Angela's Reviews > Catalyst

Last night I dreamed that I was sitting in a gathering of people, waiting for my turn to get up and play my violin. There was a tall guy with dark hair speaking to the crowd, and a little fat blond girl sitting across the aisle from me who the tall guy called an idiot. This struck me wrong, so I told him to stop. Not just because he’d called the girl an idiot, but because he’d yelled it, said it in a mean and condescending way. Instead of listening, though, he slapped the girl on the head.

I picked up my violin and left the room.

The reason I write about this dream is because I had it last night, right after I read this book, and in so many ways it’s revealing to how I feel about it. On one hand, I am a HUGE Laurie Halse Anderson fan and loved the poetic power of her words. On the other hand, I had a particular dislike for both the message of the book and the way it ended. Let me explain how my dream pertains to all of this.

In the dream I was waiting, waiting for my turn to play the violin, excited for the music, but captive to the words of the tall man giving the sermon. I felt much the same way reading CATALYST. My joy for the music was like the joy I felt in discovering Kate as a character. The girl is a minister’s daughter; her mother is dead; she takes care of her father and brother; she has issues with good and bad, particularly with integrating the good and bad parts of herself. This becomes clear when she refers to herself as both Good Kate and Bad Kate on the first page. It’s genius. Here’s the quote:

“On the outside I am Good Kate, Rev. Jack Malone’s girl, isn’t she sweet, she helps so much with the house, so sad about her mother, and she’s smart, too. . . . On the inside I am Bad Kate, daughter of no one, she’s such a bitch, thinks she’s all that, prays with her eyes open, lets her boyfriend put his hands all over her, Miss Perfect, Miss Suck-up, disrespectful, disagreeable, still waters run deep and dirty.” Catalyst p. 3-4

Then you see that Kate is running, not just for the exercise or because she’s good at it, but as a way to run from who she is, her feelings and thoughts and traits which don’t fit into the Good Kate mold. Despite the fact that this girl had straight A’s and had applied to MIT, despite the fact that she had really good friends and was an overachiever, I very much related to the perfectionist tendencies that drove Kate to run from herself.

Enter Teri: the nemesis whose house burns down (though we never learn the details of how). All we really know is that Teri comes to live with Kate because she has nowhere else to stay, that Kate and Teri don’t get along, not so much because Kate is a snob, though. More because Teri used to beat up Kate when they were younger, and because Teri flicks Kate off regularly and has a habit of being mean to her, and because Teri steals her things. Needless to say, I was not a Teri fan.

And this is where the tall man in my dream comes in. I was expecting to find a reason to like Teri. She has a little brother who is two-years-old who loves her to death, a mother who’s out of it, and a father who died in prison. There are lots and lots of reasons to feel sorry for Teri. She’s bullied at school by the football team, takes vo-tech classes, and is pretty much looked down upon by everyone in her life. I could relate to the bullying thing, and have a particular love for underdogs. So imagine my shock when I just could not, not matter how hard I tried, find a way to relate to Teri. I mean, yeah, sure she was taunted and teased and targeted by the football team. But she was a bully herself as well.

Now, I know a lot of people say that bullied kids turn into bullies, and I’m not going to argue with that. My guess is that the boys at Columbine would not have gunned down their classmates if they hadn’t been the targets of shameless bullying. And I agree that Teri had some horrible situations to deal with. Her home situation was a hundred times worse than mine was in high school; her situation at school was pretty bad too. Things got even worse for her in the middle of the book. So if anything, Teri had a right to be angry.

But as a child who was bullied so severely myself that people threw rocks at me, and as a person who was ostracized, who had to listen to boys make animal noises as I ran past, who was systematically pushed into walls, sexually harassed, and had nasty rumors spread around about me, I was always ALWAYS aware that I had a choice how I treated others. It was the constant ill treatment I received as a child that drove me not to treat others that way. Giving in to my anger, cutting people down, acting like a jerk was not an option. I chose not to be like my tormentors. It was the only form of control I had.

And Teri, no matter her circumstances, had a choice to how she treated others too. It was, in fact, the only form of control she had; and she chose to steal Kate’s watch and necklace, to hotwire her car, to steal food from the grocery store thus making Kate an accomplice to a crime. She chose to call Kate a spaz, to make fun of her inability to use a hammer, to point out her flaws, and to push her around. She chose to tear apart the house others build for her and throw paint cans at those who tried to be her friends. Now, please don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Teri had no right to be angry—she had every right to be angry, but how is the way she dealt with that anger any better than a father who screams at his children and throws things because he’s a rageaholic? I’m going to be blunt here and say, I think it’s EXACTLY the same thing.

The difference is that when Laurie Halse Anderson writes about the rageaholic father in TWISTED, he’s the problem, and the one who ruins his family’s life. But when Ms. Anderson writes about the same kind of character in CATLYST, we’re supposed to pity the girl and see things from her point of view.

This is where the tall man giving the sermon in my dreams comes in. He represented Teri and the way she treated those around her. Even though the author tried to make Kate stop running by having her help out Teri in the end, I didn’t feel like Kate did the right thing. She calls her boyfriend a jerk for telling the truth to Teri. Here’s what he says to her, “ . . . I know you’ve had a really hard life. But that doesn’t give you permission to make Kate feel like shit, or make fun of people, or steal from them . . .” p.222

I get the impression that as a reader I’m supposed to be appalled by Kate’s boyfriend being so “mean” to Teri. But instead I’m sitting there, reading it, and agreeing with Every. Single. Word.

What Kate truly does at the end is disown “Bad Kate” instead of integrating her healthy negative feelings into her identity. She doesn’t really stop running, instead she runs into another bad friendship. One where the girl treats her like crap and Kate’s expected to just put up with it. Like the fat little blond girl that gets hit on the head in my dream. I feel sorry for her.