Doug Swieteck, a fourteen-year-old transplant to the small town of Marysville, learns to cope with his life as he adjusts to new situations during the 1968-1969 school year in Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt (Clarion Books, 2011). Even as he faces the struggles of moving to a new middle school, Doug must still face his abusive father and come to terms with his two older brothers. Doug eventually finds friendship and confidence in himself as he develops a new talent and abilities with the help of a local librarian, a classmate, and a caring teacher. Especially, Doug finds strength within himself.
If the name “Doug Swieteck” sounds familiar, that is because Doug was Holling Hoodhood’s friend in The Wednesday Wars. Throughout that novel, we learned that Doug’s older brother had a list of ways to disrupt school and seemed destined for a life of crime. In this second book, Doug again must deal with his older brother’s bullying, but Doug’s own narration gives more insight into circumstances of their life in the Swieteck home. Before Doug moved, Holling gifted him the precious jacket from Joe Pepitone, the baseball player who gave them attention in previous book. To me, it seems that this jacket becomes Doug’s touchstone for “okay.” Even as other things go wrong, he still has that jacket where he hid it, so it’s okay. Until, of course, the jacket too is gone. Then Doug must figure out how he can be “okay” even without the physical object.
Okay for Now is a book that explores Doug’s growing up just as The Wednesday Wars explored Holling’s journey. While Holling found solace and life-insights from Shakespeare in The Wednesday Wars, Doug finds solace in the gorgeous images he finds in a book in the library: illustrations from Audubon’s Birds of America. The graceful lines in the paintings hint at the actions and the story, behind each of the majestic animal snapshots. Doug learns to take his pencil and sketch the same lines himself, to capture the same majesty. This gives him strength as he faces his other struggles in middle school and at home.
Life still isn’t easy. In his family, toxic masculinity eliminates any encouragement of reading and drawing. Although the physical abuse Doug and his brother experience at their father’s hand is never fully shown in the text, it’s heartbreaking, especially as Doug begins to realize that the abuse he suffers at the hands of his father is often transferred to his mother if he avoids repercussions. His well of baseball knowledge, one of his sources of positive self-esteem, also brings him into his father’s frustrations. It’s almost like he can’t get it right with his father. It’s only the loving people around him that help Doug find peace.
And, as Doug finds his own strength, he can then help his brothers. As in Holling’s story, Doug doesn’t share the name of his brother until a turning point in the book when he has finally come to a moment of understanding. He likewise can then help his oldest brother and even the teacher that made middle school gym class so miserable.
So is Doug’s life great at the end? No, but it’s “okay for now.” In the end of this book he stops calling his home “the dump.” His two brothers have hope for the future. It’s true: Doug doesn’t know what will happen with his friend, Lil, but he’s “okay for now.” As the reader, I wanted there to be more resolution and explanation about Lil, but I suspect Schmidt left it so wide open because this is how life really is. We need to learn to accept that we are “okay for now.”
Okay for Now was a National Book Award Finalist for Young Readers Literature in 2011.
