Better Nate to Come?

Tim Federle’s Better Nate Than Never is a novel for tween readers that fills a particular niche: a story of a stagestruck boy that deals almost openly with being gay. In other words, Nate’s sexuality is obvious to readers, and as a thirteen-year-old narrator he’s only a hair’s breadth away from acknowledging it.

(Which is more than the New York Times Book Review could do; actor Bob Balaban’s recommendation of the book dares not speak of that aspect.)

Some years back I wrote about the gay reading of Susan Cooper’s 1999 novel King of Shadows, also the story of a teen-aged actor far from home. But that book downplays homosexuality when it comes to the young hero and William Shakespeare.

Better Nate Than Never is more a novel of our time. And I suspect that it will become dated rather quickly. It’s perched at a moment when Nokia cell phones are present but unfashionable and iPhones still something special. Brand names like that are ubiquitous in teenagers’ lives, but writers are advised to avoid them because they can change quickly and date a book. In another five years Nate’s book-length quest for a Nokia charger could be as quaint as a character using a payphone.

More problematic for me was the novel’s plotting. The story involves Nate running away to New York to audition for the lead in a musical production of E.T. Not once but twice, and possibly three times at the end, the storyline turns on the show’s producers calling that Nokia cell phone to say that they’ve completely changed their minds since the last time we heard from them. Perhaps this is how the theater business works, but each additional shift in this novel seems more like a convenience for the sake of a sudden plot twist.

As for other plot elements, page 28 tells us that Nate’s father had an affair the previous winter, and that never comes up again. A religious backstory pops up on page 178, two-thirds of the way through the book, with no follow-up. Nate’s mother has a drinking problem that’s crucial to resolving the plot yet not introduced until page 228.

Author Tim Federle knows the milieu of his book well: like Nate, he grew up in greater Pittsburgh and lit out for Broadway. But his training is in acting, not fiction, and this was his first novel. Better Nate Than Never will undoubtedly speak to some readers more than anything else on the children’s shelf right now, and that rarity gives it value. But I suspect that, just as the next big thing in smartphones is on its way, there will soon be better constructed middle-grade novels taking the same stage. Perhaps even the upcoming sequel to this book from Tim Federle.

Half in the Shadows

Yesterday I started writing about my look back at Susan Cooper's King of Shadows after hearing her speak of the book's genesis in a story about gay love between Shakespeare and a young actor. When Cooper decided she was writing the boy Nat's story for young readers, what happened to the sexual themes?

The whole novel takes place among two theatrical troupes: a group of American boys recruited to perform Shakespeare's plays in the recreated Globe Theatre, and Shakespeare's own players in Elizabethan London. Not one person in either time is identified as gay. Arby, the flamboyant impresario who heads the boys' troupe, lives with a woman named Julia. The Elizabethan Nathan Field is said to have been known, like other theatrical professionals, for his "success with women."

I spotted only two moments in which characters mentioned heterodox notions of sexuality or gender. When a young member of the boys' troupe says his mother thinks the theater is dangerous, a sardonic teen answers, "She thought her beautiful little boy'd get attacked by nasty molesters?" Later, when Nat is in Elizabethan England, he gets angry at a street-toughened older teen calling him "little lass."

However, unlike other boy actors in both the modern and Elizabethan scenes, Nat is never assigned a female role. Nat says he has no interest in playing "lovey-dovey roles," and Shakespeare agrees that he's "not a romantic beauty." What's more, there is not a word in the modern scenes about the implications of boys dressing as women: no teasing, no arguments, no comments at all. Instead, one of the loudest themes in the book, introduced on page 2 and repeated often afterwards, is the idea of a theatrical troupe as a "family."

Cooper passes up other opportunities to address ideas of homosexuality. Shakespeare gives Nat a copy of his sonnet beginning "Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments." This is usually identified as one of the batch dedicated to a "fair [male] youth." However, Cooper's Shakespeare says he wrote it "for a woman."

Shakespeare tells Nat to read that sonnet as about "thee and thy father," which illuminates how Cooper eventually restructured her characters' relationship in what turned out to be "a children's story." She had originally planned to write about Shakespeare's homosexual love for a young player, but in the finished book Shakespeare is Nat's surrogate father and Nat is the playwright's replacement son.

This becomes clear in the scene beginning on page 73, when Nat dissolves in tears before the playwright and reveals his father's suicide for the first time. Shakespeare in turn talks about losing his son Hamnet, who was about Nat's age. It turns out that Nat's father was a writer, too. Shakespeare later speaks of visiting his wife and surviving children at Stratford. In this context, when the playwright moves the young player into his rooms for more rehearsal, that comes across as Nat regaining something of his life with his father (his mother had died years earlier) rather than as a potentially romantic relationship.

