Inside the Mind of the Teen Male, Approximately

I don’t command a nerd army, or preside over a realm of the socially ill-equipped. I’m small for my age, young for my grade, uncomfortable in most situations, nearsighted, skinny, awkward, and nervous. And no good at sports. So Dork is accurate. The King part is pure sarcasm, though: there’s nothing special or ultimate about me.

— Frank Portman, King Dork (2006)

King Dork Approximately is the recently published sequel to King Dork. They are very funny and truthful YA novels, written by Frank Portman, with a quite pro- sex and drugs and rock and roll vibe to them. They are told by protagonist Tom Henderson, a disaffected, cynical, guitar-playing teenager in a band whose name changes every other minute (The Mordor Apes, with Mithril-hound on guitar, Li’l Sauron on Bass and Necrology, and Dim Todd on Percussion and Stupefaction, soon gives way to The Elephants of Style: Mot Juste on guitar, Sam Enchanted Evening on Bass and Animal Husbandry; First Album, Devil Warship). In King Dork, Henderson’s discovery of his late dad’s annotated copy of The Catcher In The Rye creates all kinds of havoc for our hero. The movie of the first book has been in production for ages at Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s production company, Gary Sanchez; Miguel Arteta (Freaks and Geeks, Youth in Revolt) is attached to direct. Portman is also the frontman of the old SF pop punk band, The Mr. T Experience. MTX, as it is known locally, was formed in Berkeley in 1985, so Tom Henderson comes honestly by his rock and roll bona fides.

These are the only YA books I know of that describe teen sexuality convincingly from the boys’ side of the equation. Here is a quote from Tom Henderson:

You can’t control “the hots.” You don’t say, like oh, I would ordinarily like this girl’s ass, but now I know she’s a Republican or likes the Doors then I suddenly don’t. It doesn’t work like that, at least not for me. And it’s true the other way too: things like accomplishments or abilities don’t much matter like people seem to think they should. “Well, Gwendolyn, now that I know you came in second in the spelling bee, I suddenly inexplicably want to ramone you.” No, not so much. An ass is an ass is an ass. You either like it or you don’t, and spelling bees don’t enter into it, so to speak. But honestly? I usually do like it.

In the travails of Henderson and his friends and foes, Portman expertly portrays the real-life horrorshow teens face in attempting to form a halfway operational understanding of — well everything, but most specifically, how gender politics will operate in the adult life they’re about to embark on. We really aren’t serving the teens too well there, it has to be said. What have they got to work with? Some ghastly farrago of Grand Theft Auto, The Fault In Our Stars, The Hunger Games and Nicki Minaj videos.

I met Portman in the sumptuous wood-paneled Tap Room at the Huntington in Pasadena, where he was staying during his book tour for King Dork, Approximately. He’s handsome, not too tall, dark hair, blue t-shirt. Strikingly, Portman’s gimlet-eyed, cherubic mien has remained unchanged for decades.

What is YA literature, even?

Well, another question is: What is an adult? and then, What is a young adult?

Some people see it one hundred percent in pedagogical terms — like, these are materials to help shape a young mind, and they see anything that doesn’t aid in that program to be undesirable. But that is not looking at it as literature, and it’s not looking at the readers as readers: It’s looking at readers as objects of engineering. You know the argument: “How does this help us raise children to be better people?” And I certainly don’t agree with that way of looking at it. It’s even more bizarre, when a writer looks at it that way: it’s imposing a limitation on, or devaluing, the interesting part of literature.

Did you read that A.O. Scott thing about “The Death of Adulthood in American Culture”? He was going on about how he doesn’t like it when he sees grownups reading YA books, like it’s beneath them or something.

In every genre there’s gonna be things that are not worthy of attention, and things that are worthy of attention. So this idea, that you should look at these books as, “This is for this age group, and not for that age group,” and judge based on how well they fit into your idea of those parameters? That’s a really terrible way to assess a piece of art.

If you’re writing that way, that’s crazy, too: “My character can’t express this thought, because this is a young adult novel and young adults shouldn’t be reading that.” That’s a recipe for a dishonest novel. I mean, there’s different kinds of novels! But you need to be honest, at minimum; if you’re pulling punches for any reason, then you shouldn’t be writing that book, you should be writing a different book, you should be writing a different character. And that’s true of anything, any novel, any piece of fiction, any song, anything.

