Pam's Book Log

27 November, 2002

David "Davey" Rice is a seemingly ordinary seventeen-year-old living in a small-or-medium-size Ohio town with his violently abusive alcoholic father. Only, he's not quite so ordinary, as he discovers when he escapes from a beating by spontaneously teleporting from his house to the local public library. Upon further investigation, Davey determines that he has the power to instantaneously teleport (or "jump") himself and anything he's carrying to any location which he has seen with his own eyes. He runs away from home, and uses his ability to create a new life for himself in New York City. He obtains scads of money, a nice girlfriend, and even establishes a relationship with his mother, who abandoned him to his father's tender ministrations half a decade ago. And it would all have been just fine, if really bad shit didn't keep happenning to Davey, through little or no fault of his own.

I've seen this novel praised often, on Usenet and elsewhere, and it's even been personally recommended to me. So, I feel a little bad that I just didn't like it. Worse, some of the reasons for my dislike go beyond mere personal taste, into things which I consider serious flaws in the writing.

Anyway. The novel started out well, with a decent super-power premise and a character who I wanted to see do well. (I couldn't exactly root against a poor, sad, abused kid, could I?) However, I started losing interest about halfway through, wandering into Eight Deadly Words territory ("I don't care what happens to these people"). I only kept reading because I couldn't put my finger on why I was dissatisfied with the book. It wasn't the writing; Gould's prose is clear and quite enjoyable to read. It certainly wasn't that the plot got boring-- I started losing interest at around the point where all the exciting stuff begins. It's not that the book is YA fiction; a cursory glance at my Nicely-Sorted Index will tell anybody that I enjoy lots of YA fiction.

After thinking about it a lot, I finally figured it out. I didn't care what happenned to Davey because of the way Gould went about building up his character. To put it more directly. Gould didn't do anything to make Davey a sympathetic or interesting character, in and of himself. Rather, he tries to manipulate the reader (i.e. me) into caring about Davey by inflicting a series of horrors upon the kid. Whenever things look like they might be starting to go well for Davey, something horrible happens to him to ruin it. He escapes from his father, only to be sexually assaulted by some scummy trucker. He makes it to New York and freedom, only to be mugged and left with no money and a head wound. He finally gets himself sorted out, meets a nice girl, meets up with his mom, only to have more bad thing happen. (Highlight blank spot to read the spoilers.)

His girlfriend dumps him, which is bad enough, but then his mom gets blown up by Islamic terrorists, for Pete's sake! And then Eeeevil Government Agents start harassing him! The poor kid never gets a break!

Now, I've got nothing against character torture, when it is used properly. It can be an effective tool in character and plot development. The problem with Jumper, in my opinion, is that the plot is composed almost entirely of character torture, and worse, the reader is expected to sympathise with the character simply because he's being tortured by the author, not because he's somebody who inspires sympathy. By the time I reached the end of the book, I realized that I didn't like Davey at all, either as a fictional character or as a person. (Obviously, this didn't increase my enjoyment of the book.)

As a character, he's obnoxiously omnicompetant and unbelievably well-balanced for somebody with his background. He undertakes all sorts of wild endeavors, and never screws up. (Yes, he has difficulties, but none of them are the sort of self-created difficulties or mistakes I'd expect an inexperienced teenager to make while undertaking many of Davey's exploits.) In the fine tradition of all bad movies, the Government agents who go against him are bumblers, and never pose a realistic threat. Likewise for the other baddies he goes against. I can buy that his teleporting trick would give him an edge, but I don't buy that he has the natural ability to take on hardened criminals in hand-to-hand combat and win with ease, or that he's so smart that he can anticipate and defend against every move the Evil Government Agency makes. My disbelief doesn't suspend that far. It's hard put into words exactly why I developed such a strong dislike for Davey as an individual; suffice to say that he's just not the sort of person with whom I'd like to socialize.

In the end, I'm going to steal a phrase from Mike Kozlowski to describe how I feel about this book. It's got a kind of "patina of goodness" which makes me think that I ought to appreciate it as a great piece of YA fiction, but at the core, it's really not that good.