Uglies by Scott Westerfeld
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion"
(Francis Bacon, Essays "Of Beauty", 1625)

Some 50+ years ago I liked to pretend I was way more mature than my fellow teens: I shunned the so-called Young Adult fiction, and read only "grown-up" books. Ever since that time the YA genre has seemed to me simplistic, naive, overly didactic, and generally a waste of time that could be better spent on really heavy stuff by, say, Faulkner and Joyce, or Coetzee and Nooteboom, to mention contemporary authors. So when a student of mine recommended Uglies (2005) by Scott Westerfeld as the best book she has ever read I was a bit skeptical even if I trust that student's judgment a lot. What's more, the novel may be classified as science fiction, which definitely is not my favorite literary genre. Imagine my surprise then, when the book turned out to be well written, intelligent, thought provoking, and compellingly readable. Well, so much for preconceived opinions! I am also happy that there still exists some commonality of worldview between myself and at least some of my students who are now not that far in age from my grandchildren.

The plot happens in the future, several hundred years from now, when our current civilization (we of now are then called "the Rusties") is a thing of the distant and shameful past:

"It was hard to think of the Rusties as actual people, rather than as just an idiotic, dangerous, and sometimes comic force of history."

(Hey, this describes our civilization quite well!) At the age of 16 all young people undergo a prettification operation that transforms their non-standardized - meaning ugly - physiques into perfect body shapes and perfectly beautiful faces. In addition, technology has made such progress that once prettified the young people do not have worry about much - they can focus on having fun.

Tally, the protagonist of the story, is about two months away from the operation. She still lives in Uglyville and one night she sneaks out to New Pretty Town looking for her boyfriend who has already been prettified. The caper almost ends with her getting caught by safety wardens but Tally manages to escape and in the process meets Shay, a rebel girl of exactly the same age. Tally's meeting with Shay sets up a wonderfully captivating and complex plot, which most readers will have great fun to follow. One portion of the plot has made a strong impression on me - Tally's long journey to the place called the Smoke, guided only by a cryptic note coded by Shay. The passages are powerful and haunting, they seem to transcend the genre and evoke feelings not unlike one has when reading the story of you-know-who returning to Ithaca.

Not only is the plot enthralling but also Tally is a well-written character with wonderfully and plausibly rich personality. She feels like a real person as opposed to, unfortunately, some other characters, particularly Shay. There is even a smidgen of nice love story in the novel, appropriately muted for young readers, yet well portrayed and in fact very sweet. Science fiction fans will appreciate various details of the future technology. I particularly like the flying on hoverboards and the "bungee jackets."

On a serious note, one of the three things I like the most about the novel is the sharp yet not quite in-your-face critique of social engineering. The other standout is the underlying motif of what beauty is and how it relates to symmetry and averaging: I am so grateful to Mr. Westerfeld for providing the Francis Bacon quote that I used, following his lead, as the epigraph. (The continuation of the Bacon's quote is shown after the rating.) And finally, the novel may make the reader think about that special time in human life - mid- to-late teens - when people construct their identities and their personalities.

To sum up, despite the Young Adult genre, despite some over-explanatory passages and the ending that blatantly sets up a sequel, Uglies is not in any way inferior to many very good "serious" books that I have reviewed here. My student deserves huge extra credit.

Four stars.

"A man cannot tell whether Apelles, or Albert Durer, were the more trifler; whereof the one, would make a personage by geometrical proportions; the other, by taking the best parts out of divers faces, to make one excellent. Such personages, I think, would please nobody, but the painter that made them."
(Continuation of the epigraph quote by Francis Bacon from Essays, 1625)

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