The Perks of Being a Wallflower follows fifteen year old
Charlie through a year of his life. He hasn’t really been making friends at
school and has gone through some tough times recently with the death of his
aunt Helen and his brother moving away to college. He makes friends with Sam
and Patrick who are the same age as his older sister. Sam and Patrick introduce
Charlie to their friends and with them Charlie experiences new things such as
alcohol, drugs and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Throughout the novel Charlie
reads twelve books given to him by his English teacher and these have an
influence on him, as well as the new things he goes through. It’s a coming of
age book in the same vein as a novel like The Catcher in the Rye.
I thought I would like Charlie as he is a nice guy, a bit
shy and very intelligent. He also escapes into books which I can relate to.
However, there was something not quite right about the way he is written. There
are various things that have happened to Charlie that could account for this
but for me it affects how realistic the book feels. Charlie is immature for his
age and cries a lot. It’s difficult to imagine him having friends his own age,
let alone friends older than him. I just can’t see him being accepted into the
group as one of them. He does get more mature as the book goes on though. The
characters of Sam and Patrick felt more real to me and it may have been a
better book if it focused on them more. Sam has trouble with finding the right
guy and Patrick is gay but the boy he loves isn’t as open as him which
frustrates Patrick.
The book is written in the form of letters. It’s not clear
who it is that Charlie is writing to, or if you would be able to work it out
from reading the book a few times. To begin with the letters aren’t very
complex but as Charlie’s English teacher helps him improve his writing through
setting him essays, Charlie’s letters get better written. This is a nice touch
and I think that would happen in reality if someone saw potential in you and
encouraged you. My problem with the way the book is written is that I’m not
sure Charlie is the most reliable narrator and it might have been nice to get
things from a different person’s point of view. I think Charlie’s unreliability
may be intended to add a certain charm to the book. In some ways it does and
some ways it doesn’t.
The book deals with a lot of issues all at once and, being
less than 250 pages, this is a big ask. It has sex, drugs, alcohol, mental
health and abuse in it. It sort of felt like an episode of Skins, where it is a
twisted, overly romanticised vision of what it is to be a teenager. To be fair,
a lot of teenagers feel able to relate to Charlie but I don’t know how many of
them would go out and get drunk and take drugs a lot. I get that Charlie is an
outsider and everyone feels like that at some point in their lives until they
find a group of friends that is like them and they don’t feel so alone. Really,
this is enough of a story; it doesn’t need all the embellishments to make it
more dramatic. It’s just over the top.
I didn’t like this book as much as I wanted to; I think I’m
probably too old. This book and Looking for Alaska by John Green felt quite
similar to me. I’m not sure why we can’t have a contemporary teenage novel that
doesn’t have drugs and alcohol in it. Obviously yes a lot of teenagers do
experiment with that kind of thing but that’s not true of everyone. I suppose
it makes the book more exciting but it also glamorises it and it just feels
like an easy plot device that lacks imagination. The book would have been a lot
better if Chbosky had just stuck with the theme of abuse and gone with that,
rather than feeling like he had to throw everything into the book.
Overall rating 3 out of 5.
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