Penn State Deluge - Vol. 2 No. 1 - Spring 2004

Michael J. Rosen's 2002 book, ChaseR: a Novel in E-mails, targets young adult readers, most of whom are considerably more aware of the electronic world that e-mail and the web create. Chase Riley, a 14-year-old boy who has just moved with his parents from Columbus, Ohio, to rural Pickway County, writes all the e-mails that constitute the 152-page novel. Chase corresponds with a host of other people—peers and adults—and also writes an occasional "e-newsletter," which goes out to many recipients at once. But readers see only what he writes to others, leaving us to imagine the responses Chase receives based on what he types in subsequent messages. The novel is a coming-of-age story, which looks at the culture shock Chase experiences moving from the city to the country, and shows how he gradually adapts to the different mores of his community.

Kirkus Reviews, which publishes brief unsigned evaluations of new books for children and young adults, lauds Rosen's novel for integrating the e-mail concept "surprisingly well." The review dubs the narrator a "self-absorbed, introverted computer addict" who becomes more conscious of the way his neighbors live and the poverty some of them face (Kirkus). This review touches upon the main role that the e-mail format plays in Chase's personal narrative. Rosen highlights his main character's conflicted feelings about country life by contrasting the computer technology of e-mail and keyboarding with the "old" technology employed by his neighbors and classmates (i.e., the skills involved with hunting, fishing and other outdoor activities). In the same way that Chat Connect Crash depicted characters bridging the gap between e-mail as a business tool and e-mail as a means of social interaction, ChaseR looks at the distance between teenagers growing up amid different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. Whereas one boy may see a rite of passage in getting his own computer, another sees the same importance in learning how to use a gun. The narrative stays coy about exalting one lifestyle over the other, but instead shows Chase adapting to an environment in which he can appreciate the value in both ways of living.

In the book, Chase and the friends with whom he exchanges e-mails in Columbus are born around 1987, based on the assumption that the events occur in a fictional fall and winter of 2001. At the point where we pick up the story, Chase is already conversant in the lingo of internet service and connection charges and modems and satellite dishes. He has grown up with some of the best communications technology available, and would not think of relinquishing his digital connections at his family's new rural home. The second e-mail of the book is his first e-newsletter, directed to twenty-four of his friends, written mostly tongue-in-cheek and over-the-top, and filled with a lot of teenage humor (Rosen 2-9). Before the hunting question worries his mind, the cicadas do, as seen in a joke advertisement to his friends:

Dear Sir or Madam: Have you ever tasted a cicada? One of nature's most SUCKulent treats—and chock-a-block with protein! Sign up NOW and receive this special offer from Chase's Cicada of the Month Club. Once every 204 months (that's every seventeen years), we'll ship to you, direct from Pickway County, half a million prime and tender seventeen-year cicadas. (Rosen 2)

A precocious reader himself, Chase can mimic the language of ads and special offers, which have begun to proliferate especially on the internet. His friends' e-mail addresses imitate the names of popular e-mail services such as MSN's Hotmail and indicate that his friends are using the internet as young consumers with access to the web at home. In his e-newsletters, Chase types many hyperbolic complaints about the return of the cicadas, composes top-ten lists of reasons to move to the country (or back to the city), and even lampoons the local community newspaper, the Beaver Creek Beacon, which he later sends through various permutations such as the Beaver Cooked Bacon and the Eager Beaver Bacon.

As an e-mail author, Chase rarely types the kind of abbreviations that pepper Chat Connect Crash, but he employs a healthy amount of adolescent word play, artistic ASCII creations, and unique smileys. ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. The code includes all the usual alphanumeric characters used in word processing, but also encompasses many other pictograms, which are often useful in "painting" pictures using only text strokes online. Rosen fills pages 4 and 5 of the novel with Chase's pictogram for the cicadas he sees everywhere. An example of one:

\O/ / / / / / >
/O\ \ \ \ \ \ >

At least one reviewer—Laura Liang, writing in the Star Tribune of Minneapolis—questions the author's use of these computer doodles: "At times, Rosen pushes the e-mail conceit unnecessarily, with the inclusion of Chase's typographic smiley faces for each of his friends, and too-obvious references to the fact that Chase is on the computer." But these experiments with text are a step above the shortcuts used in McCarthy's work. A lively example is the combination of text characters he uses to depict his bespectacled friend and close correspondent, Jeremy. The traditional emoticon has morphed into an icon specifically designed for an individual person: —ÕfÔ— (Rosen 10). Notice the optical frames, arched eyebrows, and nose. Chase even tweaks the icon slightly when he sees Jeremy with new glasses: —ÛfÙ— (Rosen 129). Rosen makes no appeal to some established canon of computer squiggles; instead, he uses these text illustrations as a way of forming a character creative enough to come up with a variety of different images to match his differing moods and moments from a finite palate of symbols. The technique has precedents in the realm of modern typography, but its presence in ChaseR still shows a narrator willing to experiment with the form at a relatively young age.