There’s still another way to look at this: A lot of YA books that are marketed explicitly as YA are sort of fairy-tale, or aspirational or fantastic narratives that people can project themselves into in the same way that they would a romance novel or thriller, or adventure story. The scenes and events are completely unrealistic, deliberately so, in order for the reader to fantasize pleasurably. I see a potential trainwreck — politically, culturally — in reducing literature essentially to an escapist project.

I like my escapist fiction to be different. I like to involve, you know, a tough-talking, wisecracking detective, maybe. A novel is several things at once: It’s the entertainment it’s supposed to be for a kid; it can be art. There can be an amalgam of various aspirations for it. I mean, I take the view that you alluded to, which is that YA is various things that a lot of people find unsavory, as well as a contemporary marketing category; it’s also a tradition that goes back nearly to the beginning of American literature and I guess you’d really have to trace it to Huckleberry Finn.

Which is really didactic! — a work of moral philosophy.

I always think of this also in terms of rock ’n’ roll music, teenage music. Its origin is in like, girls and cars, but in the midst of this there are works of art: “You Really Got Me,” for example, a song that keeps seeming great long after you turn twenty-one. If you live long enough you realize that someone’s always really gonna get you — that’s not something you’ll ever really outgrow.

I’d kind of thought there’d be a time in the future when everyone was an adult and all of this crazy confusion and misapprehensions about other people and what they’re all about and just all the troubles that you go through interacting with reality would all kind of level out, and that is just not the case at all.

Your kind of unwise romantic entanglements and whatever… people who dismiss the relevance of this primordial teenage version of this thing, maybe, are still under the misapprehension that in a few years everything will be sorted out, and everyone will have the right views of everything and it’ll all be fine.

So… The Hunger Games. This is the kind of fantasy fulfillment story I was thinking of, where everything comes right in the end for our heroine. Which in this case, as in Titanic, requires the literal sacrifice, or attempted sacrifice, of the guy’s life: “Now, show me you love me, and DROWN!” this thing is saying. It’s very sick how young women are trained to believe in the existence or desirability of this grand passion: to expect that one day like, oh, now I’ve finally found the guy who’s gonna drown for me, my prince will come, and so on. All this by way of saying that I really loved all the beautiful passages in your book where Tom Henderson just baldly states: “I like girls.” Like: in general!! I haven’t heard this stated so clearly since Dobie Gillis.

Dobie Gillis is a great model for how you can depict that dynamic in a true yet hilarious way. I agree: That’s a good point of comparison…that doesn’t make me sound too good.

What?! It’s GREAT. It’s really good!

People shy away from things that are gonna make people go “ooh, not ok.” Well, if you were writing a novel about a fifteen-year-old guy, you know, and you shy away from sex, you’re lying. Why are you doing it even? Write your novel about a turtle or something. I don’t know about the sexuality of turtles but you can’t tailor your characters’ thoughts to someone’s idea of what, in a better world, this guy would be thinking. What’s the point of doing that? That’s propaganda, that is inimical to the whole idea of literature.

Writers try to veer away from things that are going to make people upset, and not like them. I think male sexuality has always been “problematic” in teen fiction, so what happens in characters is, you’ll have this guy who is pretty much a plain old regular teenager with maybe some quirks or whatever, but he’s like the one guy who’s not obsessed with sex, he’s the one guy who just wants the one special girl, and he’s the unusual one, and everyone else is the boorish animal.

And so then there’s a countervailing idea that we must be honest about these things. So now there’s this new version, where sort of the honest depiction of this very powerful thing that is essential to how human beings are, and you have to kind of figure out how to shy away from it.

It’s weird, because if you write a novel about a teenager and you leave out the sex, or you make him have the sexuality of a well-adjusted forty-five-year-old — not that I would say that there aren’t those people, but you’re doing something very weird. That’s a whole different kind of story that you’re telling. If you’re trying to tell the story of a real person, then this is what you got. You got the guy that is literally a hundred percent of the time thinking about asses. So you know, it’s funny, I think, it’s maybe a little bit sad, but it is what it is.

It’s not sad: It’s just what it is! I mean, I don’t think it’s sad or happy, it’s just a thing. I remember I was with my mom who’s now eighty-four or whatever — this was maybe ten years ago — we’re with my nephew who’s in his thirties, having coffee. I forget how we got on the subject, but suddenly I found myself saying to my mom what I had thought was so apparent: “No, no, mom, young guys are thinking about sex literally all of the time. Like if they see a woman they think about literally having sex with her — right? Pretty much. You know this, right?” And she’s like “Oh, no, of course not, that can’t be true!” and I look at my nephew!! And he’s like, “Uh. If there’s two chicks and they’re hot I kind of think about them doing it together.” And my mom was just flabbergasted. She goes, “Really?!”

