Lovebugs and Queer Boys in E. L. Konigsburg's The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World

E. L. Konigsburg's The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World (2007) begins with a live sex act. Sixth-grader Amedeo Kaplan, who has recently moved to St. Malo, Florida, notices two flies "coupling, mating on the wing, and when they landed, they stayed connected, end to end" (1). He waves his arms to disrupt their intercourse, but they are immune to interruption; no amount of flailing can dislodge this "shameless" pair of "preoccupied" insects (1). Amedeo kneels down to study the couple and observes that there is "a longer one and a shorter one, and from what he remembered of nature studies, their size determined their sex—or vice versa" (1-2). As evidence of a sexuality without shame, as part of the natural order of things, the winged insects copulate relentlessly and the extraordinarily observant Amedeo is captivated by their "silence and persistence" (1). The "vice versa" he accords to their size and sex, however, suggests some cognitive latitude around sexual acts and articles: Potentially, the insect actors are according to whatever it is they execute. But this compelling scene is simply a digression, it turns out, because Amedeo's attention is arrested by something far more interesting: the unexpected voice of his new classmate William Wilcox, who identifies the insects as "Lovebugs" (2).

There is something about William that makes Amedeo "eager to please him" (29). Konigsburg employs the idea of the "edge" to describe him—he is "all edges": a suggestion, perhaps, of a difference that falls outside of the ordinary parameters of difference. "In a school as variegated as an argyle sock," she observes, "William Wilcox was not part of the pattern" (3). Instead, "he was a dark thread on the edge," a person whose "self-assurance" invites "fear" or "awe." His name reflects this "difference," as when it first appears it is accompanied by a curious typography: he is "William (!) Wilcox (!)" (2), each impounded exclamation a signifier of secret self-assurance; or else each parenthetical interjection signals an unspecified exuberance that, if not exactly hidden, is never unleashed. Konigsburg's text remains remarkably coy in this respect. Readers simply learn that the living, breathing mystery that is William Wilcox is working at the house next door on Mandarin Road, assisting his mother with the appraisal and sale of the elderly Mrs. Zender's possessions. When Amedeo offers to help as well, William looks him "straight in the eye" and inquires if that type of work interests him; taking "a cue" from the cautious solemnity of his classmate, Amedeo "brushe[s] lovebugs—real and imaginary—from his shoulders before answering, 'Something about it must'" (28).

Although Konigsburg's book doesn't wear its sexual orientation on its sleeve, that of her protagonists is simultaneously obscure and plain; take, for instance, one reader's review on Amazon.com: "If Amedeo and William had experienced a tender first kiss with one another, I wouldn't have blinked an eye in surprise." This reticence in the text might read as equivocation to literature critics Michael Cart and Christine A. Jenkins, who in The Heart Has Its Reasons measure GLBTQ-themed young adult fiction in quantities like "homosexual visibility," "gay assimilation," and "queer consciousness." Cart and Jenkins's inventory necessarily tilts toward a rhetoric of identity politics, since its objective is to tally shifting proportions of stigma and stereotype against realistic representations of lesbian and gay youth. This is crucial work, given that GLBTQ content for youth remains besieged; Cart and Jenkins cite a 2005 Oklahoma statute exhorting public libraries to restrict materials with homosexual themes to adults only. And, as recently as 2011, young adult authors Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith disclosed how an agent made the publication of their apocalyptic YA novel Stranger contingent upon their rewriting a gay character named Yuki as straight, or removing "his viewpoint and all references to his sexual orientation" (n. pag.). At the same time, distilling GLBTQ content into discrete identity categories betrays the morphological flexibility of queerness, fortifying assumptions about the availability of predefined sexual orientations for...