Oklahoma Book Awards
Thanks, Kitty, for highlighting the finalists for the 2009 Oklahoma Book Awards.
Among the worthy nominees in the Children/Young Adults category is local author Jana Hausburg, whose It Wasn’t Much: Ten True Tales of Oklahoma Heroes is a really interesting and informative read for adults, too. Ms. Hausburg is a Cataloger for the Metropolitan Library System, and she’s currently working on a new book about Oklahoma outlaws and lawmen.
Another nominee in the Children/Young Adults category is Tim Tharp’s The Spectacular Now. I’ve already raved at length about this excellent novel that chronicles the high school senior year of a troubled Southside Oklahoma City kid, and Tharp’s previous two books are also well worth checking out.
Congratulations also to Jim Chastain, whose Antidotes & Home Remedies is a finalist in the Poetry category. Jim describes his book as “a collection of health related poems and other ‘greatest hits’ poems from my journal.” The special newsok.com site “Life Is Real” is a really remarkable effort by Jim to relate his ongoing battle with cancer, and it features blog posts, poetry, and video from this terrific Oklahoma writer.
Oklahoma Author Tim Tharp
Oklahoma author Tim Tharp reached a rarified level of acclaim when his 2008 novel The Spectacular Now was one of five titles nominated for the National Book Award in Young People’s Literature. His two previous novels, Falling Dark and Knights of the Hill Country, raked in their share of honors as well and are equally compelling reads.
Falling Dark chronicles a struggling small-town Oklahoma family dealing with a legacy of violence, substance abuse, and broken dreams. Its poetically spare language echoes with the realism of all of Tharp’s writing, and it’s clear the author has spent a lifetime carefully listening to the cadences and quirks of his native state’s dialect. While the novel is inhabited by ragged characters at the margins of society, it holds out a few shreds of hope and redemption amid the falling darkness.
Tharp’s second novel, Knights of the Hill Country, is categorized like The Spectacular Now as a “Young Adult” novel. That complicated audience deserves its own share of great writing, but Tharp’s books are powerful reading for any fiction fans.
Knights is the story of an Oklahoma high school football hero who is gifted with the rare ability to slow down time, but only between the sidelines. On the field where his 6′4″ linebacker’s frame hones in on helpless ballcarriers, Hampton Green is a hero and small-town legend in the making. Off the field, the speed and complications of life aren’t as easily grappled with, and Hampton is caught between the identity his town and teammates have boxed him into and an uncertain future he fights to control for himself.
Like his other novels, Knights of the Hill Country employs the unmistakeable twang of Oklahoma dialects. Tharp also has an especially sharp sense of the kinds of adolescent challenges that often aren’t overcome simply by blowing out 18 candles on a birthday cake. His characters deal with issues of race, class, and sexuality at least as complicated as those in their parents’ worlds, and as in The Spectacular Now, they face the stark reality of graduation with a mixture of tentative hope and fear of an unknowable future.
Tim Tharp is a native of Henryetta, Oklahoma, and in between his time as a student at OU and Brown University he explored the United States as a hitchhiker and worked as a factory hand, construction worker, and psychiatric aid. He is currently a professor in the Humanities Department at Rose State College in Midwest City.
The Spectacular Now
Oklahoma author Tim Tharp’s National Book Award-nominated novel The Spectacular Now lives up to its title, both as a spectacular read and as a story of the beauty and perils of holding on to a slippery moment in time.
The narrator is Oklahoma City kid Sutter Keely, who careens around Tharp’s piercingly recognizeable renderings of Bricktown, Heritage Hills, and the vast suburban sprawl of the Southside in a haze of of alcohol and testosterone. The moment described by the book’s title is Sutter’s final semester of high school, when adulthood can only be delayed for a few more precious months.
The likeable, troubled Sutter exists in a Charlie Brown world where adults are either incomprehensible or totally absent, and it becomes clear that his budding alcoholism won’t be masked by rebellious charisma for much longer.
Unlike many of his peers, Sutter isn’t especially looking forward to college or career plans. As he drifts from girlfriend to girlfriend on woozy weekends (and weekdays), he asks, “How are you supposed to know when you’re not a kid anymore in this society?” Soon an intriguing and unlikely new friend opens the door to an answer and one possible way out of the numbing suburban maze.
Tharp is a master at drawing young adult characters who are both more sophisticated than adults would think and a little less together than they believe themselves to be. While Sutter mixes martinis and holds philosophical discourses with his friends, he’s also crushingly oblivious to the ways his behavior affects the people who care about him.
Reviewers have both praised and criticized the matter-of-fact way Tharp illustrates high school drug use and sex. Rather than glorifying the thrills of late night partying or mixing in a pious sermon about the perils of pre-marital sex, the book honestly presents the life of a teenager the way it’s lived not only in Oklahoma but in every suburb and city in America. It’s reminiscent of the bluntness of Trainspotting, whose narrator allows that being a junkie surely involves “misery and desperation and death . . . but what people forget is the pleasure of it. Otherwise we wouldn’t do it. After all, we’re not @#$%-ing stupid.”
Sutter is far from stupid, but he’s hurtling toward a destructive or meaningless end all the same. It’s a testament to the quality of Tharp’s writing that the reader wants so badly for the kid to pull out of the spiral, to recognize what we and a precious few people in his life can see about his promise.
SPECTACULAR UPDATE:
Variety reports The Spectacular Now is being adapted into a feature film by acclaimed music video director Marc Webb, whose debut movie 500 Days of Summer premiered at last month’s Sundance Festival. The film’s producer hilariously describes it as “somewhere between ‘Sideways,’ ‘Catcher in the Rye’ and ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.’” I only hope the filmmakers are as true to the vivid Oklahoma City/Moore setting as Tharp’s novel is.
