Wonder

Choosing Kindness

Wonder, a novel by R. J. Palacio about a boy who is just about to start fifth grade, makes me want to be a better person. I want to tell you about it—but first I’m going to obsess a little about my weight.

Every January I used to buy a slew of diet books, and I would read them right away, convinced that this would be the year I would finally lose some pounds.

I would do pretty well for a while on a diet of skinless, boneless chicken breasts and water. But then the doughnuts and beer would come back, and the weight along with them. I would beat myself up a bit, but then move on, vowing to do better next year. Not tomorrow or next month: next year. Having blown my New Year’s resolutions, I could now wait another eleven months before getting serious.

Of course, some of these diet books were worse than others. The grapefruit diet books were never going to work, no matter how religiously I followed them. Man cannot live on grapefruit (and protein, also allowed) alone. But some were good—in fact, excellent—with sensible advice, clear logic, and realistic strategies. If I followed the advice in those books, I could change, and change for good. So why did I find it so hard to follow sound advice?

Other books I’ve read, books like Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, explain why I’m failing to change my habits and how I might succeed. Duhigg presents studies that show you need to recognize cues and institute a system of rewards to change a bad habit (gorging on chocolates after dinner, spending too much money on magazines I barely read, wasting time on the Internet) or to institute a good one (going to the gym to do cardio). I had never allowed myself sufficient time nor given myself rewards along the way.

We buy self-help books and read them because they encourage us to believe that we can change—that we can become slimmer, healthier, richer, better versions of ourselves. Books can help us figure out who we want to be. And that’s not a small thing. But this habit changing is a tough business. And I suppose that if any of these books could work magic without considerable effort, then that would be the end of that category of book. The foolproof diet book would be the last diet book anyone would ever need to publish.

To further complicate matters, most of us read for escape and instruction. And yet when we wander into the self-help, business, psychology, and diet sections of the bookstore, we generally tell ourselves we are interested only in instruction. But is this really true? Perhaps simply flipping through a book advocating a grapefruit diet (and gazing at its glossy grapefruit pictures) will make me feel thinner—if only for the subway ride home. Viewed in that light, was my annual pilgrimage to buy diet books really something to regret? The only thing wrong with this habit was that I didn’t examine my motives closely enough; I mistook escape for a desire to change.

At the same time, some of us also look to the fiction section to feel inspired to do better. I read novels in part because they help me figure out who I want to be. In a standard-issue police procedural, say, I want to be more like the detective and less like the killer. In a subtler work, though, I may find myself comparing my behavior with that of a number of different characters simultaneously or being drawn to a certain aspect of someone’s character while remaining wary of another. Rereading Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, I want to mirror Elizabeth Bennet’s strength and sense of duty, but I hope I’m not quite so quick to judge those around me as she is throughout most of the novel.

But much of fiction’s effect is, I think, subliminal. It changes us even though we don’t know we are being changed. Studies have shown that reading fiction makes us more empathetic. I would like to think that even with inconsistent effort on my part, I’m now less proud and prejudiced than I was when I first met Lizzy Bennet, even though I’m still plenty proud and prone to prejudice. (Must read again.)

There’s the maxim that you can’t judge a person until you’ve walked a mile in his or her shoes (or moccasins). Certainly, fiction is one of the best ways to accomplish this. How else could you be on the front lines of revolution in eighteenth-century France and marooned on a Pacific island on a single flight home to JFK? I burned a lot of shoe leather with Jean Valjean fleeing Javert while reading Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I was also racing alongside the heroic Ralph in William Golding’s 1954 novel, Lord of the Flies, as he was running for his life through the burning jungle to escape his antagonist Jack and the other boys.

Still, if diet books tend to fill me with an unrealistic sense of hope about my ability to change, I find that fiction works in the opposite way; I often wonder whether, amid the chaos of revolution, I would behave the way Jean Valjean did or be much more like the relentless Javert—whether, if marooned, I would stand apart with Ralph and his tiny band or follow Jack and his feral crew.

