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Lord of the Flies Somehow I made it to age 24 without reading Lord of the Flies. I don't know how this happened. I realize reading it is a rite of passage in America's educational system, but I'm fairly sure I was never assigned it, although it could have been on a reading list and I just blew it off, Heart of Darkness-style. Maybe it's just that I never wanted to read about twelve-year-old boys, even when I was one. It just never crossed my radar. Until, of course, this list. That's not to say I wasn't familiar with the story. Like Fahrenheit 451 and other book-sized morality tales, pretty much everyone knows the story and the lesson behind Golding's book. It's a moral on the order of "Without society we would all degenerate into fascist savages and start killing the sensitive and fat kids." That might well be unfair reductionism, but it's hard to look at this book objectively when it's been a part of the culture for 50 years. It's been made into a movie more than once; The Simpsons did a parody of it. So there were really no surprises for me -- except for the Lord of the Flies itself, the impaled pig's head that makes its creepy appearance near the novel's end. I didn't see that coming, and yes, it freaked me out more than a little. I am a nervous person, and many things scare me, including bees, sudden noises, spiders, and leprechauns. But the great thing about the 100 Books Project is that I don't have to be objective at all. That's good, because I don't think I could bear writing about what the glasses and the conch symbolized. In fact, it's nearly impossible to know what to say in response to this book, given its long history in British and American cultures. I can definitely say it's a lot darker than I expected. They teach seventh-graders this? I had just assumed that any book with violence -- particularly one as brutally cynical as this -- had been drummed out of the schools by now. So how come parents aren't bitching about Golding to their school boards? Turns out they are; I just wasn't paying attention. According to the American Library Association, Lord of the Flies was the 70th most challenged book in libraries and schools in the 1990s. It's sandwiched between Slaughterhouse-Five and Native Son on the Top 100 list. This is disheartening for many reasons, not the least of which is that kids desperately need an education in intelligent cynicism, which Lord of the Flies most certainly is. It's too easy for adolescents to adopt Pollyanna optimism or trendy post-punk nihilism as their philosophies, and Golding's novel is a pretty decent antidote for both. Speaking of cynicism, it's interesting to note how much Golding has in common with today's transgressive writers. "Transgressive" is one of those terms, like "emo" in rock music, that actually means nothing at all, and is used to group together artists with very little in common. The term "transgressive" has been applied to a host of contemporary authors: modern legends like Dennis Cooper and the late Kathy Acker; brilliant young writers like A. M. Homes and Scott Heim; and pop authors like Irvine Welsh and Chuck Palahniuk. They all have in common a brave frankness when discussing sex or violence or both. So did Golding, though Lord of the Flies is now, obviously, tame enough to teach middle-schoolers. (It's worth noting that Golding's novel is now challenged less than Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret.) Is Golding a direct influence on the transgressive set? It's possible, but I somehow doubt it. Still, Golding may have paved the way for later authors who also dealt with brutality and human nature in a similarly stark way. I'm not really sure whether this book is going to stay with me. I can definitely see the severed pig's head playing a part in some future dream. I suppose I would have been more moved if I were much younger, and hadn't already thought about desperation and isolation so much. Actually, I wish I had read it twelve years ago, when it may have done something for me besides make me just a little more depressed about life. Jesus, I don't know how I'm going to survive reading The Thin Red Line. 
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