Lauren Myracle's ttyl
A Frodo's Notebook Book Review
by Ben Carr - Editor at Large

A novel wearing in a pretty pink dustjacket with yellow smiley faces on the front might not seem to portray itself as some of the most inventive modern fiction available. But last year's ttyl (Amulet, $15.95), the latest work by Lauren Myracle (author of the well-known young adult novel Kissing Kate), had the potential to be just that. It is written in the form of a series of instant messenger conversations, held between three girls over the first few months of 10th grade. The girls are best friends "4ever," and they always type in flawless teenaged IM-speak.

Laying aside for now the discussion of the medium, Myracle tackles real-life issues: the girls get burned by boys, chasing popularity lands them in trouble, and one male teacher becomes a little too friendly. The characters are stereotypes, but the sort of stereotypes who exist in great number in real life - you know, the slightly-depressed artsy chick, the peppy boy-crazy one, and the necessary good girl who still gets into trouble. The big question of the story: Will the friends stay loyal to each other and work through the hard times?

ttyl has a definite charm. The story is a quick read, and rarely boring. It couldn't move slowly if it wanted to - it is, after all, pure dialogue with no extraneous description. Plus, there's plenty of bits to laugh at: one character is obsessed with online personality quizzes, and readers may find themselves Googling "date Jesus" after the girls laugh about a Web site. It is, at the very least, a well-researched look at how 10th-graders talk to each other.

But the picture-perfect way the struggles and resolutions work themselves out don't feel genuine. The story's format is such that there should be no sense of down-talking at all, as all its life lessons are given through the keyboards of teenage girls; but it's too easy to imagine the writer of the story reading pop sociology books about the troubles girls face, then sifting through AIM logs and carefully typing "l8r" when she wants a character to say "goodbye."

This brings us to the interesting question which the book raises with its mere existence: Is this a sign of the degradation of English literature? After all, here we have a whole novel laden with intentional misspellings. Emotions must be reduced to emoticons and accentuated with caps lock or loads of exclamation points. Noah Webster must be rolling over in his grave.

It's not that bad, though. What the book is written in is best seen not as a deformed and evil version of English, but as its own emerging and legitimate variety: as different from written English as the written is from the spoken. There is craft in using a limited number of emoticons and other symbols to convey the whole array of English expression, and people old and young are practicing that craft in tiny visible boxes on computer screens everywhere. College students and high school students IM in different ways, and businesspeople and retirees in different ways again; there is room for creativity that is gone from most media.

All IM is not the same, and that is part of what causes the trouble for ttyl. Myracle may have studied the IM language of a few particular teenagers, but she's not yet fluent in even that - and I doubt that anybody outside of the community creating that language can recreate it in a fully convincing work of fiction. Individual IMers are constantly reshaping the way they type (consciously or not) in order to better express themselves, but Myracle's characters are clearly only imitating the IM conversations she's read - not indwelling the IM spirit. That's why "u" is never ever "you" in her book.

So the final problem with ttyl is not merely that it uses the language of IM, nor that it tackles the 'tough issues' of adolescence - but that it does both and simultaneously takes itself too seriously. It tries to solve half the problems of female adolescence in 209 thin pages, in a language the author doesn't quite speak. I thoroughly believe in the power of literature, but perhaps this would have worked better as a satire.

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