The Great American Landscaping Novel

This is a review of the novel Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison.

I decided to read it and judge for myself after seeing that in many locations, people were challenging its presence on the shelves of school libraries. Typically the claim was made that it "promotes pedophilia." This is the passage that was frequently quoted:

"But there's one thing I'd never tell Nick in a million years, not that it really matters: in fourth grade, at a church youth-group meeting, out in the bushes behind the parsonage, I touched Doug Goble's dick, and he touched mine. In fact, there were even some mouths involved." (p. 19)

Except -- the passage isn't quoted in its entirety. All the people objecting to the book started with the words "not that it really matters," capitalizing the N to make it look as if that's the beginning of the sentence.

See the trick here? By leaving out the first clause, these liars make it seem as if "not that it really matters" refers to what follows, which in turn would make the entire passage gratuitous. Which is what they want people to think. But it actually refers to what came before it. The protagonist, 22-year-old Mike Munoz, is claiming it doesn't really matter that he would never tell Nick about this incident. But that's only because of where he is at this point in the story. The fact he wouldn't tell Nick, his best friend, may not matter in itself, but the reason he wouldn't does, because what it means is that Nick's unabashed homophobia puts a limit on how open and frank Mike can be with him.

So, in a sense, Mike is lying to himself in saying that it doesn't matter. This becomes clear later in the story (pp. 91-93) when, increasingly frustrated by Nick's bigoted attitude about gays and others, Mike does tell him about this incident, and Nick doesn't take it well. He walks out of the restaurant in which they're meeting.

I won't say more about what follows to avoid spoilers, but this makes clear how dishonest the protesters are. They deliberately and deceptively edit a passage from the book to make it look as if it was put in there for no reason (except to "corrupt the youth" presumably) when it actually sets up something crucial to the whole story.

And, of course, it's not depicting sexual contact between a child and an adult, but between two children, such as has been quite common historically*. It's only a refusal to acknowledge this reality that drives some people to attribute such honest depictions to "pedophilic" motives.

*"As long as the adult members of a society permit them to do so, immature males and females engage in practically every type of sexual behavior found in grown men and women. [p. 197] [...] After reviewing the cross-species and cross-cultural evidence, we are convinced that tendencies toward sexual behavior before maturity and even before puberty are genetically determined in many primates, including human beings." -- Ford. C. S.. & Beach. F. A. (1951). Patterns of sexual behavior. New York: Harper & Row.