Reading challenges you to figure out what kind of person you want to be. I’m going to call this the Wonder challenge, named for the book I mentioned and for the act of pondering this kind of question.

If you find the need to categorize books, you would consider Wonder a middle-grade reader; it was published and marketed for fourth- to sixth-graders who have graduated from simple chapter books but aren’t ready for the darker themes of young adult. Written under the pseudonym R. J. Palacio by a successful book publisher and art director, the story is told from multiple perspectives, in a variety of voices. It centers on a young boy named August (Auggie), the first narrator, who has a craniofacial deformity. For years, Auggie has been tutored at home. Now, at the age of ten, he is about to start school for the first time.

I had picked it up to see if it might be good to recommend to my niece and nephews. Once I started, I couldn’t stop reading. I desperately wanted Auggie to fit in at school, to be happy, to find friends—to have a place in his life other than his home where people could see him and not react in horror to his face.

At first, all goes much better for Auggie than I would have expected. But soon he encounters real cruelty and, what’s worse, betrayal. The book’s use of many narrators performs a double function: it both allows us to see what motivates people to behave the way that they do and also gives voice to our own fears and anxieties. It helps us reckon with how we might behave when faced with the same situation by coming at it in different ways. The author even followed Wonder with a book that includes the perspective of the classmate who bullies Auggie, the kid who calls him a freak and who tells other children that if they touch him they’ll get the plague.

Much of the wisdom in the book comes from Auggie’s teacher Mr. Browne, who is in the habit of sharing precepts with the class to help them learn how to deal with life’s challenges and dilemmas. But it’s the school’s principal, Mr. Tushman, who, in his middle-school commencement address, sums up best the most important lesson of the year. His instruction to his students is both simple and arduous: Choose kindness. I was surprised and pleased to note that he explains kindness to the fifth- and sixth-graders with references to books. First, he cites a book by J. M. Barrie (not, he tells them, Peter Pan, but a book called The Little White Bird). He reads the sentence “ ‘Shall we make a new rule of life…always to try to be a little kinder than is necessary?’ ” He explains: “What a marvelous line, isn’t it? Kinder than is necessary. Because it’s not enough to be kind. One should be kinder than needed. Why I love that line, that concept, is that it reminds me that we carry with us, as human beings, not just the capacity to be kind, but the very choice of kindness.”

Mr. Tushman then continues with a passage from a second book, Christopher Nolan’s Under the Eye of the Clock. In this creatively structured memoir, Nolan tells in effervescent prose the story of his childhood and his education as a poet and writer. Born in Ireland in 1965 with cerebral palsy, Nolan was only able to control his eyes and his head. With the help of his father (who read to him great works of Irish and world literature) and his mother (who taught him the alphabet and talked to him constantly) and his sister, he first learned to communicate by signaling with his eyes and then began to use a pointer strapped onto his forehead like a unicorn horn to hit letters one at a time on a special computer keyboard. Nolan tells us that, with this setup and starting at age eleven, “he gimleted his words onto white sheets of life. Hands hanging loose by his side, electric pulses shooting through his body, he just nodded and nodded, typing numb-lost language” that had been trapped inside him for all his childhood years. Nolan would go on to compose remarkable and acclaimed poems, stories, plays, and a novel, and also to graduate from Trinity College, Dublin. He died at age forty-three in 2009.

Nolan’s memoir was published in 1987, when he was twenty-two. He writes in the third person and calls himself Joseph.

Here’s what Mr. Tushman says to the fifth- and sixth-graders:

“…Ah, here we go. In Under the Eye of the Clock, by Christopher Nolan, the main character is a young man who is facing some extraordinary challenges. There’s this one part where someone helps him: a kid in his class. On the surface, it’s a small gesture. But to this young man, whose name is Joseph, it’s…well, if you’ll permit me…”

He cleared his throat and read from the book: “ ‘It was at moments such as these that Joseph recognized the face of God in human form. It glimmered in their kindness to him, it glowed in their keenness, it hinted in their caring, indeed it caressed in their gaze.’ ”

He paused and took off his reading glasses again.

