Self-discovery and -rediscovery in the Novels of M. E. Kerr

"Inside of every fat person, there's a thin one wildly signaling to be let out," P. John Knight reminds his fat girlfriend Susan ("Dinky") Hocker in M. E. Kerr's first novel, Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!¹ The imprisonment of one's true self in a shell of one's own making is a pervasive theme in this novel and its five successors.² Though each of her novels tells a different story, the same concern for self-realization—a concern shared, we may assume, by every adolescent who reads these books—dominates both plot and subplot. And overall the message is an optimistic one: many of her characters do succeed in releasing the person shut up inside them, as Susan is shut up inside "Dinky," or Priscilla inside "Chicago" (in Love is a Missing Person ). And even for some of the apparent failures, there is hope. At least they have become aware of the possibility of change and they have gained insight into their own identity.

Of course, not all change is for the better. Kerr's characters have free will, and they must ultimately decide whether they are really "grabbing the reins" (ILY, p. 117) and "stretching" toward the ideal (LMP, p. 128) or simply toward something different. But often they can only find out by trial and error. Revolt for its own sake may not seem much better than passivity, but some of Kerr's characters must "act out" before they understand what they are really disturbed about. When Carolyn Cardmaker, for example, starts an athiests' club in Is That You, Miss Blue? she is rebelling not against religion but against a world that hypocritically exalts religion while allowing most of its clergymen (including her father) to live on the edge of indigence. Since her quarrel is really with society, she returns, in the last pages of the novel, to her church and her family. But she is more aware, at the end, of the "system" that has beaten her down. P. John Knight in Dinky Hocker is another example. He adopts a conservative political philosophy, as he sheds his father's first name, in a desperate attempt to establish a separate identity for himself. When he achieves independence in other ways, he can again embrace his father's political liberalism. Progress, Kerr shows us, cannot always be measured in a straight line.

While the title Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack! suggests that it is a book about drug addiction, it is a phrase used primarily for its shock value. Like all Kerr's work, it deals with the many different forms of escapism to which we are all subject at one time or another—obesity, alcoholism, psychosomatic disorders—and with the prejudices and hypocrisies we often adopt. Drug addiction is just a particularly dramatic example, a metaphor used to bring Kerr's readers face to face with their own dependencies. And in every instance, in her work, the recourse is the same: one must take charge of one's own life.

All the novels follow the same basic structure: two plots centering around two characters, one ordinary and afraid to diverge from the norm (Tucker, Alan Bennett, Brenda Belle Blossom, Flanders Brown, Suzy Slade, Wally Witherspoon), the other in some way extraordinary and trying to reach a truce with the rest of the world (Dinky, Duncan Stein, Adam Blessing, Agnes Thatcher, Chicago [Priscilla] Slade, Sabra St. Amour). The two plots often split off into one involving a romantic relationship and the other involving relationships between parents and children. With the exception of Dinky Hocker, all are written in the first person, and two, The Son of Someone Famous and I'll Love You When You're More Like Me, employ a variation of that technique, the double first person. The two alternating voices produce a more complex point of view and help to create dramatic irony.

Certain motifs are repeatedly used in Kerr's work to express the state of mind of her characters. Food is one; clothing is another. A third and particularly interesting one is her...