Good books for asexuals: How to Say Goodbye in Robot

07Feb11

Funny story – I find high school to be a very stressful place, and when I am stressed out I have a tendency to take refuge in familiar YA books, generally of the coming of age variety, while completely ignoring goals I had previously set up for myself, like, say, writing a series of posts looking at the intersection of gender and asexuality. So now I will introduce a new series, that of good books for asexuals, beginning with a personal favourite, How to Say Goodbye in Robot by Natalie Standiford.

Although honestly I shouldn’t be doing any of the above because I have a lot of physics homework.

How to Say Goodbye in Robot begins when Beatrice Szabo moves to Baltimore, her family following her father’s new teaching position. Her father distant, her mother constantly tipping over the edge, Beatrice has a tendency to retreat into herself, leading to accusations from the aforementioned unstable mother of being a robot – cold, distant, emotionless. Upon beginning school she meets Jonah Tate, a boy who has been similarly aloof and insubstantial since the death of his mother and twin brother in third grade, thus earning the title “Ghost Boy.” Eventually Beatrice shuns the possibility of full inclusion into the normal social scene at Canton and takes to Jonah, especially after he shares with her a quirky midnight radio show, the Night Lights, hosted by the genial Herb and supplemented by a cast of characters like the cruel Don Berman, mellow  Larry, or Elvis-loving Myrna, hair always teased up in a black beehive in his memory. A lot of other things happen, primary among them the discovery that (gasp! spoilers!) Jonah’s long-lost but ne’er-forgotten twin brother Mathew was not killed in the car crash that took both Jonah’s mother and his chance at a well-adjusted childhood, but rather sent to an institution in the hope of being forgotten to the ages – but the core of the story is the strong, close relationship that develops between the two main characters, Robot Girl and Ghost Boy, and how that takes them through their senior year.

Outside of the likening of Beatrice to a robot, Jonah to a ghost, and Bea’s mother to someone about two tottering steps away from total collapse, the most consistent motif in How to Say Goodbye in Robot is the assumption of the characters around the pair that they either are, should be, or inevitably will be a Couple . Anne Sweeney, a functional Queen Bee of her own small but significant social group in the Canton universe who happily greets Beatrice on her first day at Canton, thanking her profusely for finally providing a buffer against the ephemeral creepiness of Jonah, is the first to suggest it to Beatrice, saying that everyone had just assumed that there was something of somewhat less than pure intention going on between the two of them, and follows that up repeatedly – when people say that it’s the only explanation, when Tom Garber (the biggest pimp of Canton high – cute, dreamy-eyed, with the inexplicable and unfailing ability to make the ladies collectively weak at the knees) inevitably shows interest in Anne, his tendency towards the freshest students all full of starry-eyed bewilderment pulling him towards her with all the force of the strongest biological imperatives, and when Bea and Jonah skip prom to go down and spend a night in Ocean City.

These assumptions are later repeated by Myrna (the Night Lights listener with a beehive and an Elvis fixation) at the annual Night Lights holiday luncheon, to which Beatrice and Jonah went together. The two ladies (inevitably, one might say) end up in a discussion of what Beatrice’s relationship with Jonah is and isn’t, and then later on Beatrice’s mother makes the same jump as everyone else, repeating her advice on kissing and knowing on the night of prom before her daughter leaves to skip town and head down to Ocean City in lieu of a dull school function – five months earlier, when Beatrice capitulated to Garber’s uniquely douchey charisma, she had told her to hold out for silver sparkles while kissing, and then, when Beatrice realizes that’s what she’s asking about just as she’s set to leave with on her ersatz date, she replies that with Jonah they aren’t silver, but gold.

But the thing is, despite what everyone thinks – that Jonah and Beatrice are a couple in the wholly conventional sense, that they’re kissing and letting that kissing lead to even more compromising positions, and becoming entangled in all the heteronormative wankery that inevitably ensues when two teenagers decide to do Those Types of Things – they really…  just aren’t. Certainly the two of the are very close, but it’s a transcendent intimacy. It’s free of the trappings of conventional relationships and reliant, not on sexual attraction or the ever-elusive “spark,” but on mutual weirdness and an inability to function as normal humans, on being the kinds of people to chase impossible plans, shun convention, and construct one’s peer group as an eccentric band of insomniacs – Myra, the Elvis-obsess; Larry, the blind old man who phones in just to play crackly, classic old records; Don Berman, the trickster with a flinty nastiness; Kreplax, the self-declared time traveler who’s spent too much time out of his personal time thread and gotten stranded in the comfortable familiarity of an alien period – rather than the homogeneous, insular group of teenagers in which they’re trapped.

And when asked specifically by other people, Beatrice denies it – without exception, almost without hesitation. When Anne asked, she shrugged it off, and when Myrna asked they have the following exchange:

“So why don’t you go out with [Jonah]?” she asked.

