Tuned Out, by Maia Wojciechowska

[rachelmanija]

Cover copy: In Jim’s revealing journal, which is the substance of this moving book, we share the experience of that terrible summer – the LSD and marijuana, the hippies, the disillusionment, the helpless confusion and fear. It is all recorded frankly, to the final horror of Kevin’s freaking out and the shaky beginnings of his redemption.



The freaking out silhouette is even more detailed and hilarious in real life.

Written in 1968 by a very square author determined to plumb the horrifying depths of drugs she clearly never tried herself, this novel is regrettably only intermittently amusing: one part Reefer Madness to three parts unconvincing teen angst.

Sixteen-year-old Jim idolizes his nineteen-year-old brother Kevin to a rather disturbing degree. This is how the novel opens:

One day I ought to find out how it is with other kids. I don’t think I’m abnormal or anything for sixteen, but I don’t think that there are many guys my age who are still crazy about their older brothers. They might actually love them, but I just don’t think they are crazy about them. […] It’s not that I’m ashamed of it or anything like that, but how do you explain that Kevin is not just a brother to me? Besides being the greatest guy I know, he’s someone I’ve got to have. I mean it’s very important to me to have him.

Fandom! Stop making me go to the bad incest place!

Jim goes on and on and ON about Kevin for the entire rest of the chapter. He offers to be Kevin’s “Boswell” and follows him around writing down everything Kevin says to preserve it for posterity.

He is important.For one thing he never says ordinary, cruddy things. When he speaks he almost always says something really brilliant.

[…]

I really want his opinions on these things so they can become my opinions too.

Then, at the end of an entire chapter of that: I’ve been re-reading these last couple of pages, and I do sound sort of creepy.

Yes. Yes, you do. I’m going to go out on a limb and surmise that the author wrote this entire thing as a first draft and never re-wrote, but rather added in stuff like that as she went along.

Kevin comes home from college, and he’s become a marijuana fiend! He giggles maniacally, flaps his hands, hallucinates evil circles, and demands that Jim smoke pot (“You know. Tea. Grass. Marijuana.”) with him. Jim does so, despite his a Public Service Announcement’s worth of reservations. What follows is certainly the most unique pot high I’ve ever come across in fiction. While Kevin freaks out over the circles, Jim experiences ecstasy, hilarity, and then is visited by a devil who is out to get Kevin’s soul and an angel who urges Jim to save him. The angel-devil-Jim dialogue goes on for pages and pages and pages. Then Jim comes down and pukes his guts out. But lo! The angel is still there! The angel is real! Jim’s soul really is in danger from the Demon Marijuana!

The angel takes off, having convinced Jim that pot is bad. Kevin then hauls Jim out to score LSD, which Kevin has never tried before. They meet naked, dirty hippie chicks in a filthy squat, and nice adults who warn them of the terrors of “freaking out.” Kevin trips and – all together now – “freaks out.” This is disappointingly tame: he thinks the circles are attacking him, breaks a mirror and goes catatonic.

Kevin is taking to a mental hospital, where a nice psychiatrist fixes him up. He and Jim swear off drugs, and Jim resolves to try to get some of his own opinions. And then he goes and gets himself killed in Vietnam. The end!

Oh, forgot to mention: No one in the history of humanity has ever taken heroin and not become addicted, and it is impossible to ever get off it. If you take heroin, you are DOOOOMED.

View boggled reviews on Amazon: Tuned out; a novel

Comments

[jeremytblack.livejournal.com]

You know, I was only 5 in 1968, but I remember Kevin! I couldn't get over him. I wanted to ask him all sorts of things just so I could know what to think. Further, I wanted to &%(@ his *%#& and $(@$* his %&(%, although that might have something to do with the pot he was forcing me to smoke, it's hard to tell.

By the way, I'm surprised at this review of yours, coming as it is from a post-Reaganite philistine.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Hilarious.

My teenaged daughter recently flipped through Go Ask Alice and said it was similarly unconvincing, dated, and foolish.

And the heroin thing. Why do they do stuff like this--say things that are patently untrue? They really must have forgotten what it's like to be a kid (KIDS ARE NOT STUPID)

[vito-excalibur.livejournal.com]

Our teacher read us that book! In the FOURTH GRADE. It scared the piss out of me.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Wow! All we got was filmstrips that threatened that if we took LSD, we'd see music and hear colors. (Made me want to rush right out and get my hands on some--not the effect they intended, I'm sure.)

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

//DIES OH, how I remember this book. OH MAN. The only worse book I ever read about drugs -- besides Go Ask Alice -- was Angel Dust Blues, which we had to read in junior high as a Cautionary Tale. Ahahahaha.

Do you ever follow Fine Lines at Jezebel? They review old YA stuff all the time, it's awesome.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

No! Awesome, I've read nearly everything she reviews. I had no idea anyone but me remembered Nothing's Fair In Fifth Grade.

