A Boy Who Possesses Animal Magnetism

The Flight of the Cassowary by John LeVert (Atlantic Monthly/Little, Brown: $14.95)

Paul (he never tells us his last name, which isn’t his only secret) is a nice kid. He’s starting his junior year in high school. He has a father who can’t figure him out (which evens the score because he can’t figure his father out either), a mother who has a weird sense of humor sometimes but is always sympathetic, a typical kid sister, Jessica, and a much younger brother, Luke.

Typical is probably a word that can be used to describe Paul himself as he tries out for the football team, struggles with French and Biology and tends to argue with his English teacher. He falls stumblingly in love with Karen Cleary, who’s also a nice kid, has a witty best friend, Jerry Raynor, and has tense encounters with a John Robbins, who’s black and a formidable football star.

Nothing special here, as far as Young Adult novels are concerned, right?

Wrong.

Paul Secret Life

There is much that is special in John LeVert’s remarkable first novel, and Paul’s secret life, the other side of a very plain-looking coin, is what makes it so. Paul (hold on to your hat) seems to turn into an animal at odd and unexpected moments.

Not just one animal, though. First, a rat and then a cat and then others. He also holds wonderfully lucid conversations with Ken, a bully of a dog, in the neighborhood. Paul deduces early on in biology class that people have the same basic response mechanism as the protozoan, the earthworm, the frog and the ape. As Paul explains to Jerry: “Like with your ancestors: a person is part Irish, part French, part Jewish.” Paul concludes that we are also part this, part that from the animal kingdom.

The reader is not surprised when Paul comes across Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” in which Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself a cockroach. Some kids in class don’t like the story at all. But Paul does. He is particularly impressed with the possibility that Samsa’s change into a cockroach was his natural response to his environment, his best way to deal with his family situation.

Obviously, we are being set up for Paul’s own animal responses to specific circumstances. And this is exactly what happens. After an out-of-town football game, Paul enters a tunnel as a shortcut to his school bus. He is accosted by a gang of kids who block his way, taunt him, then threaten him. He is in real danger--caught, as he thinks, like a rat in a trap.

Something happens in the tunnel. Paul isn’t certain what happens, neither is the reader. But suddenly the predators fall away as Paul walks through them. Later, Paul tries to construct the scene: “For a moment, it seemed, I had been a rat. But I wasn’t sure. Had I walked on four legs? Had those kids who were about to mug me seen a real rat? It was very strange.”

Suspending Disbelief

Ambiguity is the lovely refrain that resonates throughout Paul’s story. Does Paul actually turn into an animal or does he only think so? In order for this ambiguity to be successful, the author had to create a real high school kid in a very real environment of school and home. LeVert is eminently successful, so much so that we find ourselves willingly suspending disbelief.

Yet, the ambiguity persists even in the last dreamlike pages when, suddenly, the novel moves into a soaring climax as Paul flies--leaves the Earth, fights the tug of gravity, struggles upward until he clears the highest branches of trees and is free of the bonds of the planet.

Since Paul is the narrator, we’re never sure whether he flew in the sky or in his own mind, but we believe it, nevertheless, because we want to believe.

Later, Paul sits on the steps with his father. They embrace, close for the first time in years.

“I don’t know what to say,” the father murmurs. “Do you?”

“No,” Paul says, and neither do we. All we know is that, preposterous or not, fantasy or not, we are oddly moved and touched.

The novel is not as heavy or ponderous as it perhaps sounds. The threat of animal overload is avoided by hilarious touches--LeVert has the zany, poignant twists and turns of adolescent life down pat. We laugh and ache and wince at first dates, after-school fights, shopping-mall trips, classroom antics, intimidation by bullies, and here again LeVert exquisitely captures the exactness of things. He sets off powerful shocks of recognition in the reader and this, after all, is what fine writing is all about.