1971: THE SUMMER OF THE SWANS by Betsy Byars, with illustrations by Ted CoConis
Sara Godfrey was lying on the bed tying a kerchief on the dog, Boysie.
[A quick note: the book that today’s essay covers is a 1970 novel in which one of the main characters has an intellectual disability. As you might expect, the language used in the book to describe that character, and which is cited in this essay, is not exactly what we’d consider sensitive or compassionate by today’s standards. This essay also contains a big plot spoiler for The Room, I guess.]
I don't need to detail all of the reasons why The Room was bad. The movie, a 2003 drama written by/directed by/produced by/executive produced by/starring eccentric auteur Tommy Wiseau, is one of the most famously bad movies of the past several decades and has since become a cult favorite for midnight screenings. If you haven't seen the movie, it's worth seeing at least once because the wild tonal shifts, dropped plotlines, and out-of-order dialogue will crack you up as you witness a man trying to realize a very specific artistic vision and failing at every possible juncture. All of the baffling production decisions that led to the utterly incoherent final product on the screen are detailed in the bestselling book The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero, who co-starred in The Room; Sestero's book was also adapted into a separate film directed by and starring James Franco as Wiseau, and that movie is pretty entertaining if you can get past the fact that it was directed by and starring James Franco.
What I would like to highlight, though, is how Wiseau tried to spin the generally-appalled reaction to the film. Everyone except Wiseau knew that the film was bad when it came out; in Sestero's telling, pretty much all of the cast and crew also knew the film was bad before it came out. When the film premiered in Los Angeles - a premiere where Wiseau rented the theater himself because no studio would distribute the film, and promoted it with a cryptic billboard at Highland and Fountain that somehow stayed up for five years - the audience was reportedly howling with laughter at how terrible everything was.
Wiseau can't make movies, but he's not a complete idiot, and he almost immediately started to lean into a new narrative after people started going to The Room to laugh at it: of course everyone was laughing at The Room, because the film was always meant to be a comedy, actually. That's why Wiseau goes to midnight screenings of The Room around the world today and fully embraces the film's cult status. As Entertainment Weekly reported for the film's five-year anniversary:
"Wiseau insists he always intended The Room to be partly comedic, and that the movie’s perceived faults — including the out-of-focus scenes — are deliberate. ”Let’s assume we did everything perfect way,” he hypothesizes. ”You will be asking this question? No, no.” However, another anonymous cast member has no doubt that Wiseau is merely making the best of an extremely bad job: ”I don’t have anything to say about Tommy as a person. He is a nice guy. But he is full of s—. He was trying to put together a drama. It was basically his stage to show off his acting ability.”"
Perhaps the best way to illustrate this point is with the cover of The Room's original 2005 DVD case, which you'll see includes the pull quote "Experience this quirky new black comedy, it's a riot!"
You can see that this particular sentence is in quotes, as if a reviewer said or wrote it at some point, but the quote is not attributed to anyone. And given that Wiseau owned the film and distribution rights outright and created, marketed, and sold the DVDs himself through his own production company which he also owned outright, and thus would have had final say over what went on the DVD case, it's extremely possible that he just wrote the pull quote himself and slapped it on the case in order to further reassure everyone that this movie was always meant to be a comedy and it's totally fine that people are laughing at it.
To state the obvious, The Room was never meant to be a comedy. Wiseau plays a banker who discovers that his wife is cheating on him with his best friend, and ultimately kills himself. If your story is about something that serious, it’s probably not going to be funny. If it is funny, it’s probably going to be unintentionally so. And if you tell a story this serious and also make it intentionally funny…well, that’s just really weird.
I think the place I want to begin with 1971 medalist The Summer Of The Swans is this passage about midway through the novel, as the protagonist, Sara, and her friend are searching the woods for her lost ten-year-old intellectually disabled brother, and the protagonist is starting to panic:
“‘I was so sure he’d be here,’ Sara said. ‘I wasn’t even worried because I knew he would be sitting right here. Now I don’t know what to do.’
‘Let’s go back to the house. Maybe he’s there now.’
‘I know he won’t be.’