“It glimmered in their kindness to him,” he repeated, smiling. “Such a simple thing, kindness. Such a simple thing. A nice word of encouragement given when needed. An act of friendship. A passing smile.”

What he wants them to understand is this: “If every single person in this room made it a rule that wherever you are, whenever you can, you will try to act a little kinder than is necessary—the world really would be a better place. And if you do this, if you act just a little kinder than is necessary, someone else, somewhere, someday, may recognize in you, in every single one of you, the face of God.”

Mr. Tushman is careful to add that his listeners can replace “God” with “whatever politically correct spiritual representation of universal goodness you happen to believe in,” which earns him smiles, laughter, and applause.

By the time we get to this portion of the book, so close to the end, we have seen terrible viciousness. But we’ve also seen the face of God (or whatever we call it) in Auggie, in the friends who stuck with him, in his family, and in some of the teachers at the school.

Choose kindness. Whenever there’s a choice—and we are faced with such choices almost every minute of every day—this is what the book would have us remember.

Of course, no book can reform human nature, with all its flaws, just as no book will ever cause pounds to melt magically from our bodies. Even a book like The Importance of Living, with its advice that we need to be lazier and more sybaritic versions of our current selves, isn’t so easy to follow. It takes discipline to try to relax and enjoy life a bit more.

Still, the union of imagination and action can be a powerful force. In fact, one of the lovely things about Wonder is that it sprang from the author’s challenging herself to be kinder. In an interview with Michele Norris on National Public Radio, the author explained Wonder’s genesis: She was in an ice-cream store with her own children when one of them, then just three, burst into tears after he saw the face of a little girl with a facial deformity who was eating ice cream nearby. Palacio was so mortified that she grabbed her children and raced out the door. Afterward, she was furious that she hadn’t managed the situation better: “What I should have done is simply turned to the little girl and started up a conversation and shown my kids that there was nothing to be afraid of,” she told Norris. “And that got me thinking a lot about what it must be like to…have to face a world every day that doesn’t know how to face you back.”

Wonder’s popularity spread in that most magical of ways: by word of mouth. Readers, booksellers, and librarians all started to recommend it to one another. Schools began to introduce it into the curriculum, and it became one of those books that a whole community decides to read together. In other words, it envisioned a possibility so intensely that it galvanized people to reproduce it in their lives and communities. Today it is well on its way to becoming one of the most beloved children’s books of all time.

So the Wonder challenge after reading this book is to wonder if, in fact, we are choosing kindness—and to try to challenge ourselves to live more kindly.

Because clearly people can read this book, profess to love it, and then immediately and blatantly choose not to be kind. At the same time, I do hope that if we are inclined to be kind, a book like Wonder reminds us of that inclination. And if we aren’t, then maybe it nudges us a bit in that direction. Certainly, as this book has already proven, it can begin a conversation that helps us create safer communities for children and encourages us to hold one another to a slightly higher standard. Fiction doesn’t exist to change us for the better; but I believe it almost always does. Fiction opens us up.

As for my annual flirtation with diet books and diets, I did finally manage to lose some of the weight I had been trying to lose for more than a decade, and I’ve kept most of it off for two years as of the time of this writing. It was a lot of work, and it involved a great deal more than simply reading a book; I had to create new habits and tangible rewards, just as Charles Duhigg had predicted I would. I had to get much more serious about the gym. I had to learn how to eat a lot better (and a lot less) and remember to walk a lot more. And I have to think about it every single day.

I’m still working on the kindness, and it’s not as easily measured as weight and body fat. But I like to think that I’m getting a bit kinder every year and staying that way. And when I fall short, I often think of Auggie.