There is a lot to say about Laurie Halse Anderson’s novel Speak, which is the first point I would like to make about it. For a book that doesn’t quite make it to two hundred pages, for a book about a girl who doesn’t talk, where silence isn’t just a counterpoint but is the point, this book says so much.
To summarize the book, for me, seems nearly impossible, but the closest I can come is: Speak is a novel about a girl who is raped, and because she ends up a social outcast at the same time, succeeds in hiding the attack from everyone she knows. Which summarizes the plot in a way, but does nothing to capture the feel of the book. On every page is a problem, a striking image of the world, from intolerant teachers to bureaucratic/governmental interference to the dysfunctions of a loving family. Yet, not one of these issues is dealt with through the lens of melodrama. As the book is First Person, Present Tense, we see these things through the oh-so-jaded eyes of a teenage girl. For her, these things are normal and so we see them through the lens of normal. Verisimilitude, for those of us who like our ten dollar words. Realism, this book feels real to me, for the rest of you. That is the normalcy that Melinda oozes with every carefully thought word. “The hot lunch is turkey with reconstituted mashed potatoes and gravy, a damp green vegetable, and a cookie.” (8) We all know that kind of food, it is the world around us, which, perforce, brings up the more troubling thought: does that make the rest of Melinda’s normal… well, normal?
But the complexity of Speak isn’t merely in its subject matter. There are some books where the words are the medium through and in which the author tells the story. It is the mode of expressing their art. And then there are stories where the words themselves become the art. Speak is the latter. From the very first page it is obvious that this is not a run of the mill novel. There are no chapters here, the books is broken up into sections called marking periods. There are no scenes, there are smaller sections, usually just a page or two long, all carefully titled with things like “Our Fearless Leader” (17) and “Peeled and Cored” (65). There are no scenes, paragraph, dialogue, paragraph, dialogue. There are paragraphs, short, choppy sentences clinging to each other in the middle of all that extra white space. Extra line breaks linger between thoughts on the page, drawing the reader’s attention, their focus to each mental moment in time, as if it were important. Forcing it to stand alone as a coherent moment, only loosely connected to the rest of the story. And when there is dialogue it is marked off, blunt and direct. He said/she said are invisible, as any English teacher or major will tell you. They are invisible tags that the reader will just skip over automatically. When writing, you want your reader to know who is speaking, but the tags, the bits of action, the minute are supposed to flow away from the words, from dialogue to paragraph with no mental interruptions.
In Speak Anderson interrupts. “Heather: [smiling with her mouth but not her eyes] We were never really, really friends, were we?...” (105) It’s like the format of a script or screenplay, and yet even more in your face. Who is speaking isn’t supposed to be periphery knowledge here. Who is saying it, how they are saying it, those things are just as important as the words themselves. In a blunt and simple way, merely through a bit of formatting Anderson is forcing the character to step up and take responsibility for the words they speak, even if, within the universe, they don’t seem to care. The words we speak are not insignificant, which, cliché as it sounds, is the whole point of the novel. New summary: Speak is a novel about human interaction and how influential a word/gesture/action can be, in both the positive and negative.
But at the same time, it is a book about a girl, and she was raped. It is a book about depression. About social isolation. About families that are screwed up but in a socially acceptable way. It is about high school. Self expression. Speak is about girl-on-girl crime and boy-on-girl crime. It is a book that defines friendship and what it isn’t. Speak is complicated and complex. It’s the way it should be.
Works Cited:
Anderson, Laurie Halse. Speak. Puffin Books, 1999. Print.
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