‘Well, don’t get discouraged until we see.’ She took Sara by the arm and started walking through the trees. ‘You know who you sound like? Remember when Mary Louise was up for class president and she kept saying ‘I know I won’t get it. I know I won’t get it.’ For three days that was all she said.’
‘And she didn’t get it.’
‘Well, I just meant you sounded like her, your voice or something,’ Mary explained quickly.”
This passage is the one that has stuck with me the most from Betsy Byars’ quick 160-page novel set over two days in the West Virginia backwoods, and hopefully it’s clear why: this is a very funny exchange of dialogue. It actually cracked me up when I read it. Mary, the friend, is trying to reassure Sara by reminding her about her dumb panicky classmate who was worried she was going to lose the election, and then Sara pointed out that she actually did lose the election, and Mary scrambled to save her point. That’s very funny.
But just to restate the context of that exchange, which is also the main plotline of the book, Sara’s ten-year-old brother has wandered off into the woods and vanished, which has put his life in danger because he has an unspecified intellectual disability (the book uses the term ‘mentally retarded’ throughout) that is likely going to keep him from finding his way back home or being able to find someone to help him. This is a nightmare. Sara, who is already moody and anxious all of the time simply because she is fourteen years old, spends the bulk of the novel trying not to be crushed under the weight of her worry for her brother Charlie, who could die slowly and scared and alone. Sara and Charlie live with their aunt because their mother is dead and their father lives in another state and doesn’t really want anything to do with them. This is a bleak story. This is a genre I call “bummer lit”: characters in dire circumstances usually dealing with a dire medical condition and just trying to get through the dire of it all, while readers endure their suffering and hope that there is some sort of moment of grace or catharsis at the end; whenever a work of "bummer lit" gets a film adaptation, the movie has a swelling soundtrack. This isn't to write off this entire genre - Bridge To Terabithia is bummer lit and Bridge To Terabithia is a good book - but it's to say that Swans is going to throw a lot of misery and stress at you in often predictable ways.
Except the book is also, frequently, trying to be funny. There’s a runner joke about Sara being sick of her orange shoes and trying to dye them another color, only to accidentally turn them puce. When Charlie disappears, Sara’s aunt goes into a hysterical, and clearly comedic, monologue blaming herself for watching too much television instead of taking care of her nephew:
“That devil television. I was sitting right in that chair last night and he wanted me to sew on one button for him but I was too busy with the television. I’ll tell you what I should have told your mother six years ago. I should have told her, ‘Sure, I’ll be glad to look after Charlie except when there’s something good on television. I’ll be glad to watch him in my spare time’. My tongue should fall out on the floor for promising to look after your brother and not doing it.”
This is funny, it was funny to read, the author wanted me to laugh and I did. But it’s a monologue about a woman being crushed by guilt because her nephew with an intellectual disability may be in the process of dying horribly. So, my real critique of Summer Of The Swans is that I have no idea what Byers is going for in terms of content or tone.
It really doesn’t help that Charlie is such a nebulous character in the novel, a problem further compounded by the fact that nobody knows what, specifically, his condition is. He’s just described as “retarded” throughout the book, which was probably consistent with how people would have talked about him in the late sixties or early seventies, and I don’t necessarily expect Byers to properly cite everything she read in the DSM. But it still makes it hard for me today, in 2022, to get my arms around Charlie as a character, with nothing but a very outdated and vague description of disability as his main character trait.
What is that disability? Well, Charlie doesn’t talk at all and is obsessed with keeping to his routines and listening to his wristwatch:
“The watch was a great pleasure to him. He had no knowledge of hours or minutes, but he liked to listen to it and to watch the small red hand moving around the dial, counting off the seconds, and it was he who remembered every morning after breakfast to have Aunt Willie wind it for him…He put his ear against his watch and listened to the sound. There was something about the rhythmic ticking that never failed to soothe him. The watch was a magic charm whose tiny noise and movements could block out the whole world.”
So, while Charlie has an unspecified intellectual disability, these kind of sound like characteristics of somebody with autism spectrum disorder or similar neurodivergence. Except Charlie definitely doesn’t have ASD, because he got this way after he had a bad fever?