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

DUDE, she reviewed Tiger Eyes! Nobody ever talks about Tiger Eyes! And I loved that one, because the NM setting was so well-done.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

No one in the history of humanity has ever taken heroin and not become addicted

I read a really creepy thriller once (when I was very short of reading matter) in which there was a subsidiary character who was a jazz pianist who had become addicted to heroin after somebody covertly slipped him some one time at a party* (you know, in that naive manner of jazz musicians). Our hero took him in, because of some plot convolution I totally forget, and in the process helped him go cold turkey and get clean. This hurt/comfort motif, combined with the general misogyny - the two main female characters were sisters, one was a slut who had Betrayed the hero and his love for her, the other was her uptight spinster sister who turned out to be both secretly in love with the hero and a psychopathic murderess - made me to go hmmmmm even before I'd heard of slash. Anyway, the jazz musician was An Innocent Victim.

*This is the 'they put sherry in the trifle at the kiddies' party and now I am a hopeless alcoholic' defence.

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

...omfg I so need to read this now, YOUR FAULT.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I can't remember either the author or the title - it was in some omnibus volume from something like the Thriller Bookclub - the other two books were a Desmond Cory and a John D MacDonald but I've tried to trace the volume with that information without success.

It was really, really, bad. Esp by comparison with the other two, since Cory and MacDonald could both write a nifty thriller with plausible characters in prose that does not set one's teeth on edge.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

I don't think you should blame fandom for making you go to the bad incest place. Clearly Jim wants to go there himself.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Holy moly! Even the very best Maui Wowee didn't furnish a mega-high like that!

[jinian.livejournal.com]

the author wrote this entire thing as a first draft and never re-wrote

For FIVE DOLLARS.

I am disappointed to find no Amazon reviews!

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I thought there were some, but I seem to have copied the wrong link, and now I can't find them. Dammit.

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

Dude! It's DUELING REVIEWERS!

http://www.amazon.com/Tuned-out-novel-maia-wojoiechowska/product-reviews/B000GT5EUQ/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_helpful?ie=UTF8&coliid=&showViewpoints=1&colid=&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending

[seajules]

Besides being the greatest guy I know, he’s someone I’ve got to have. I mean it’s very important to me to have him.

Fandom! Stop making me go to the bad incest place!

Hate to tell you, but it's not fandom making you go there. Sounds like Jim's painting up a psychedelic VW bus to drive you himself.

Although, this:

While Kevin freaks out over the circles, Jim experiences ecstasy, hilarity, and then is visited by a devil who is out to get Kevin’s soul and an angel who urges Jim to save him. The angel-devil-Jim dialogue goes on for pages and pages and pages. Then Jim comes down and pukes his guts out. But lo! The angel is still there! The angel is real! Jim’s soul really is in danger from the Demon Marijuana!

sounds like either the worst SPN AU ever or the MOST AWESOME SPN AU ever. Either way, it'd make a hell of an ff.net summary.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I am now tempted to search and replace on that chapter and paste to the Pit of Voles to see if anyone would notice! Um. I guess that would be plagiarism, huh?

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

....hell, I bet that IS an upcoming SPN episode. Only with evil-women-demon-blood, instead of ganja.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Clearly someone needs to nominate this book for Yuletide next year.

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

DUDE, APPARENTLY SHE FOUGHT BULLS AND IMPRESSED HEMINGWAY.

http://www.lib.usm.edu/~degrum/html/research/findaids/wojciech.htm#bio

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/21/arts/maia-wojciechowska-74-author-of-children-s-books.html

Now I totally have to rip through all my Hemingway bios and see if she's mentioned in any....

Good God! Bolding mine

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Maia Teresa Wojciechowska was born August 7, 1927 in Warsaw, Poland to Zofia and Zygmunt Wojciechowski, a war-time chief of staff for the Polish Air Force. She attended schools in Poland, France, and England, developing an intense dislike for formal education. With the outbreak of World War II, her family moved westward with a string of refugees, ending up in France. They were overtaken by the Germans a year later. Due to her dislike of the French and her refusal to speak the language, Wojciechowska attended as many as seventeen schools in one year. She had a rebellious nature that has remained with her throughout her life and greatly influenced her writing. At eighteen she claims to have held a record seventy-two jobs and held a variety more in the course of her life, including undercover detective, restaurant hostess, masseuse, professional tennis player and instructor, ghost writer, and translator for Radio Free Europe.

In 1942, the Wojciechowskis moved to California. She attended Immaculate Heart College in Hollywood and continued to work at various jobs, including as a copygirl for Newsweek in 1956, assistant editor of RWDSU Record (labor newspaper) in 1957, assistant editor of American Hairdresser

[seajules]

DUDE, APPARENTLY SHE FOUGHT BULLS AND IMPRESSED HEMINGWAY.

Yeah, but was she high when she did these things? More importantly, was Hemingway high?

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

This comment thread killed me. I actually needed to get up to go to the bathroom, but stayed at the computer reading past my physical comfort level b/c I couldn't stand to tear myself away.

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

I was reading through your latest reviews in funny-blog order. So I got through this business of freaking out and becoming terrified of circles, and then the next post started:

"...her boyfriend is not too bright and drinks a lot, and she fears geometry..."

Well no *kidding*. Those circles are *dangerous*.

(I had to give the semantics a serious wedgie before they shut up and started meaning what you meant them to mean.)

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

I wonder if Kevin had beautiful hands, like Seymour Glass.