s the kind of violence that middle America doesn’t like – seeing their repressed bubba kids punished for bullying others. Oh, yeah, and a suicide, which happened twelve years before Stotan Week. Might as well object to the Vietnam War, which happened fifteen years earlier… No, my guess is that the challenges chronicle the usual objection to Crutcher books: a coming-of-age novel that features a fair-minded (dare I say mildly liberal?) young athlete who gets his head on straight thanks to the mentoring of a tough but fair adult who is neither his parent nor his preacher: that’s not the kind of think the challengers seem to like. Again, experience: my sibling’s children were raised by the kind of parents who would be uncomfortable (at the least) to have seen their child exposed to this kind of free thought instead of their rigid rules. Now, for the novel itself… Oddly, Stotan! feels very much as if it was in reality Crutcher’s first novel: the time period is slightly off, and it’s simply not quite as polished as Running Loose, which had already been in publication for three years. Perhaps that’s because it feels as though there are too many issue-based threads running through this novel – child abuse, racism, being truthful, the whole Stoic-Spartan riff, even youthful death – instead of the usual one or two that a Crutcher protagonist is required to face down. Other than an abundance of issues, however, this is vintage Crutcher: thoughtful young men find adulthood through athletics and the guidance of an adult (or two) who help them mature intellectually as well as physically. Good stuff, though not his best – but no matter whether it’s the most lyrical prose Chris Crutcher has ever written or dreck so poor his laptop tried to delete it, trying to censor it is a violation of one of our nation’s most cherished rights. Well-suited to adolescent boys in their early to mid-teens. If you can drag them away from their video games, it's a quick read and features characters with whom they can identify (as opposed to "super"heroes and wizards). |
More Banned Books:
Also by Chris Crutcher:
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