Perks 4: Final Thoughts

So, I finished The Perks of Being a Wallflower a week or so ago and I wrote down a bunch of topics I still wanted to write about.  I may or may not get to them all, but I wanted to do one culminating one that looked at the big picture.

One question I asked myself is: could I recommend this book?  Some students who read it admitted that it was a pretty graphic book.  There are pretty detailed descriptions of sex, rape, masturbation, drug use, etc.  So does that make it a bad book?

Not necessarily.  There are a lot of books that have some pretty raw stuff that I think are worth reading.  The Bible is one of them.  Romeo and Juliet is another.  Even the book that Perks is attempting to emulate, The Catcher in the Rye has some of these issues. 

To me, though, what makes the above stories more readable is that they can address some heavy subjects with a level of grace.  Books that speak to us often show the world as it is, including its more gritty side.  Yet masters of language can make us feel that grit without it feeling raunchy.  Perks seemed to cross into raunchy at times. 

So, can I recommend it?  I don’t know.  It depends on the person.  I want my kids to read Harry Potter…but not yet.  There is a time when certain works of literature or movies or music can enlighten even when muddling through gritty aspects of life and there is a time when those same pieces can pull us down and stir cravings and curiosity that can lead us to unhealthy choices.  Each person has to make that call for themselves.

But I want to end on what I see as the triumph of Perks and that is what I see to be its dominant theme: Like Charlie, we need to see the complexity of people’s lives and extend compassion to them.  Charlie doesn’t label people.  Even when he doesn’t like them or is hurt by them, he is able to see the complexity of their life.  Everyone has a story and everyone’s faults have a story.  We all share in the glory of life and we all share in the gutter.  He sees both sides in everyone from his father, to Patrick, to his ex-girlfriend Mary Elizabeth. 

And, in the end, he even seems to see it in his Aunt Helen who molested him.  This is truly shocking, but should it be, especially for those of us who call ourselves Jesus-followers? 

Jesus protected and spoke love to a married woman who was caught sleeping with a married man.  He had a dinner party with a notorious cheat named Zacchaeus and turned the man’s heart.  He looked over the city of Jerusalem, the city that would eventually execute him, and had compassion because they were “like sheep without a shepherd.“

He looked at people and he saw humanity-meaning he recognized and loved the frailty of what it is to be human. 

I read The Catcher in the Rye many years ago.  It has been considered the most powerful modern-day ‘coming-of-age’ novel.  One scene has stuck in my mind since I read it.  The main character Holden, who is lonely, decides to get a prostitute.  When she comes to his hotel room, he is struck by the fact that she is his age and ultimately decides that all he wants to do is talk.  The prostitute eventually gets annoyed and leaves.   Holden, like Charlie, and like Jesus sees through the labels and sees a person, a person in all their crap, and sin, and beauty, and pain, and longing, and dreams. 

That’s what I want to emulate from Charlie’s life.  To see the people around me, even the ones that frustrate me, as people with a history.  And I want to love them.  I want to be the hands and words of God to them.  Because I have a history too, but my history has been written with the fingerprints of a Savior.  He has touched my crap, sin, beauty, pain, longing, and dreams.  And I want Him to use me to help do the same for the people I come in contact with.