Speak and the Crisis of Adolescence

In reading through Speak, the aspect of adolescence that stung with the sharpest nostalgia (though we rarely associate nostalgia with unpleasantness) was Melinda's helplessness in the face of overwhelming dysfunction in the people and institutions that are supposed to serve as her caretakers.  If anything, Melinda is extraordinarily sensitive in accurately detecting the presence and causes of this dysfunction.  I suspect that few junior high/high school students truly share her gifts.  They know enough to be bitter, angry, and withdrawn--to be sure--but rarely do their observations or rebellions strike the deserving targets.

At least that was the case for me when I moved with my family from the small town I grew up with in the summer between seventh and eighth grades.  The crisis I experienced was largely the result of academic discord and disappointment.  In my home town I had ranked at the top of my academic class but the curriculums were so vastly mismatched between my old school and my new one that I found myself quickly buried beneath the workload.  If I recognized the problem, I certainly couldn't articulate it.  I floundered and did my best to ignore school and minimize its significance in my life.  This was, necessarily, a losing battle, since school would continue to be my greatest time commitment for the next five years, but--as an adolescent--the qualities of inaction were as novel a solution for problem solving as the variety of alternatives that were, as yet, a vague, unruly, and likely disappointing lot.

The misfortune of my ill-timed move and subsequent academic struggle pales in comparison to Melinda's lot but I felt I could identify with her response.  The mingling of Melinda's tragic rape with the more insidious brutalities that accompany our first tastes of the adult world is perhaps a shortcoming of the book, or, at least, a shortcoming of its role as a tool to provide insight into the adolescent mind.  Rape is abhorrent and--I imagine--extraordinarily traumatic.  So, it would not be unreasonable to expect a similar shift in personality/psychology for a victim of rape regardless of age.  The book seems to suggest a brighter horizon for Melinda at the end and the character is perhaps clever and resilient enough to proceed brilliantly into her sophomore year, but anyone who has their image of the world and their self-image strongly shaken at a formative point can probably expect to carry certain habits of mind well beyond their initial recovery.  As for me, I have little more faith in the adult world and the Deciders that helm our institutions than I did when I was 14.  The hard-earned difference, acquired somewhere along the 16 intervening years, is that I no longer think it expedient to ignore them.