In fourth and fifth grade, Doogie Howser, M.D. was my favorite television show. I remember the synthesizer theme music, the newspaper clips declaring the even younger Doogie graduating from college and medical school, and then the now ancient seeming computer screen with text being typed onto it. I did not have a crush on Neil Patrick Harris like I did on Kirk Cameron (Growing Pains) and later Leonardo DiCaprio (also Growing Pains), but on Doogie Howser. Doogie was a funny, sensitive genius. My mother did not approve of the show, because it was too sexy, so I made sure not to let on how much I loved it, or it would be nixed from our TV rations, going the way of Blossom and Head of the Class.
It was not so much that I wanted Doogie Howser to be my boyfriend, but that I wanted to be him. I wanted to be a genius. When I read about kids who skipped grades, I wanted that to be me. I watched a lot of PBS before I started kindergarten, and I was obsessively jealous of the kids on Sesame Street who already danced ballet or played the piano. What could I do? I could jump rope, roller skate, and I knew how to make friendship bracelets. But none of these things made me a genius or a prodigy.
What really ruined it for me was not PBS or Doogie Howser, M.D., but a movie my teacher in the gifted program showed us called Little Man Tate. Being in the gifted program meant that we were smart enough that our teachers noticed, had us tested, and then our IQs were high enough to distinguish us from the rest of the public school masses. My school district did not believe in allowing kids to skip grades, because they were worried about social development, but they had no problem holding kids back. So, instead of allowing us to be really challenged, we were pulled out of class once a week and put in a room with other bored misfits, and given little projects that they hoped would entertain us enough to keep us out of trouble.
Little Man Tate, I suspect, was not really meant to keep us out of trouble, but to occupy us when the teacher had nothing planned. It also covered two weeks of sessions, which worked out well for her. Not sure how the movie struck the rest of the group, but it made me ache with jealousy. The kid was reading before he could speak in complete sentences! He was taken away to the exciting world of college! What was getting hit in the head with a globe compared to being a child prodigy? Why would Jodie Foster consider keeping her son from being exploited, if it would help him reach his full intellectual potential? Being emotionally damaged or stunted seemed more inevitable than a threat: I knew no one who was normal.
Besides, being a little weird was cool.
The painful truth was that I did not learn to read, play the tuba, or build robots before the age of two. It was excruciating to admit, but I was not a child prodigy. I did, however, continue to believe that I would blossom young. Convinced that I would publish a book before the age of seventeen, I began numerous novels that carried on for a couple of pages, finished a few stories, and hundreds of angst-filled poems. When I turned seventeen without a book of my own, I thought twenty would be my year, then twenty-five, and then thirty. Now, I am thirty, and still have not published a book. I have completed a manuscript of poems, another of short stories, and am working on both a memoir and a novel. I write every day, or nearly every day, and consider myself a professional writer. I’ve publish a handful of poems and a short story. I send out work regularly and submit my poetry manuscript to book contests.
Truly, I believe that I am a hard worker and a good writer, and that at some point, it will happen for me. I do not intend to give up. That does not make it any easier to be thirty without a book. Many of the writers I admire, such as Lorrie Moore, say that they gave themselves the thirty deadline. Those writers, however, met the deadline. At this moment, I have no more deadlines. Just soon. Keep working, and it will happen soon enough.
A.S. Byatt, though arguably a genius, does not put forth as impressive an effort in Angels & Insects as she does in Possession and The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye. Angels & Insects is comprised of two novellas, “Morpho Eugenia” and “The Conjugal Angel.” Both are set in England, in the past, and contain a certain amount of betrayal by lovers.
“Morpho Eugenia,” the tale of an explorer stuck in civilized country due to lack of money who falls in love with a woman he assumes is civilized, feels like a Gothic romance set in a castle, though it is actually set on a large estate, and the characters are not royalty.
Edgar Alabaster spent the last several years of his life in the jungle, studying insects. He finds a patron, marries his daughter, and still pines to explore. Here is where things get weird and Gothic. Not to spoil too much, but before there were vampires, people still had weird fetishes and sexual practices. The overabundance of description and philosophy, however, manages to take all of the fun out of the perversion.
“The Conjugal Angel,” though including ghosts and spirits, is also a bit dull. The overuse of quoted poetry stilts any excitement in the plot. Lilias Papagay, a widow with no inheritance, has fallen into the trade of medium as a way to support herself, and has been lucky enough to find consistent customers, among them Emily Jesse, sister of Alfred Tennyson, whose fiancé died on her many years before, and she has since married another man.
Lilias just happens to have an assistant who is the real deal, which is where problems in the story eventually arise, as while people like to play at contacting the dead, they do not actually wish to hear the truths of the dead.
A rather dull story that could have been fun, something more akin to Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, but “The Conjugal Angel” overuses Tennyson’s poetry.
An interesting read, but time would be much better off spent reading Byatt’s Possession. Byatt’s first book, incidentally, The Shadow of the Sun, was published before she was thirty. If you are counting.
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