“When he was three, he had had two illnesses, one following the other, terrible high-fevered illnesses, which had almost taken his life and had damaged his brain. Afterward, he had lain silent and still in his bed, and it had been strange to Sara to see the pale baby that had replaced the hot, flushed, tormented one.”
And that’s kind of all we get on what happened to Charlie and what he’s like. Again, this novel is short, and the entire action happens in 48 hours: Sara is moody, she takes Charlie to the lake to see the swans, Charlie sneaks out that night to see the swans again, he gets lost, there’s a search party, they find him, the end. He is not a thoroughly developed character, and nobody in this novel is, certainly not the supporting younger brother.
Except, unexpectedly, for stretches of the novel, Charlie is the main character. It isn’t until sixty pages in - over a third of the way through - that the third-person perspective abruptly shifts from Sara to Charlie as he wanders through the woods, and then wobbles back and forth between the two of them for the rest of the novel. There’s a straight-ahead practical reason for Byers to do this: it’s more interesting to intermittently show Charlie try to think through things in the woods than it is to show a hundred straight pages of a search party. But even getting inside Charlie’s head doesn’t reveal that much about him, and the narrative voice doesn’t meaningfully change, and nothing lasts long enough for me to really learn anything.
The brevity of the novel and occasional flashes of humor - the jacket copy describes the book as “the warm, humorous, poignant story of a difficult fourteenth summer" - are working against the actual story here. There’s just not enough time to establish the relationship between Sara and Charlie, or Sara and the rest of her family, and why it’s important, and giving a character with an intellectual disability that drives the novel’s main conflicts such vague characterization is doing a tremendous disservice to that character and the book overall. I don't think it's impossible to write a story on subjects this dark while being funny and smart, but I think it might be impossible to do it in a story for children, and definitely impossible to do it in 160 pages including illustrations. There’s just not enough here to work with.
There’s one passage at the very end of the novel, after everyone is home safe and sound, that feels like it’s supposed to be very moving:
“She [Sara] suddenly saw life as a series of huge, uneven steps, and she saw herself on the steps, standing motionless in her prison shirt, and she had just taken an enormous step up out of the shadows, and she was standing, waiting, and there were other steps in front of her, so that she could go as high as the sky, and she saw Charlie on a flight of small difficult steps, and her father down at the bottom of some steps, just sitting and not trying to go further. She saw everyone she knew on those blinding white steps and for a moment everything was clearer than it had even been.”
This is well-written, but a metaphor this sober and dramatic, with this much imagined swelling string music in the background, doesn’t work for me after I’ve whipped through unexpected shifts in tone and narrative. The most charitable analysis of Byers’ novel is that it is somehow both very realist and very impressionist: yes, stupid weird funny moments happen when you don’t expect them, including while tragedies are unfolding, and the world certainly doesn’t feel like it makes any sense when you’re a teenager, and Byers is suggesting all of that, but we really only get a glimpse of everything she suggests in this very short novel that feels very quickly sketched. The audience seems to be expected to fill in the rest themselves, and the audience is children who probably don’t have the tools to fill in a lot of blanks on characters with serious intellectual disabilities (adults often don’t have those tools either), ultimately reading a story that is way darker than most things they would have read before.
As Tommy Wiseau explained in the DVD extras of The Room, he had a very specific reason why he titled his movie that:
“At the time, I thought about a special place, a private place, a place where you can be safe. And it’s not a room, but it’s the room. I thought and I think that a lot of people would relate to it. So the room is a place where you can go, you can have a good time, you have a bad time, and a safe place.”
I’m not comparing Betsy Byers to Tommy Wiseau, that’s certainly not fair to her. But the metaphor that Wiseau gives here just sounds way more serious and heavy than his work actually suggested, just like the metaphor Byers puts out at the end of The Summer Of The Swans. Both artists clearly had something in mind that they wanted to get across to their audience, and neither of them appeared to be successful at translating everything that was in their heads into everything that was on the page. Wiseau failed more spectacularly and his work was more unintentionally funny. Byers wrote an intentionally funny book, but in doing so confused all of the remaining elements. So to give my final verdict on The Summer Of The Swans: experience this quirky new black comedy, it’s a riot!
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1923 medalist, The Voyages Of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting.