Stotan


Crutcher, Chris


Assigned to 9th grade Communication Arts but written at a 5.8 (5th grade, 8th month) reading level


Stotan is a low-quality, formulaic novel by Crutcher, who seems to be a favorite author by some teachers in the Blue Valley school district (three of his novels were assigned as required reading in the 2003-2004 school year that we know of – Stotan, Chinese Handcuffs, and Running Loose). Once you’ve read one Crutcher novel, you know the pattern for the rest. A high school boy meets a girl (one of whom is an athlete with some sort of serious problem), they get involved, they muddle through issues of sex, suicide, abuse, and/or drugs without any evident concern or involvement from their parents, they resolve their issues through illogical coincidences, and as a grand finale, the star athlete wins the big game at the end of the season.

Many of the individual passages in Crutcher's books are very rude and offensive, making a parent or taxpayer wonder why this book is used as a compulsory reading assignment over so many other unassigned, easily-accessible, rigorous, and high quality titles. Another problem, however, is the disingenuous and dangerous themes and messages that Crutcher's books teach teens about how to solve their problems. Throughout Crutcher's novels, teens are fed a diet of real problems (suicide, teen pregnancy, teen drug use), without real or meaningful answers. Instead, kids are sheltered from the truth regarding their "fun," experimental, illegal, and/or defiant behaviors, and the path of lifelong emotional and physical misery that these choices forge.

In general, parents and clergy are portrayed in Crutcher's books as irrelevant idiots who are unworthy of any respect. To Crutcher's lead characters, "rents" are useful in supplying material needs only. Great efforts are made to fool, manipulate, and otherwise eliminate parents from all information about the true teen world. Loving, positive, and supportive fathers and mothers are nonexistent. To Crutcher's characters, all emotional support, advice, and truth about lifelong issues such as teen sex and drug use comes only from their open-minded, nonjudgmental, and extremely wise peers, or perhaps one 'hip' teacher.

Stotan is the story is about the members of a high school boys’ swim team. One boy, Lionel, lives alone, his parents having been killed in an accident 2 or 3 years before. Lionel's apartment becomes the "home" for the swim team during "Stotan week," (a week of heavy workouts for the swim team). Another boy, Nortie, is the victim of violent physical and emotional abuse by his father (his mother is abused as well), and also deals with emotional problems brought on by his brother’s suicide, and his finding of the body. Walker, the narrator, has a drug dealer for a brother and almost nonexistent parents. Walker fantasizes having sex with Elaine, another student, and the only major female character in the story. Elaine is currently dating one of the school's teachers. Jeff becomes very ill with cancer and cannot swim in the last meet. The only adult "hero" of the story, the swim coach the boys call Max, has a young daughter in another state that he visits for a few minutes while on the way to a tournament with the boys. (Yes, the swim coach is constantly alone with the boys, both at the school and on overnight, out-of-town swim meets including the trip where he takes the boys to the clandestine visit to his daughter). Walker is never sure whether the woman the girl lives with is an ex-wife or ex-girlfriend of Max’s. There is a subplot involving a boy distributing pro-Aryan newspapers at the school.

As in other Crutcher novels, a primary theme is the notion that in order to solve your problems, sometimes you have to do the opposite of what you think should be done. This is obviously a very confusing notion for adolescents because it makes absolutely no sense. Walker states that if he ever makes it to adulthood and decides to help a young person grow up, he’s going to spend most of his time dispelling the “myth” that good guys are rewarded and bad guys are punished. Yet, he’s not even sure of the difference between good and bad: “Who are the bad guys anyway?”

Why do teachers in the Blue Valley school district favor so many illogical, low-quality, “bad example” books like Crutcher’s? Is it because our “kids can relate to it” because the books are about high schoolers? (But does this book describe your high schooler or the behavior you want your child to emulate?) Is it because “all the kids talk like that anyway”? (No, they don’t, at least they don’t at home where parents don’t tolerate such raunchiness.) Click here for more excuses given in support of this type of required reading assignment.

Like other Crutcher novels, Stotan is filled with profanity, the language of the ignorant, as well as frequent sexual references.

Words throughout the book include: Chrissakes, Christ, Jeez, Jesus, turd, wussies, pissed, turdburger, peckerneck, jerk-off, frigging, faggot, nigger, jungle bunny, goddamn, hard-ass, kick some ass, whore, bitch, peckerbrain, whacking off, getting laid, farted, shitty, puss(y).


Excerpts:

• Don’t whine, peckerneck.

• My brother still puts drugs into every orifice he can find…

• Hi, Anus Breath.

• Wait, Jeff, you can sleep with my sister.

• (Nortie buys and takes street drugs, breaking the school athletic code which states that the athlete is automatically dropped from that sport for the remainder of the year). Walker counsels him not to tell their coach: God, you’re turning into an old lady. Nortie tells the coach anyway, who says: I’m blessing you with the ability to go back in time…back to the moment when you got it in your pea brain to come tell me. And you’re going to decide not to.

• Sure, we have a few beers now and then, and I suppose a couple of us have tried grass, but never in season, and never to excess.

• …tell him to go to hell…

• His dad…jerked Nortie out of the car onto his hands and knees, then lifted him up and slapped the sides of his head, screaming at him. When Nortie put his hands up to protect his head, his dad gave him a hard shot to the solar plexus and dropped him….he was convulsing for air…

• (talking about how he wants to break up with his girlfriend): …no matter how much I have to fake it when we’re making out.

• Jeff cranked up a big middle finger.

• …see you for what you really are…a warm, wet sister.

• Dad came home drunk and decided Mom had been sleeping around, so he called her a whore and a bitch…describing what she did with all these other guys…made her stand up on the coffee table so her kids could get a good look at their mother, the whore. Jeremy cried and held my head against his chest so I couldn’t look, and Dad …jerked him away and threw him against the kitchen table. Then he made me throw things at Mom. He stood there slapping me on the back of the head until I did it…then he started to choke me…Jeremy’s arm was broken…Mom told the doctor that he’d broken it falling off the garage roof….Jeremy had hung himself from the rafters. A stepladder was kicked over and his Adidas dangled right above my eye level...

• Jeff says he uses Colleen, his girlfriend, beckoning him from the far end of the pool in a translucent black negligee (as a fantasy to motivate his swimming)….I’ve tried them all—usually I tell Jeff I use Colleen too, same negligee, same sordid details, just like the football team does on their wind sprints...

• Somebody finally tell your daddy you been sweet on a little jungle bunny?

• Nortie asks Walker: You sleep with Devnee (Walker’s girlfriend)?...Why do you want to know?...Milika wants to sleep with me. All right! I said. I bet you won’t get much sleep though…I don’t get any sleep just thinking about it… The …truth is we’re most of us whacking away alone at home…

• A voice behind me said, Boy, I’d like to get a piece of that. I looked up to see Elaine walking down the hall the other way…voice came from none other than Fartin’ Martin O’Brian. The guy with him said, I already did. She acts cool, but she’s as hot for it as any other chick…She was all over me. (Elaine says): Couldn’t get me off you huh? You know, it’s funny...but I can’t remember. Hard to believe I’d forget something that electrifying. You wouldn’t happen to have a teensy-weensy little thing, would you? I can see how I’d forget that. Or maybe you were a little quick on the trigger. I know I’d forget that.

• How’d you like to have a little dark meat, Johnny?...What’s it like, Wheeler, jumping in the sack with a little tarbaby? Pretty hot stuff?...What’s the matter Wheeler? You too much of a puss to get a white woman? Guys like you make the rest of us look bad. A million chicks out there and you pick a nigger.