Well, at least from one side. Even though Shakespeare shows only paternal fondness for Nat, the boy develops some sort of crush on the playwright. "I'll never leave you. I want to act with you forever," Nat thinks, and later asks to be Shakespeare's apprentice. Nat misses the man terribly when he returns to the 20th century. And although he never identifies his feelings as romantic love, he comes to sees his portrayal of Puck alongside Shakespeare's Oberon as a "spirit in love with his master."

Thus, while the William Shakespeare in King of Shadows doesn't appear to be gay or bisexual, it's certainly possibly to read Nat as at the start of realizing his homosexuality. Of course, that mix of filial and romantic love can be disquieting, especially in a young boy--hence the explicit emphasis on finding a family.

Earlier I quoted an interview Cooper gave to a British newspaper in 2000, in which she mentioned the genesis of King of Shadows in the love between Shakespeare and a young player. Perhaps she said the same to American journalists, but as the book was coming out in 1999 she emphasized a different inspiration in an interview with Publishers Weekly:

About 10 years ago, I had a flicker of an idea that I would like to write about a boy who is acting at the new Globe and finds himself going back in time to act at Shakespeare's Globe. But I thought, "Oh, God, all that research!" I had just finished The Boggart, and the [main character] hadn't quite left my head, so instead of doing my Elizabethan boy, I wrote a sequel. But the Elizabethan boy didn't leave my head either. So then I did bite the bullet.

Though some readers have latterly wondered about Cooper's Shakespeare being gay, the book's earliest reviewers picked up its clear theme of Nat finding a replacement family rather than its misty whiffs of romance. Publishers Weekly said "Shakespeare [is] cast as a wise, intuitive father figure," and Library Journal spoke of the playwright and Nat's "father/son relationship."

Seeing Cooper shift her story from a love story to a tale of rebuilding a family makes sense when we consider her oeuvre. In her books, families are sources of stability and strength, not tension and anger. She writes little about romantic love and sexual attraction; as she described in her Cambridge Forum presentation, that's one reason she likes writing about pre-adolescent kids. (The recent movie The Seeker was particularly un-Cooperish because the screenwriter gave Will Stanton a teenage crush and a treacherous sibling. We can find such things in Diana Wynne Jones's novels, but not in The Dark Is Rising.)

Out of the Shadows?

Back in October, I asked what major characters in children's fantasies were identified as gay before J. K. Rowling's post-publication comments on Albus Dumbledore. With some commenters' help I came up with a very short list of characters, none of them humans explicitly identified as gay.

I didn't include William Shakespeare in Susan Cooper's King of Shadows on that list even though the real poet wrote love sonnets to a young man. That was because, as far as I could recall, there was no sign of homosexual interest from the character who appears in the novel.

At last month's Cambridge Forum, however, Cooper described her book as having its seed in imagining Shakespeare's attraction to a young male actor. Mentioning Dumbledore, an audience member had asked her why so many recent fantasy stories for children appear to advocate tolerance. (Not unlike most other modern American children's literature: "tolerance is good" is an almost inevitable theme.) Cooper reply included these remarks:

It is hard to do something on purpose without being didactic, and I had intended King of Shadows to be a book about a gay relationship between--a homosexual relationship since the word “gay” meant something quite different in the 17th century--between this boy and Shakespeare, and it wasn’t spelled out in the book. And one of the nicest things anybody has ever said to me about a book is when a friend of mine said, “I wish I’d had that book when I was a gay boy at ten.” So it was there--something--it was as if it was still there in the book for someone who wanted to take it out.

(MP3 download of this talk here.)

That genesis for King of Shadows isn't just a post-Dumbledore revelation. In a 2000 interview with the Guardian, Cooper said:

Initially, my idea was to write a story about Shakespeare's repressed homosexual relationship with one of his boy actors--but then the boy, Nat, got stronger, and by the second chapter I knew that it was a children's story.

Some King of Shadows readers have evidently seen hints of a homosexual relationship in the book. In October, Horn Book editor Roger Sutton wrote cheekily, "I still maintain that, in Susan Cooper's time fantasy King of Shadows, young hero Nat and the Bard of Avon totally had it going on". And a reviewer on Epinions wrote in 2005:

There were several times when I half expected Shakespeare to make a play for Nat - all of the signs seemed to be leaning in that direction - but it never happened. I don't know if that ambiguity was intentional or not, but I'd have greatly preferred that either something had happened or that there'd have been no signals that things might go in that direction. I found constantly wondering if something was going to happen distracting.

So I took another look at King of Shadows. And I still don't see Shakespeare showing any sexual interest in other males. Indeed, I think the book passes up opportunities to address issues of sexuality and gender, and heavily emphasizes other aspects of the relationship between Shakespeare and Nat. Which isn't surprising, considering the abiding themes in Cooper's other fantasies for children.

TOMORROW: What might it mean for King of Shadows to have become "a children's story"?