The Giver

It takes imagination to make interesting its lack. Considering the ring of meh around Phillip Noyce's film The Giver, I was surprised to see how faithful it was to Lois Lowry's Newbery Medal-winning book. Its faith only breaks on commercial commonplaces—on Y-A clichés that have either blinkered the imagination of filmmakers or conked the source material into an ironic bow. Or maybe a little of both. Published in 1993, the novel predates the current Y-A boom, but is coolly prescient about which marks to hit. It is set in a Huxleyan dystopia: a Bored New World wherein conformity is the opiate of the masses—of everyone, really. Like Harry Potter, the adolescent hero, Jonas, is more special than he thinks; he is, in fact, more special than everybody else. And what makes him special is that he has been selected for an honor that all adolescents in our world are forced to endure: *feelings*.

Jonas's society is literally sterile; starting at the cusp of puberty, its citizens take pills to banish the "stirrings." Absent that impulse, and the concomitant commitment of love—a word that has fallen out of general use—family life is blunted into a polite form of social husbandry. Giving birth is a dispassionate occupation that, like all occupations, is assigned to one by the Council of Elders when one is 12 years old. When the story begins, Jonas is at the tail end of his 11th year. One of his friends gets assigned to the birthing center, where Jonas's father works. Other peers are dispatched to the Hall of Justice, the workplace of his mother. Jonas, however, is appointed to the hieratic position of Receiver of Memory, in whom all experience of past sensation, passion, nuance, and even color, is kept—all that was purged generations ago when the community retreated into insensate, choiceless sameness. The current officeholder is a trenchant, prematurely wizened man called The Giver; he transfers the memories of snow and war and sunburn and love to Jonas, who comes to understand that the tranquility of his parents and peers—who will, by design, never understand what he is going through—is a lie. This is a lesson that any teenage reader who's high on hormones and low on perspective could appreciate, and a lesson that those who mean to court that demographic have shrewdly learned.