If I Am Being Honest: An 'Honestly Ben' Review

This sliver of a moment that is now, that’s where the past and future meet, and once you’re there and you recognize it, it’s gone. You can’t think it. You just have to live in it.

Bill Konigsberg comes back with another mind-rattling piece, Honestly Ben, this time the kind-of-sequel to Openly Straight – though the narrator role is swapped here. If you have already read Openly Straight, you’d already know who Ben is – the huge, hulk-like muscly, really erudite guy?

In the last book, I had adored Ben. In this one, I wanted to worship him.

The novel picks up from where Openly Straight was cut off at – Rafe fessing up to Ben about his misguided exploration of what being label-free means and both heading over to their respective homes for the winter break, Rafe in a cloud of gloom, and Ben, fuming over what he considers was an unforgivable betrayal.

He gets over it, of course, after he comes back to school, and is elected the captain of the baseball team and the recipient of Pappas Award which grants him partial scholarship to college, and starts dating Hannah he met in the town Library, and he and Rafe reach an amicable, “best-friend”-ly place. So everything is hunky-dory, a ball of perfection for Ben for a while.

But of course, it doesn’t take long for that veneer of perfection to fall away.

Ben’s compassionate and sensitive disposition becomes more transparent in this book, along with all his orthodox prepossessions he inherited from his stoic dad. If Ben is laconic, his father has mastered the art of speaking with silence. His father’s is a black cloud hovering over his head, a grey shadow of disappointment that Ben keeps fighting, till the end.

Konigsberg here made light of something that is pretty prevalent among teens and students – their relentless, unquelling and sometimes unhealthy need to make their parents proud, to not let them down, often in academic realms. Which ultimately leads them into an unhappy place where they put themselves through uncompromising mental stress and pressure, often with irreversible repercussions. Exactly what happens to Ben.

Ben’s hankering after one single appreciative or proud glance, or an approving nod from his father, his molding and bending himself into someone that matches his father’s expectations, his penchant, whetted by his father, for being perfect in everything academic - all thrust him forward to be an overachiever in school, to exert himself in his studies in varying degrees of mental torture.

And then later the realization of his father’s unemotional, pitiful parenting, as well as the overall disrespectful treatment of his mother by him, and the general indigence of his family manifested more prominently in a rich-kids school environment are something Ben is seen to be struggling with throughout the novel.

Except his jock friends and their trash talking and slut-shaming, the other characters in the novel are pretty likeable and admirable. Hannah is a preppy, jaunty, headstrong girl. She has her own sack of rocks, as Elaine Stritch says, and she is not afraid to let it spill out. Well, that takes a certain amount of guts, right? Her introspective words would always make you stop, force you to think it out.

And I think it says something interesting about men that they love women so deeply and yet hold them in such low esteem.

She is the kind of girl you’d generally expect for a reticent, gentle and composed-at-all-times jock like Ben, to pull him out of his shell and bring down his wall of limitations and all that – If Ben had been completely straight.

And it takes him all kinds of hoops to jump over and slip through to realize he is not. The major part of this book is interspersed with the agonizing ruminations of his conflicted feelings for Rafe and figuring out his sexual orientation, and then his floundering with explaining that orientation to himself and the others.

The one character that I was bowled over by is Toby. His presence became stronger in this book, a beacon of hope for those who are flailing around to find their path, a calling for sticking to the way one is, always. His unmitigated acceptance and love of himself, his staunch unrepentance for being true to who he is, his overcoming the fear of being judged and summoning courage for letting the world see the non-binariness of his gender is a beautiful portrayal of self-love and self-respect, and Bill Konigsberg performs that exquisitely.

The patchwork of debatable and controversial issues raised in this book is laudable. The author, through Ben and the other characters, has questioned a lot of the toxic norms pervasive in the society, norms that need to be erased out of existence, that are not enough talked about but pushed down into the far-away barrel of our minds, where we regurgitate the same arguments over and over, but do not have the nerve to speak them out.

I so much liked the way the layers of misogyny and homophobia were pulled apart and pondered over. Konigsberg needlingly analyses the all-encompassing way misogyny and homophobia imbibe in all circles, how they are interlaced intricately and seeped into the air in every men-talk, how they are normalized in the society, how we carry them around everywhere, knowingly or not, even in the smallest imperceptible gestures or words.

Really, in some ways, it was an all-boys world. Telling someone to stop being a pussy was telling them not to be a girl, as if being a girl was bad. And saying that something weak was gay was saying that straight was better, and gay was weak, and weak equaled effeminate, and effeminate equaled female.

Or as Hannah says:

Misogyny is so pervasive that the idea of being associated with female behavior freaks guys out.

And then the idea of war, which is not often found or discussed in a YA novel. But here the author does it. As Ben becomes recipient of the Pappas Award, he grows more invested in who Pappas was and where he came from, which is not unusual for an aspiring history professor.

But what he unravels about Pappas and his ideas, the concept of wars and their urge for a win overpowering the cost of lives that are destroyed in them, the needlessness or the pointlessness of these wars plague him for nights on end. The letters Pappas would send to his sister from Vietnam would twist and wrench your heart as they would Ben’s. Konigsberg deserves more than a little credit for tackling such a sensitive subject so gently and considerately.

And okay, all the sports talk did not really sound fascinating to me, since I have zero interest in or understanding of baseball. And I did feel the way Ben and his mother both suddenly see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel was a little disconcerting. But it doesn’t really overshadow the brilliance of the novel.

I’d easily give it a 4.