“Jonah? I do like him,” I said. “I like him a lot. He’s my favorite person in the whole city of Baltimore. Maybe the world.”

“So what’s the problem?” Myrna said. “Sounds like love to me.”

And it does, because it is, but it’s not the giggly, breathless kind of love, or the horny, rip-off-my-clothes, pray-for-premature-infertility love, or even the normal teenage puppy love, or teenage “real” love – it’s something beyond all of these things, and, as Jonah says, better:

“Why are you so jealous?” I said. “It’s not like you’re my boyfriend or anything. Are you?”

A shocked glare from Jonah. Then he looked away. I couldn’t believe I’d let those words out of my mouth. They rang in my ears, pushy and demanding, the questions of a conventional girl, something Anne or AWAE would say, not me.

“Boyfriend is such a stupid word,” Jonah said. “No, I’m not your boyfriend. I thought we were way beyond that. What we are cannot be described with trivial words like boyriend and girlfriend. Even friend doesn’t come close to describing it.

So it’s explicitly stated that they aren’t dating – but they’re not dating, not because they aren’t at a stage where they could, but because they saw that stage coming up and swiftly passed it by, heading on to something richer, deeper, and just better. And not only is is explicitly non-romantic, or at least romantic insofar as it is confined by the expectations and conventions of non-platonic relationships corralled by such words as “boyfriend” and “girlfriend,” but it’s also, in its way, non sexual, as demonstrated by one statement on page 95:

I had to do something. In a romantic comedy, I would have been able to wipe all his troubles away with a single kiss. But that wasn’t going to happen – not the kiss, not the troubles vanishing with it. I felt so close to him, but I didn’t want to kiss him. And I didn’t get the sense that he wanted to kiss me.

Okay, so, I will admit that that instances was early on in their relationship, probably even before the point at which a lot of people would thinking kissing and generally associated compromising positions are a given, but this same attitude of physical intimacy without a specifically sexual component continues into May, when they go to Ocean city together and spend the night in the same bed – sleeping together, but with clothes on, over the covers, no hanky panky, and on the night before, when Beatrice’s mom warns her about the possibility and asks about sparkles.

I’d never actually kissed Jonah. Not in any way other than friendly, sisterly, fondly. Certainly not in a way that would produce silver sparkles, or visions of any kind.

Furthermore, their relationship is interesting in other ways because it involves the kind of territoriality usually only associated with explicitly romantic or sexual relationships, as demonstrated by something Jonah says after telling Beatrice about what Garber (the resident pimp and lady-killer) did to him years before, and after he spurns Beatrice at a New Year’s party.

“…But thanks for trying to protect me, anyway.”

“I wasn’t just trying to protect you,” Jonah said. “I was jealous too.”

I focused on my mug, trying to keep my face from showing my surprise. “Jealous?”

“Not like that,” Jonah said. so he wasn’t going to confess his love for me. I felt relief and disappointment, mixed. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear a confession of love, but it would have given the night a dramatic kick.

“I was jealous as a friend,” Jonah said. “An all-consuming friend. I don’t want to share you with anyone, not even your parents. I know it’s weird and not fair, but that’s how I feel.”

“I want you all to myself too,” I said. The two of us in that kitchen felt more like a family than I’d ever been with my parents.

So the relationship is very involved and intimate, edging into codependency and setting off “more than platonic!” alarms for everyone around them – clearly Beatrice loves Jonah, and Jonah loves Beatrice. But they defy the different ways in which people can love each other according to the rigid conventions of the society into which they were born; looking at it from different directions, they could seem in a pre-marital state or just siblings, deeply invested in each other but in a way that isn’t sexually, even romantically, charged.

And even beyond the glorious ambiguity of their relationship and its inability to be classified according to how people feel compelled to classify relationships, Jonah’s sexuality is never specified, and is actually rather explicitly left open to interpretation, as shown by a continuation of the conversation between Myrna and Beatrice at the Christmas luncheon above:

[Myrna] lowered her voice. “Is he – you know – funny?”

“He’s very funny.” Then I realized my mistake. “Oh, you mean gay. Um, I don’t think so.” I’d never really thought about it. Was Jonah gay? Did he like girls? I had no idea. He never talked about boys or girls, except to say how much he didn’t like them. He was an equal opportunity disliker.

So there you go, How to Say Goodbye in Robot has it all – stunning poignancy, rather brilliantly simple prose, some really impressive insights into teenagers and the adolescent experience, an ambiguous relationship that’s so intensely intimate that it defies conventional classification, and a prominently featured character whose sexuality is not only left open to interpretation (and could honestly, without much stretching, be taken to be of the asexual variety) but almost totally neglected besides that, since, to  his primary relationship, it just doesn’t matter.

Filed under: good books for asexuals   |  8 Comments