I mean, that’s just biology

.

And because we’re humans in the other way too, it causes obsession and neuroses and…

Pain.

…all this stuff. So Tom goes like, “So what are you supposed to do if this is the case? You know: pretend it’s not the case? But it is still the case, so.”

I know the tendency is to say “Oh this is a YA thing, so it’s not to be taken seriously,” but we need to grapple with these facts. Because this idea that there’s this beautiful unicorn boy who only thinks about Miss Girl and is gonna drown is just such bullshit, and it doesn’t serve young women, or young men, at all. Real boys are a different way. Not a bad way! Just, different. Like they survive, for example, that has got to be a good thing.

You have to be honest, you know, and there are gonna be attacks on that basis. And a lot of the people who complain about this kind of stuff are from an intellectual culture where they think of themselves as the good people who are representing the values of honesty, right? Who will criticize this kind of thing by saying, “Yes, this is how people do really think, but we don’t need to read about it! And you should be more responsible!” So that’s the one narrow context where this person would counsel dishonesty in literature, and I think that is a very interesting thing, but it’s awful. It’s not the right way to look at what a novel is, either as a writer or as a reader or as a critic.

We have ideological chauvinism on the left and on the right. Yes.

I’ll tell you something. You know sometimes you’ll just come across something and it’ll just be so clarifying that after a lifetime of irritation and puzzlement suddenly it all just smacks into focus? — this is from Thomas Merton, it’s from one of his journals, and he’s talking about how the liberals and the conservatives are both inhibited or motivated by the same type of conformity; in either case, the dread of being left out of their reference group.

And that’s what snapped into focus: If you look at political discourse, it all seems so dumb and trivial, but if you look at it purely as group dynamics then it all suddenly kind of makes sense — Twitter outrage, all of this stuff — if you look at it as in-group signaling, rather than discourse. We’re not talking to each other, not arguing with each other, it’s just like: “We’re the good people, they’re the bad people, and thank god I’m in the good people group.” Everyone.

I’m from the San Francisco area, I had never met a Republican until I was like twenty-five — I didn’t even really think they existed, you know? — that’s my world. But we definitely have the pretenses of being you know, rational and liberal and tolerant, and in fact nobody is. Me, you, everybody, at bottom everything is very tribal.

Well here I have to disagree some, because there really is some attempt at tolerance out there — that’s what I love about your books, in fact; they’re very striking that way. There’s a ton of people out there who aren’t quite so jingoistic about their tribes and that’s why I’m here talking, you know? This is really important to me. Your book doesn’t give the impression of having been confected to please anybody. It’s a reflection of what really happened to someone growing up, and I really appreciate that. So like Tom Henderson, who is so inconveniently candid — this is part of what I want to know: How has he been received?

King Dork was very well received and it was very successful and it was this unexpected thing. I think how Tom Henderson is received is a different question, and I’m actually quite proud of the fact that this is a question that has caused people to have to do a little thinking before they can answer. He’s a character that justifies his existence, and it needed to happen. Because you know, sometimes people write depictions of well-adjusted, kind people who are just completely rational and reasonable to each other and obviously, that would be a terrible book if you did it, and that’s not the way life is experienced by anyone to any degree. But then you run a risk when you are honest, because reality is unacceptable in so many ways; a lot of people don’t like to see reality depicted.

There is this whole thing of “likable characters.” If that’s something you as a writer are concerned about, then I think you’re in serious trouble. “I gotta make this character likable, god what if people don’t like him?”

There will be responses not just to my book, but any book about teenagers where there’s an objectionable “attitude” or something and it’s like, “Okay, well done, Sherlock Holmes, you’ve cracked it! This is an adolescent who is narcissistic and has an unrealistic view of, and doesn’t understand, other people! You’ve cracked that adolescent problem wide open.”

That’s the thing, you’re so good at creating the conditions for sympathy for this kid who’s really troubled in many ways, but also like totally, and this is where I’m gonna quarrel with you on this whole idea of likability, your heart as a reader just goes all the way out to Tom Henderson. He’s a mess and you’re just like oh, hon

A lot of the things he’s confused about, he doesn’t realize he’s confused about them, and that simple thing can lead to a lot of hilarity, because this guy’s operating under these parameters that are completely mistaken, without any way of figuring it out. That’s the other thing that people want to see from a coming of age story: They want the lessons to be learned.

