Books: ‘Hunger’ takes on weight issues.
‘Chalk Artist’ explores contrasts in escapism
Can Emily Dickinson compete with World of Warcraft?
That’s among the intriguing questions raised by Allegra Goodman in “The Chalk Artist,” featuring a 23-year-old teacher trying to win the hearts and minds of her students in a high school that “had a reputation for ‘out of the box’ kids – those who were artistic, or autistic, those with learning differences, or special gifts, or both at once.”
Aidan is among the students in Nina’s American lit class; while he’s bright, he’s also more interested in gaming than studying. He’s hooked on products offered by Arkadia, a company run by Nina’s father that’s rolling out a new game.
Borrowing from Dante’s “Inferno,” UnderWorld is an elaborate multiplayer online role-playing game featuring “aeroflakes” — pixie dust that, once released, catches and reflects light to erase one’s actual surroundings, replacing them with a world of elves, knights, demons and monsters through which one “qwests” toward and into hell.
Goodman takes her time rendering this richly imagined alternative universe, so that we might better understand why, for Aidan, his “ordinary body seemed a dim reflection of his gaming self” and why his flesh-and-blood friends and family grow increasingly “indistinct” as “their voices died away.”
Aidan’s descent is aided and abetted by Daphne, an Arkadia employee; resembling a sorceress from Aidan’s virtual world, she seduces teen boys like him to play. She likewise enchants Collin, an Arkadia employee and the 23-year-old chalk artist of Goodman’s title.
Collin is also Nina’s boyfriend. Much of the first third of Goodman’s novel is given over to their budding romance and everything standing in its way, with Collin’s inability to believe in himself and trust his talent being the biggest obstacle. It’s telling that Collin works best with chalk; easily erased, his creations can be disowned as trifles he claims he doesn’t much care about.
Collin, too, gets readily lost in the virtual worlds he helps create; “at work, the outside world felt like a dream, far away and unsubstantial.” His escapist immersion in games like UnderWorld is among the many traits he shares with Aidan.
Both have been raised by loving single moms, in a novel where fathers are nearly always absent, abusive or both. Both crush on Nina. Both are nevertheless fascinated by Daphne. Both are extraordinarily gifted. Both balance confidence in their own talent with deep-seated insecurity about whether they’ll be appreciated.
True to his chosen medium, Collin is a sometimes flashy but also easily smudged and erased version of the more textured Aidan. The weakest sections of this novel involve Collin’s romance with Nina, which is never quite believable and for which some of the dialogue is remarkably stilted, coming from such an experienced novelist.
Conversely, Aidan and his twin sister nearly always ring true, whether the topic is their fractious entanglement as twins, their loneliness as teens or the corresponding yearning they share for love and connection.
Moral without being moralistic, Goodman suggests that gaming is not the answer; while she understands how and why it tugs at sensitive and vulnerable teens like Aidan, she worries about all it means when a boy “would rather play online with strangers than qwest with friends in the same room.”
Invoking the superstar writers from the American Renaissance, Nina tries to win Aidan back, making good on her dream “of enchanting kids with words instead of optics.” “She had grown up with games,” the narrator tells us. “She craved truth.”
Despite this stark dichotomy – true to Nina’s Calvinist New England state of mind – Goodman herself seems more willing to recognize that both gaming and poetry are forms of fantasy. It’s Nina’s beloved Dickinson, after all, who boasts she’ll speak the truth by telling it slant.
But Goodman also clearly believes some fantasies are more compelling than others. Compared to someone as fierce and original as Dickinson, she tacitly suggests, even the most awesome virtual avatar becomes a boring lightweight. She’s right.