Essay Questions

What is the stimulating incident which drives the narrative storyline?

The novel is a coming-of-age story about a teenage boy coming to terms with his sexuality. The plot is therefore dependent upon Davy meeting Altschuler and this meeting cannot take place if he remains living in the circumstances prior to the story’s opening. The incident which stimulates the changes that make meeting Altschuler possible is the sudden death of Davy’s grandmother. It is the heart attack which claims her life which upsets the protective and somewhat sheltered applecart of Davy’s existence. As the result of losing his beloved grandmother, he is forced to move in with his mother who is definitely not capable of filling the caretake role his grandmother provided.

This book has gained the reputation of being one of the first YA novels to “about” homosexuality, but is it really?

The problem that comes with assigning a single overarching topic that a book is supposed to be “about” is that it often diminishes a multitude of other themes which the story covers. Davy’s tale touches upon a fairly broad range of themes including the effects of grief, the consequences of divorce upon children, culture shock, parental alcoholism, the crumbling of the traditional family unit, nature versus nurture, and the psychological impact of being a latchkey kid. As for the vaunted focus on homosexuality, there is just one single innocent kiss that passes for a “love scene” in the story. Most of the book’s focus on same-sex sexual desire is targeted toward the feelings of guilt and shame that such desires are capable of producing following teenage experimentation. While not exactly wrong, the categorizing of the book simply as an example of LGBTQ teen fiction seems to be really more of a marketing decision than an organic one based entirely on the book’s content.

How would the changing the title of this novel to Fred significantly—but fairly—change its critical perception?

A popular genre within the YA field is the “dog story” in which the main character is a canine. Many of these stories feature a first-person teenage human as the narrator who relates the actions of the animal as well as sometimes conveying opinions of the dog’s thought processing. Of course, it is also true that many dog stories are told by a third-person narrator capable of actually entering the dog’s mind. Davy’s pet dachshund, Fred, is unquestionably a major character in the novel. In fact, it is quite easily argued that Fred is the second most important character in the book. It is also true that the second most significant stimulating incident in the book involves Fred. The guilt and shame that Davy feels about his brief homosexuality encounter with Altschuler is directly produced by this incident. Taken altogether, it is very safe to describe the book as being “about” a boy and his dog just as much as it is to suggest it is “about” homosexuality. It would not be misleading in any way for the novel to have been titled Fred, but doing so would certainly have altered the critical opinion that has led it to becoming famous as one of the first YA novels to be “about” homosexuality.