As a reaction to culture shock and a feeling of isolation from his city friends, Chase responds adversely to the ways of the country during the beginning of the novel. The arrival of the cicadas irritates him; his dogs return dirty and injured from playing in the wilds of the family's property; and Chase usually prefers to stay inside and type on his computer in lieu of experiencing nature. He types quickly—47 words per minute—and enjoys participating in the newspaper club at school. His parents gradually recognize that the amount of time Chase spends on the computer may be hindering his adjustment to rural life. They send him to Miss Dummery, a counselor at school, to talk about the habit, but they eventually find a compromise: "only one hour per day on the computer," Chase reports (Rosen 139). This subplot contributes eventually to Chase's realization that worthwhile free-time activities lay beyond cyberspace. The modest limit imposed on his e-mailing does not prevent him from communicating with his city friends entirely, but prepares him to respect his surroundings and his neighbors' choices.

Meanwhile, Chase continues to struggle to make friends with his classmates, and cannot seem to understand their interest in hunting. The activity repulses him, and that feeling is aggravated when one of his dogs, Bonner, hobbles home one day after being shot and injured by an unknown hunter. Chase exacts his juvenile revenge by drinking a lot of iced tea, then urinating by the neighbors' deer stands, a trick he learned for keeping the animals away. Chase eventually gets in trouble for this prank, but in the meantime, he decides to do some online research into arguments in support of deer hunting. He presents what he discovers via e-mail to his college-freshman sister, Mallory, with whom he has a passionate debate over a series of messages. He writes: "Almost everything one organization says is true another one says isn't. It's like pro-choicers and pro-lifers arguing about abortion. [. . .] It got so confusing or maybe just plain contradictory I had to make a list" (Rosen 97).

The tone of Chase's personal e-mails is appropriately more sensitive and honest than the one he uses when writing his e-newsletters. As the hunting conflict in the book becomes the focus of Chase's confusion about the country, he sends fewer public e-mails and more personal ones to his best friend and his sister. Chase tries to make amends for what he did by allowing the neighbors to hunt on his family's land while they are away for Thanksgiving. In a message to Jeremy, he writes:

When we walk in, I see how Dad is looking around and I can tell he's uncomfortable seeing how the Randolphs' house is so crowded and small. We're the closest thing to being their neighbors [. . .] I'm sure that made Dad feel even worse about why we were there. Like we were the rich people coming to do the poor people a favor. (Rosen 134)

Chase later learns that the venison from the deer the Randolphs harvested fills the family's freezer and helps to provide them with food through the coming months. The Randolphs do not take up the Rileys' suggestion to hunt on their land, but instead take up an offer from other friends to hunt elsewhere. Jeff, the boy similar in age to Chase, explains:

We didn't need to [use your land], didn't want to. I get how you feel about hunting. Sometimes I feel a little of what you do, but it's not the way we do things. Not in my family, anyway. So after you left, when I told Dad about your dog being shot and being scared and all, he just said, 'Well, the Rileys sound like good people,' and then he went to get the gear together. That's all the talking we did about it. (Rosen 137)

Earlier in the novel, Chase tells Jeremy what he had learned from another classmate about Jeff:

Jeff's not really into the killing part as much as the part where he just keeps his dad company and helps. He can probably calculate the trigonometric angle of the fired bullet in relationship to gravity and the earth's curve. Whatever that means. He's really smart. (Rosen 127)

Chase begins to see a fuller picture of the kind of people for whom hunting is a way of life. He becomes acquainted with Jeff and understands that these "old" skills are part of the Randolphs' cultural inheritance, which does not preclude Jeff from learning the same math and science skills Chase studies at school. The comparatively poor conditions Chase encounters also show him that his access to electronic communications is a privilege and not a given among all his peers.

By the end of the novel, his computer time becomes only one activity among a variety of others that living in the country offers him. He revises his "Top Ten Reasons to Live in the Country" with new additions, which include friendly shopkeepers, free harvests of chestnuts, the ability to mountain bike for hours, the quiet of living far from your neighbors, and the opportunity for showering naked in the open air (Rosen 149). Chase does not plan on giving up e-mail and computers as one of his favorite hobbies, but he begins to glimpse a fuller life that takes advantage of the rural options available to him beyond the computer.

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[ Contents | Abstract | Intro | I | II | III | IV | V | VI ]
[ Notes | Works Cited | Appendix ]

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