Title: Real
Author: Carol Cujec and Peyton Goddard
Publisher: Shadow Mountain
Genre: Young Adult Novel (Based on the experiences of Peyton Goddard)
Year Published: 2021
Number of Pages: 299
Binding: Perfect-bound hardback
ISBN13: 978-1-62972-789-9
Price: $16.99
Like Bigfoot Battling the Abominable Snowman in the Middle of Main Street
A review of Real, by Harlow Clark for The Association of Mormon Letters
Life on the spectrum is difficult. Difficult for a bright third or fourth grader, who never gets picked but gets picked on always. Difficult for the teacher, who holds an inquest in class to try and learn why no one likes the boy. Difficult for a high school student who tells the school counselor, “They don’t like me because I’m different.” “How are you different? Do you have an extra arm or leg?” But they both know that’s just a rhetorical trick, that not knowing how to articulate a difference doesn’t mean the difference is not there. Difficult for parents, who ask, “What are you doing to cause people to tease you and not like you?” Difficult for a father in his late twenties whose estranged wife taunts him with, “Everyone always knew you were weird.” Difficult for an articulate, curious reporter in his sixties who loves to talk to people and write their stories, who stops to talk with a little girl along the parade route about her Unicorn Academy shirt which he has seen others wearing. Only to have her father tells her not to talk to him, then call the police over to point him out. “I’m a reporter,” he tells them when they question him about his questions, terrified because police have been known to shoot troublesome people.
How much more difficult, then, for a witty, intelligent 13-year-old girl who can’t articulate her wit and intelligence? Not that she is inarticulate. Rather, she knows no way to get her brain to carry the signal to her mouth to form the words she wants to say. She has no way to control other parts of her body. She can dribble and shoot a basketball just fine, but can’t stop her body from a thrashing meltdown when her senses or emotions are overloaded.
But I’m speaking in the third person. In Real, a novel based on a true story by Carol Cujec and Peyton Goddard, Charity tells her story in the first person. The authors let us hear her wit and sometimes acerbic comments in her own words. They let us see the meltdowns as Charity experiences them, not through someone else’s eyes. Charity’s story feels like watching Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft battle it out in “The Miracle Worker” before Helen Keller grasps the concept of names and understands that the motions Annie Sullivan is making in her palms and the cold liquid running over her hands are connected, that the motions name the liquid.
Except in Real, it’s the adults who have the breakthrough. Charity’s parents know how intelligent she is, but they have no way to let the intelligence out, and she doesn’t have the muscle control to spell with her fingers (which may be why no one in the story mentions that possibility).
Real follows an age-old structure, the journey from hell to purgatory to heaven. The hell portion is witty and entertaining as Charity introduces us to her world and her favorite book of amazing animal facts, which she has memorized, and quotes throughout the book as analogs to her situation.
“Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell,” the psalmist says, and in the second third of the book Charity and her parents meet an aide at the junior high who knows how to teach Charity’s body to let her words out through an iPad, a stylus, and a speaker.
In this purgatory section, where some of the characters have their sins and prejudices and preconceptions purged away, Charity asserts herself to others the way she has to us in the hell section. Their reactions to her, particularly in the first section, kept reminding me of an essay we read 40 years ago in Jim Faulconer’s Philosophy 110 class, “Does a Human Fetus Have a Right to Life?” by Michael Tooley.
Tooley’s answer is no because to have a right to life, you have to meet three requirements. You have to be “a continuing subject of experiences and other mental states,” that is, be a person, you have to understand the concept of being a person, and you have to think of yourself as a person, that is, you have to be self-conscious. Tooley argues that a fetus doesn’t understand the concept of a person and doesn’t conceive of itself as a person, so it doesn’t have a right to life.
Before I reread the essay, I thought one of Tooley’s requirements was to be able to express your right to something in language. I thought that because it’s an unstated assumption.
Unstated assumptions are handy. We use them all the time, including when the traffic light turns green and we start walking across the street without constructing a logical argument that a green light means we can cross the street in the direction of the green light, the light just turned green, therefore we can cross the street.
That is, we use unstated assumptions when we think they’re obvious to our audience and don’t need to be stated, or when they’re invisible to us and we don’t think of them as assumptions.
So how do I know Tooley’s unstated assumption is that you have to be able to express your self-consciousness and desire in language to have a right to it? I surmise it because Tooley argues that a newborn has no more self-consciousness than a fetus, so abortion and infanticide are both morally neutral acts.
Another way to state that is to ask how Tooley would know if a newborn had self-consciousness? And the answer is surely that she would have to express that self-consciousness in a way that Tooley would recognize as an expression of self-consciousness, maybe by saying something like, “I am intelligent.”
But Charity can’t say those words, except to us, so she lives in a world where educators and others (the Thinkers, she calls them) assume she can’t benefit from an education and has no right to one. Indeed, Charity’s aunt tells her mother, she’s sure the girl can’t even understand what they’re saying, which earns her a severe rebuke. Charity’s mother knows she can understand and is an unrelenting advocate for her daughter. As is her father.
The purgatory section is about convincing people of her intelligence and finding a place she can fit in, beginning with getting into school. The interview doesn’t go well, and Charity can feel her body getting ready to explode into uncontrolled motion and energy. But then Celia, the school’s special education coordinator, says softly, “Charity, querida, could you please pick up that pencil for me?”
Charity knows the word, Spanish for dear, but it’s also a cognate with her name, though Charity doesn’t know the full meaning of her name (not charity case) until the end of the story.
Celia helps Charity tap out her first sentence on an iPad, which then speaks the sentence, “I am intelligent.”
Celia teaches Charity’s mother how to support her daughter’s arm and confirm that the letter she’s pointing to on the keyboard is the letter she wants to type, and then others ask to learn, which leads to the paradise of acceptance. Of course, not everyone accepts Charity, so the journey from hell to heaven is not the only archetypal structure. The story is also a mystery. Who is the cyberbully, Sassygirl?
At the end of my first semester in graduate school, one of my professors told us he would be teaching an undergraduate class in popular genres the next semester. He gave us a short preview of the conventions of the mystery genre, which has been exceedingly useful to me. The detective and the murderer, or hero and villain, are close moral doubles, and there is always a verbal showdown. Watching for the verbal showdown and moral doubles helped me better understand novels like Chester Himes’ The Real Cool Killers and Louis Owens’ The Sharpest Sight, and who the authors think the real killers are.
It’s a useful convention for understanding Real as well. To think about which characters mirror each other, and which characters have verbal showdowns with each other, and (of course) who cracks wise (several who’s).
Real is a rich novel, whether you want to read it as an engrossing mid-grade novel, a psychological study, an archetypal journey, or all those, it’s rich and satisfying.
For 18 years now, I have performed the duties of my last name for the president of a small LDS branch serving the care center across State Street from our stake center, so when we’re not locked out because of COVID I attend sacrament meeting in the Alzheimer’s ward. I’m working with my third presidency, and one of the Relief Society president’s counselors is in special education, so she brings her compassion and tools with her and helps the residents improve their skills.
I was taking care of some branch business with her husband, a counselor to the branch president, and told him about Real, and how I thought his wife would like it.
“Books like that are full of hope,” he said.
Yes, full of hope, and faith, and Charity, especially Charity.