"A Little Less than Nothing" Response

        Tyra is a popular, beautiful, and self-aware high school girl living in Everett, Washington. She alternately approves of and disapproves of her two friends, Bretta and Haley, and struggles to move past the heartache of a breakup with her former high school boyfriend, Darren. One day, an outfit her father had warned her against wearing causes an older male teacher to implicitly proposition her, and she rejects his advances with disgust, deciding to change her pattern of dress to avoid incidents like these in the future.
        One characteristic of this story that I really admired was the narrative risk the author took in writing for a character of a different gender than himself. I believe this is the first story we've workshopped as a class to do this, and I commend the author for his bravery, as I know I've tried and failed to write a convincing character of a gender besides mine. I think his female character's voice was convincing except in small instances when typically male expressions slipped out, like "I mean, hell..." I also enjoyed the wry, sarcastic, and often offensive voice of the character developed throughout the story, especially in lines like "How's my little nail painter this morning?" when addressing Brita, who is half-Vietnamese. I can see how the character has internalized some of the misogyny present in our culture, like when she asks Haley to tone down her "sex appeal" so Tyra appears more beautiful, and when she implicitly competes with Bretta, who is dressed better than usual, but denigrating her appearance as looking "like a maid."
        I enjoyed the story's unlikeable characters, but I wish the plot did more to showcase them. As the story is now, there doesn't seem to be any real conflict until the next to last page, with the exception of the small dispute with Tyra and her father at the very beginning. The characters of Bretta and Haley are mostly fleshed out to be crucial side-characters, but once the girls reach the school they are almost immediately discarded and never heard from again. The story is short enough as it is that the conflict can be complicated and prolonged without having to sacrifice any of the valuable narration at the middle of the story. I don't buy that the narrator would so immediately and so unequivocably turn down the teacher's offer, given how eager she seems for recognition of her beauty and talent, and the wistful way she describes her former relationship with Darren. Also, there are a few places when the characters, as teenage girls, become cliched. In the dialogue when they arrive at school, the use of "like" and "totally" make Haley seem like the walking "dumb blonde" cliche. Perhaps to remedy this, the perception of Haley as dumb and almost worthless could be a projection of the narrator's self-importance, and Haley contributes to their conversation intelligently. This would call into question the reliability of the narrator to accurately depict reality, which would make her descriptions and actions much more shaded with doubt and subjectivity than presently, where everything she says is exactly confirmed.