Child Abuse Theme Connections

The obvious theme of most of the book is child abuse, and how many of the characters deal with it, whether they are victims, abusers, people trying to help, or any combination of the three. Now, to me, most of it seems pretty accurate, not that I would know a whole lot about it. But I’ve been dealing with it in my own life, not directly but I know others who have, including someone rather close to me, so I’ve tried to help and I can connect with T.J. in some ways.

Chris Crutcher, to me, seems to miss some things as well; he relies too much on people falling into a “savior complex” and, while he describes some frustration in T.J. because he isn’t able to do much about it, and he also describes a lust for revenge rather well, my trouble relating to him is that he’s too deep into it. He knows too much and I suppose before I got into dealing with the people I know, I was fairly sheltered, and, to be honest, I still am. Not that Mr. Crutcher doesn’t have a right to do that, but it definitely gives me a disconnect from his characters.

Now, along with a savior complex, I think Chris Crutcher almost does more to enforce it than he does to help eliminate it (which, maybe it’s not worth eliminating, but you can meet some pretty screwed up people who failed their goals when they had one, so you can’t argue it’s something worth having in all cases) because he allows T.J. to help the little girl and sort of makes Mike Barbour look better in the end. He doesn’t give the sense that you do what you can to help, but you can’t fix anyone and you can’t change what happened to them. He’s saying you can cover things up, and if the wound isn’t too deep you can eventually pretend it was never there, which I have to disagree with.

He does a great job of showing how different people deal with it in different ways, like contrasting Mott and Mike Barbour or Carly Hudson. He shows the motives and ideas of people like Alicia and Rich Marshall, and showing it in action, as in Heidi. He shows how people become obsessed with saving, like the trauma that happened to T.J.’s father, but I think the best novel that dealt with saving anything was “Acceleration” by Graham McNamee. It showed something more of an natural want or need to be something of a hero or a savior to someone in everyone, something I relate to more than wanting make up for past mistakes.

I guess my point is, if there really is one, that while the novel does a great job of exploring the themes of the novel, unless you really know anything about it, it can go over people’s heads in a heartbeat.