Clearly I’m quite protective of it.
I first read The Perks of Being a Wallflower seven years ago, in a bid to make up for a lack of literary erudition. The 1999 novel by Stephen Chbosky was one in a trio of Young Adult titles I picked up during an online shopping spree, most likely in between episodes of The OC. The author had named J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye as an inspiration; since I was looking to discover another coming-of-age classic, a touchstone I could call my own, his work about an introverted and unconventional teenager who calls himself Charlie ticked all the right boxes: drugs, sexuality, alienation, wit. Sold.
I was so glad to have stumbled upon it that I even mentioned it perhaps even quoted it in one of my earliest pieces as a newspaper columnist. While it came along with the disappearance of my attention span, the book’s references, enumerated by Charlie, intrigued me long enough. It was through the high school freshman’s wide-ranging taste in music, films and novels that I became aware of A Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol Harum and Asleep by The Smiths, along with Jack Kerouac’s On The Road and Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters. I drifted through this thicket of fiction in such a heightened state of happiness that I made it a goal to download, watch or purchase everything it mentioned. I was so obsessed that peeing on the damn book wouldn’t have made it more my own.
I haven’t read The Perks of Being a Wallflower in donkey’s years, so news of a film adaptation left me in a dilemma, one that snobs and early adopters seem to share. We fish in the same pond pop culture for the same fish. But couldn’t Hollywood have its way with another bestseller, one that I feel less strongly about? They’ve already ruined C.D. Payne’s Youth In Revolt but, thankfully, did an okay job with Ned Vizzini’s It’s Kind of a Funny Story. Incidentally, those two are the other tomes in my triumvirate. There seems to be a pattern here.
I have this nagging suspicion that film producers now source their ideas from blogs because Perks is huge online. There’s a Tumblr devoted to it. There are teens who have tattoos of a line from p.39: “And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.” There are those who, in spectacular meta fashion, mock teens who sport silly “infinite” tattoos. And it’s no coincidence that the stars set to play Charlie and Sam Logan Lerman and Emma Watson, respectively are Internet icons.
I should be proud that a book I loved long before it caught on has become this big, resonating beyond print and the Web. But I am conflicted. There’s a part of me that isn’t ready yet to share The Perks of Being a Wallflower with those who only read it because the movie will be out soon. Bandwagon people are the worst. Then again, a novel like this, despite being hipsterfied, deserves the acclaim because the experience it presents, a mixed tape of a young person’s emotional life, is universal.
Maybe writing about it is counterproductive. Maybe not. But at the very least, Stephen Chbosky is writing and directing the big screen version, due in November this year. To repurpose something Charlie says on p.2, “And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be.”
I really don’t know.
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