Sexy

Oates, J. C. (2005). Sexy. New York: HarperTempest. ISBN 0-06-0544149-0.

Why read this book

What do you do when some of your jock buddies accuse your English teacher of giving them bad grades because they wouldn’t respond to his sexual passes and he just gave you a B you didn’t earn? You want it all to just go away, but maybe it won’t.

Plot summary

Darren is a junior in high school in a small town in New Hampshire. He’s just beginning to realize that the girls think he’s cute, and he’s doing pretty well on the swimming team, but the academic work is tough. One snowy night after swimming practice the friend who usually gives him a ride home ditches him, and Darren ends up getting a ride from his English teacher, Mr. Tracy. Mr. Tracy is a little friendlier than Darren wants him to be, but Darren tries to forget about it. It gets harder to ignore when Mr. Tracy flunks one of his teammates and some of the other swimmers hatch a plan to get back at him. They start spreading rumors that Mr. Tracy has been threatening them with low grades unless they respond to his passes, and they try to implicate Mr. Tracy with some gay pornography. Before they know what’s happening there’s a police investigation. Darren thinks his teammates are idiots, but he really doesn’t want to have anything to do with Mr. Tracy, either. What are people going to think if they find out that Mr. Tracy gave Darren a B he didn’t deserve for the first semester?

Critical evaluation

There’s not really a lot of plot in this novel – even the one major tragic event is underplayed a bit – but what does happen creates a very complicated situation for Darren. Running under the surface of the story is a question that Oates’ never explicitly answers: Is Darren gay? It seems his parents think he might be. He’s a little more sensitive, a little less macho than his older brother Eddy. Darren has been best friends with a girl named Molly for a long time, but he doesn’t seem very interested in her sexually. They talk regularly, they email a lot, they exchange nice Christmas presents, but Molly doesn’t figure very largely in Darren’s interior monologues about his life and its difficulties. And Darren feels bad when he masturbates. “He hated losing himself, somehow” (p. 7, emphasis in original). Given the absence of any religious sensibility, what’s up with that? Whatever it is, Darren doesn’t want to think about it. He just wishes it would all go away.

By keeping the question of Darren’s sexuality unresolved, Oates builds a fair amount of suspense. As Darren’s swimming buddies start picking on Mr. Tracy and the homophobia increases in school and around town, the reader wonders how vulnerable Darren is becoming. Are the facts on the ground going to create a situation where he can’t maintain his role as just one of the guys? Is he going to end up outing himself to maintain his integrity?

Oates maintains this suspense with a clever narrative structure. The third person narration is almost exclusively focused on describing what Darren is doing and thinking. His thinking is confused. He’s angry with almost everyone – his friends, Mr. Tracy, his parents, his brother. He doesn’t trust or confide in anyone. Yet when he speaks and we hear his own voice, which isn’t often, he displays very little of his emotional turmoil. He manages to maintain a good-boy public presentation, usually saying what he knows he needs to say, what he is expected to say, being the nice boy that he is. His parents and Molly suspect that there’s more going on than he’s admitting, but he brushes them off. His self-imposed isolation is consistent with that of a high school boy who knows he’s gay and doesn’t want anyone else to find out, among other scenarios.

But Oates has to play tricks with her narration to keep the reader in the dark about Darren’s sexuality. Early in the book she portrays him as preoccupied with sex in a high-school-boy kind of way, but she never lets us in on what sexual fantasies he’s having. She tries to justify this by telling us that he just doesn’t want to think about all the turmoil inside himself, but I find this a bit disingenuous. I think Oates wants us to conclude ultimately that Darren is gay, despite the sex scene at the end where we are told he has had sex with a girl but we aren’t told anything about the actual act and we aren’t told very much of Darren thinks about it. I appreciate Oates’ desire to make the story more interesting by leaving Darren’s sexuality ambiguous, but this comes at the cost of the reader being too conscious that the narrator is manipulating the narrative. And we also end up concluding that the lesson Darren has learned is that he can cover his gayness. To be able to cover can be empowering, and I appreciate Oates’ implicit acknowledgment that it’s an option a gay person is entitled to exercise. But I wish there were a sequel to Sexy in which Darren learns that that are other, better options, too.

About the author

Joyce Carol Oates was born in 1938 to working class parents in Millersport, New York. She graduated first in her class from Syracuse University in 1960 and published her first collection of short stories in 1963 at the age of 25. She has since published a staggering collection of novels, short stories, plays, essays, and other non-fiction and is considered “among the most distinguished writers in the United States” (Joyce Carol Oates, 1994). Since 1978 she has been a professor of English at Princeton University. In addition to Sexy, her young adult fiction includes Big Mouth & Ugly Girl (2002), Small Avalanches and Other Stories (2003), Freaky Green Eyes (2003), and After the Wreck, I picked Myself Up, Spread my Wings, and Flew Away (2006) (For Children and Young Adults, 2008).

Genre: Coming of age, LGBTQ

Curriculum ties

Sexy is a great novel for exploring ambiguity in literature. I think the question of whether Darren is gay would inspire considerable discussion in a classroom of high school students. It’s a great opportunity to teach students to read a text closely and find evidence to support their interpretation of the author’s meaning.

Book-talking ideas

• Read the section where Mr. Tracy oversteps the boundaries while he is giving Darren a ride home and ask students whether Mr. Tracy is wrong (p. 49-52).

• Read the section of the police report where Darren finds outs that someone saw him in Mr. Tracy’s car and ask the students if Darren should have come clean with the police about the incident (p. 164-167).

Reading level/interest age

The text is accessible to younger teens, but they might not find the lack of action in the story very engaging. Older teens are more likely to appreciate the complexity and subtlety of the narrative.

Challenge issues

The title is a little sensational. The f-word appears periodically. A sexual encounter occurs off-page near the end but is not described.

Responses

• Remind the challenger of the policy (in the case of the San Francisco Public Library) to present “all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”

• Remind the challenger that Joyce Carol Oates is “among the most distinguished writers in the United States” and that we should hope our teens would read such fine literature.

Why I chose to read this book

I wanted to see what a great writer like Joyce Carol Oates would do with YA fiction, and when I looked in the library I found Sexy on the shelf.

References

For Children and Young Adults (2008, January 7). Celestial Timepiece: A Joyce Carol Oates Homepage. Retrieved November 4, 2009, from http://jco.usfca.edu/works/children/

Joyce Carol Oates. (1994). Current Biography. Retrieved November 4, 2009, from Biography Reference Bank database: http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com/.