So what would Tom Henderson say to the girl who is waiting to be rescued by a Handsome Prince, I wonder.

He’s a cynical person generally, but he also has an affectation of cynicism — which is sort of telegraphing almost its opposite, a dismay at the fact that his view of the world is basically, survival of the cruelest and the dumbest. That nobody really cares about anything, and that they’re all faking it with every nice thing — but it’s also a wish that it weren’t so, and an aspiration to maybe somehow transcend this, symbolized by this idea of the Sex Alliance Against Society, as he puts it, the thing where you have a club where it’s two of you, at least, against the world, and he’s obsessed and fantasizes about it, even though he thinks it’s probably impossible, even though he does inch towards that in a way. So I think he would say that that is completely delusional from every angle.

I don’t know what, it’s an understandable psychological thing that people wanna be rescued, they wanna be saved, you know, raw form, life is terrible, a terrible experience and a terrible struggle, and you have these things that, like flashes of joy that mitigate how much of a struggle it is, so I can understand that, but I think that there are other stories. That’s one kind of powerful story.

There’s also the story where you’ve got a puzzle that you’ve gotta sort out for yourself, and then you sort it out, and you get it, and you use that to get to the next level, as in Donkey Kong.

But wait, come on. I think Tom Henderson can come to grips with this question on a deeper level. I mean he’s read, he’s read Austen. And I love how, in order to understand it, he kind of has to break Austen down into a series of economic questions, which is actually exactly correct. But he doesn’t go so far as to think about what is actually the case, which is that it was literally impossible for a woman to progress in that society absent those calculations.

I mean just for Tom Henderson, that is a level of awareness of reality that is completely unavailable to him.

So like, to what degree do we allow literature to just be a balm for the wound?

That’s one of those questions that is probably unanswerable. I believe it’s in Annie Hall where he tells the joke about the guy who thinks he’s a chicken, and it’s like “Well, we could cure him, but we need the eggs” — it’s that kind of thing. There’s a preposterous, and maybe even a damaging thing about some of these myths and delusions, but they are used in art in a way that that you need, and that you realize as you observe more of life, as the basic truth. This idea that there is a possible state of affairs where everything is equally good and fine and there’s no downsides and upsides, if only you calculate it right then you get to this point, you know it’s not the reality, it’s going to be flawed–

So are you saying, I mean, it does us good to even think that that’s possible.

Right.

But if it were yourself alone then maybe that would be like, nothing special, but you know that others have felt it too, and you also read about others feeling it, and it’s that echo that makes it possible to get up the next day.

This is something I’ve been very used to in my so-called career: there’s an almost exact parallel between being a YA author and therefore at the kids table, and in publishing and business, sort of condescended to, although strangely, in a lot of cases, we’re the ones who are selling more books, we’re the ones powering the ship — but it’s kind of like oh, you’re so cute! — and patting you on the head.

So pop punk — in the general world of punk, no one or very few people and nobody in the critical world could conceive of something interesting being done in this context, so they didn’t see it. I can’t complain about it now that the music industry is over. I am where I am; I’m in actually quite a good position with this legacy of songwriting. But I’ve noticed the same thing with YA publishing, where you end up in these kind of obnoxious situations with your “betters,” etc., but there is something kinda great about the element of surprise when the punches land, and there’s a lot of energy in it, and it’s like, it’s money-making in publishing.

It reminds me of punk rock in a lot of ways. You’re not the main thing going on, you gotta jump up and down and make as much noise as you can just to get noticed and you crash every party you can, and it’s hard to do it but when you do it there’s something great about crashing the party.

And the audience isn’t all just people with Ivy League degrees?

No no, and this is something that like I always say — I write for the world, like, you say you write the book that wants to be written. I really believe that that’s the way to do that.

But I will say that teenage readers are great. They don’t bring all of this trivial baggage to the appreciation of the book. If they don’t like it, they don’t like it, and they let you know. But when they get it, they enter into it solely on their own terms, it lives in their world and they don’t subject it to all these various tests. So that’s a great audience.

I hear from lots of girls who very much identify with Tom Henderson and his existential predicament, and that is not ever presented as something unusual or weird. It’s not like, “Hey I just want you to know that even though I’m a girl…” — they’re not saying that, they’re saying “I feel the same way.” Teenage readers are more sophisticated than most people give them credit for, and I find that very encouraging and inspiring.

This interview has been edited and condensed, for length and clarity.