2018: HELLO, UNIVERSE by Erin Entrada Kelly
Eleven-year-old Virgil Salinas already regretted the rest of middle school, and he'd only just finished sixth grade.
When I graduated from college, I went back to my parents' house and still had a few weeks before my job and lease started and I moved out. Some of that time I spent shopping for a mattress, learning how student loan payments worked, loose preparation for independent adult life. But, at one point during this period, kind of out of the blue, my dad asked me if I wanted him to give me any advice. I didn't fully understand what he was asking at first - it was kind of a very broad question to start the conversation - but he wanted to give me advice before I started in my first full-time job. He had been very successful throughout his career at a few different companies, and he obviously had supported a family and raised two kids who were also graduating from college, so he definitely knew his way around being an adult in the world, and he still does, my dad is a good person, a loving person, a moral person, and I still remember all four pieces of advice he gave me and still think they are all very good pieces of advice. And writing that out also brings me some small comfort, because with every interaction I have with my daughters it becomes increasingly obvious to me that I am just turning into exactly him, parenting-wise.
These are the four pieces of advice. The last one is really more specific to participating in the workforce, but the first three? Well, folks, I think these work for any adult regardless of their job:
Ask for advice
Be fully present where you are
Treat everyone with respect, professionally and morally
Work at your job like you will be there forever, because otherwise you will be
They're good, right? I still think about these! I did not write them down and I still remember them fifteen years later, so I consider it all very good advice1. But I still do these things. I don't ask for advice as often as I should, but when I do, I think of my dad telling me to do it. I do remember to be fully present where I am, and I'm bad at it at my job but try to push myself to do it when I play with my kids. Treating everyone with dignity and respect, especially in my work life, has become so important to me that I'm legitimately shocked when I work with someone who does not do that. Today I don't give a shit about the "work like you'll be at your job forever" thing but my dad's heart was in the right place.
Like everything else, I got lucky. I had a dad who taught me the right things and gave me good advice, and in that respect, I ended up in a better place than Chet “The Bull” Bullens.
2018 medalist Hello, Universe is fine, if a little weird. It’s about a Filipino kid with some sort of unspecified learning disability who gets trapped in a backwoods water well with his guinea pig, just a real mad lib of a plot. He’s crushing on the deaf girl who is also in his school Resource Room cohort and feeds feral dogs in her spare time, and then he has a best friend who’s a young Japanese girl that practices some hodgepodge fortune telling, and occasionally he has visions of evil spirits or ancestral ghosts telling him what to do. I don’t know, guys, I’m not going to broadly recommend it.
But the antagonist in the book is Chet “the Bull” Bullens, who is a bully, and if the name wasn’t enough for you, rest assured that he is the most heavy-handed bully I’ve read about in recent memory. Every other line of dialogue that Erin Entrada Kelly gives him is some variation on “UGH! THIS IS STUPID!” or “I REALLY WISH I COULD HURT SOMEONE RIGHT NOW BECAUSE I’M BETTER THAN THEY ARE!”, and then the non-dialogue character traits he gets are “wanting to catch a snake in the woods because he thinks it’s cool” and “throwing the autistic kid’s bag down the well”. Look, this is a novel for children, so I get that we don’t have to be subtle. But, if for some reason, you’ve been thinking “I still don’t really understand what Chet ‘the Bull’ Bullens’ deal is,” chapter ten of the novel provides some helpful explanation in terms of what Chet’s dad is like:
“Chet wasn’t one hundred percent sure what his dad did at work, but whatever it was, Chet wanted to do it, too. Something about corporate sales, whatever that was. Something that made Mr. Bullens an important person who sometimes had to travel to faraway places like Europe or Seattle. Mr. Bullens liked to say that a smart man had an answer for every question. That’s how you get respect - you know more than anyone else and you teach people who aren’t as smart as you. Respect came in two flavors, Mr. Bullens said: fear or admiration. Sometimes both. Otherwise, you’re just a weakling at the bottom of the food chain, ready to get crushed under someone else’s boot.”
Ok, so Chet is a bully because his dad is Logan Roy or whatever; when Chet asks him why some people are born deaf, his dad’s response is “Don’t know. Lots of things, I guess. Some people are born defective. Why? Do you see one?” So do you get it yet? Chet’s dad is a lousy person, and that’s why Chet is a bad person? Have you received enough characterization in this seven-page chapter of this 311-page - 311 pages! - book? You haven’t? Okay great because we have way more stuff we can pile on here, because the dad makes a snide comment about the overweight woman in front of him at the grocery store buying junk food:
“The woman glanced their way and gave them a snarling look, similar to the one Valencia had given Chet. He wondered if the woman had heard. He hoped she had. Sometimes the only way to teach people was to embarrass them, wake them up, make them see the error of their ways. That’s what Mr. Bullens always said. It worked, too. People usually straightened up when Mr. Bullens was around.”
