Wringer by Jerry Spinelli

Thinking about weird books

Have you ever finished a book, thought that was weird, and then proceeded to give it five stars and immediately recommend it to everyone you know? I’m reading one of those books now, called Nightbitch, in which a new mother turns into a dog. It was recommended to me by a fellow writer and new friend.

The author, Rachel Yoder, doesn’t spend a lot of time introducing you to the concept of her novel. The main character doesn’t even get a name. You’re just dropped inside the head of “the mother” and expected to hold on for a wild ride. The book opens:

“When she had referred to herself as Nightbitch, she meant it as a good-natured self-deprecating joke — because that’s the sort of lady she was, a good sport, able to poke fun at herself, definitely not uptight, not wound really tight, not so freakishly tight that she couldn’t see the humor in a light-hearted not-meant-as-an-insult situation — but in the days following this new naming, she found the patch of coarse black hair sprouting from the base of her neck and was, like, What the fuck.”

Yonder then grabs the reader’s hand and yanks you along, and before I knew it, I was pondering the animalistic and instinctual magicalness of women and if my own creativity, my own individualism would ever survive a transition as all-encompassing as motherhood. But the plot is: a woman turns into a dog. What the fuck.

I took the recommendation from my fellow writer friend because I wanted to read something weird. Weird as in conceptually or intellectually challenging, full of dark humor, completely engrossing and totally itself. I’m so glad she knew exactly what I meant.

Not only has Nightbitch inspired my own writing, but it’s made me think of other books I’ve described as five-star weirdos. There are plenty, but this newsletter is dedicated to the first weird book I remember reading.

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Me to the bestie I’ve known since 2nd grade: What was the name of that book I used to be obsessed with when we were little? With the scary looking white kid on the cover?

Bestie: Ugh - You mean that book about dead birds?!

Me: YES!

I was likely 8 or 9 years old when I first encountered Jerry Spinelli’s Wringer. I can’t recall if the book was assigned reading, or if I selected it from the shelf of my elementary school library for myself. What I do know is that I read it all in one sitting.

Wringer is about a little boy named Palmer. Every year, the town where Palmer lives hosts a week-long event called Family Fest; picture a big Ferris wheel, cotton candy booths, and plenty of ring-toss-like games. The week of Family Fest culminates in a pigeon shooting competition that involves 5,000 pigeons being brought in and shot over the town’s soccer field. “People pay for it,” his dad explains to him. “It raises money for the park.”

Once Palmer turns 10 years old, he'll be expected to participate in this tradition as a wringer, someone who goes around the soccer field killing the pigeons that are still alive by wringing (snapping) their necks. “Putting them out of their misery,” Palmer’s mother tells him when he’s 4-years-old and first witnesses his first wringer in action.

All the 10-year-old boys in town do it, especially the school bullies who have recently started calling Palmer their friend, even giving him a nickname: Snots. They look forward to it. Family Fest is an annual tradition and Palmer’s dad even won a sharpshooter trophy. Palmer, however, doesn't want to be a wringer. He hates the sound and smell of the gunfire, and he can’t understand why the men in his town buy a living animal just to kill it. He starts to dread turning 10 years old. And then, a pigeon turns up at his window, asking to be fed, and now Palmer suddenly has a secret pet.

Weird, right?

I reread Wringer recently and was reminded of the slow, creeping sensation of the language as Palmer’s 10th birthday gets closer and closer. Parts of it read like a horror novel.

“It was about then that Palmer began to feel a certain tilt to his life. Time became a sliding board, at the bottom of which awaited his tenth birthday.

Beans kept asking, ‘You gonna be a wringer?’

Every time, Palmer would look straight into that crayon box of teeth and say, ‘Sure thing.’ And every time he said it he could feel his heart thump. For among all the changes in his life, one thing stayed the same. It was something he had known since his second Pigeon Day, when he sat with Dorothy Gruzik on the swings. He did not want to be a wringer.”

If you haven’t noticed, the themes of Wringer are very boy-coded. For a good chunk of the book, Palmer is trying to impress the boys at school while also hiding his secret shame. He picks on Dorothy to distract the boys from the fact that his pet pigeon keeps hanging around his house; he gets in trouble at school so he has to stay late and his pet pigeon can’t follow him home; he slowly falls out of love with sitting in his father’s lap because his father smells like gun smoke.

Poor, sweet Palmer is basically in the midst of solidifying his definition of masculinity. Will he follow tradition and give in to peer pressure or is it possible to design his own definition of what it means to be a man (or at least what it means to be a 10-year-old)? In the climax of the book (which comes on the very last page), Palmer’s pigeon has escaped and ended up at the soccer field on Pigeon Day. He’s wounded and Palmer retrieves him from the field in front of everyone:

“Cradling his pigeon in both hands, Palmer walked from the field. The crowd parted just enough to let him through. He felt the cold stares of the people, he smelled the mustard on their breaths. A hand reached out. He flinched…”

Wringer certainly felt different from the type of books I was supposed to like. A lot of my favorite children’s and YA books are the same way. When other girls were obsessed with The Babysitters Club series, I was reading Wringer or Ellen Hopkins’ Crank series (now the most banned book series in the country) about teenage drug issues, or The Crane Wife in which a bird turns into a lady and then back into a bird.

As I got older, my taste for weird reads continued. I loved the absurd, over the top violence of Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah as much as I loved the navel-gazing of I, The Divine by Rabih Alameddine, a book made up entirely of first chapters of the main character’s memoir in progress. One of those chapters is in French and I couldn’t even read it and STILL it resonated with me. The Sellout by Paul Beatty is a hilarious satirical novel about a black man in California trying to reinstate slavery just to put his little county back on the map. How To Be Black by Baratunde Thurston is a collection of personal essays about his childhood — even just the title of this one will have people looking at you funny if you read it in public.

The Time Travelers’ Wife, Lovely Bones, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. I could keep this list going for a long time.

If you explain the plot of any of these books--characters turning into birds or dogs, killing pet pigeons, or a time traveling romance--they all sound hella weird. The person you’re explaining it to is likely thinking “why would I read that?”

What makes Wringer, and the rest of the books named above, so good is that although the concept is strange, reading it reveals a lesson in something so absolutely normal and human. Palmer learns to stand up for what he believes in. Ellen Hopkins’ characters learn to stop pushing people away. The nameless mother in Nightbitch learns that her motherly instincts are just as wild and indestructible as her creativity is and that both can existent inside herself at once (I hope, I’m still reading it.)

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I’m trying to write a weird novel right now. Weird as in, a simple, intriguing concept, with dark humor, taken to an unsettling extreme.

I wish I had a good elevator pitch, but I’m still very much in the early stages. What I do know is that the book I want to write is about anger, and how Black women are often unjustly criticized for expressing their anger. I know my main character has been repressing her anger for years, until she can’t anymore. I know someone is going to get murdered, maybe more than one someone. I know I want to explore how unexpressed anger can fester and become something else, something closer to blind rage.

I’ve been struggling with writing it for several reasons. One is that I’m a highly anxious perfectionist so starting any new project is hard. Another is that it feels unfamiliar to be writing fiction, especially the type of fiction I’m going for. I’ve been a journalist for over a decade, living completely in the world of facts and quotes and truth. And yesterday, I wrote a completely fictional scene in which the main character in my novel disassociates, follows a group of girls home and sits in their bushes, judging them. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a part of me that is asking why the hell anybody would read that.

Rereading Wringer reminded me that there’s a place for weird books with unsettling concepts and dark content. And there must be more weird readers out there (like me!) who might like this strange idea taking up space in my head.

Please, prove me right: what’s your favorite weird little book?