Do you get it yet? Do you get that Chet’s dad likes belittling people and maybe that’s why Chet likes belittling people too? Do I also need to pull in the passage where Chet’s dad also tells his son that he’s disappointed in him for not making the basketball team so that you can understand that bullying behavior often comes from deep insecurity? Are you tracking yet? It’s okay, I’ve got one more example on the final page of this, again, seven-page chapter, where Mr. Bullens callously comments to the trainee grocery cashier that “by the time we get out of here, my son’ll be graduating from high school,” and then Chet jumps in, desperate to get his dad to notice him “more like college,” are you figuring out what makes this character tick yet? Would it help if we jumped ahead twenty more chapters to Chet trying to prove something to himself by finding and capturing a snake in the woods and then imagining asking his dad to take a cool picture of him holding the snake he caught and everyone being so impressed by what a badass Chet is and Chet finally living up to his dad’s frequent advice that “you might as well be nothing if you don’t excel at something”? And Chet is an awful bully, but don’t worry, Kelly makes it clear that he’s not just insecure, he’s also kind of dim:
“‘Hey, dumbo,’ he said. ‘Is that you? Sneaking off to the bookstore?’ Chet laughed like this was the funniest thing he’d said all day. He often thought he would make a good comedian, what with all his funny jokes. Chet waited. His eyes moved slowly from tree to tree. The thought of someone being so afraid that he had to sneak by made Chet feel like a warlord or warrior. Sometimes before he went to bed he even imagined himself that way - like it was the Middle Ages and he was an all-powerful knight, sitting atop a mighty horse, covered in armor and pointing at people with his fine-tipped sword. ‘Go fetch me water, you peasant!’ he’d say, in his imaginings. But there were no peasants here, so he was stuck with names like dumbo. It would work better if the kid had big ears, but it still worked. ‘You can run, but you can’t hide!’ yelled Chet. It wasn’t very original, but it was all he could come up with on short notice.”
If you’re really annoyed by this character, I have good news, he ends up getting bitten by a snake in the book, although it’s not poisonous, so he mostly just ends up annoyed and we forget about him before the end of the novel.
To be honest, Mr. Bullens’ repeated admonitions of “SON, IT’S IMPORTANT TO BULLY WEAK PEOPLE SO YOU CAN DO BUSINESS THINGS ONE DAY” are a relatively small part of a novel that is, while long, generally a quick read (I read the entire second half while getting an oil change). Hello, Universe is in no way subtle or understated, but I’ve read less subtle, more overstated books for this project before. The kid who gets trapped in the well gets out by the end, and he starts getting somewhere with his crush, which is something. But it’s still mostly a weird hodgepodge of events and character traits, and the main thing that stuck with me was Mr. Bullens, if for no other reason than it made me think of how lucky I was to get the advice that I got from my dad.
But it also - maybe you see where I’m going with this - makes me wonder what sort of advice I’m supposed to give to my daughters. Right now, because my oldest is four, the main pieces of advice that I’ve been giving them, repeatedly, is “it’s not kind to jump on people” and “don’t eat floor food” (‘floor food’, of course, referring to food that has fallen on the floor2). I don’t do a lot of pontificating in front of my daughters; I cannot imagine any scenario in which I am saying anything to them that begins with something like “there’s only two types of people in the world”, apart from occasional sing-alongs to Britney Spears’ “Circus”. The good news is that I have my dad’s advice to start with, and someday when they move out of the house, I’m pretty sure I can still make that work for them. They should still ask for advice. They should still be fully present where they are. They should treat everyone with dignity and respect, professionally and morally. I might swap in a new piece of advice like “your job will never love you back” or “our only hope for liberation is for the proletariat to seize the means of production and overthrow the capitalist pigs” or maybe “don’t ever put yourself in a situation where you would be near an open well in the woods”, but I have some time to wordsmith all of that. For now, I just consider myself lucky that I have a dad who cared more about his kids than about hearing himself talk, so that when the time came to give me advice, he nailed it.
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 1957 medalist, Miracles On Maple Hill by Virginia Sorensen.
It just occurred to me that it's entirely possible my dad gave me additional advice that I've not only forgotten, but forgotten that there was an additional part of the larger array of advice he gave me. Ah shit.
This is the piece of advice I've given to my children that I have personally ignored the most for myself.