Slacker

“I was proud of my lifestyle. I saw this guy on TV once who said the key to happiness was to find what you love to do, and do it. I’d lived by that rule for every one of my thirteen years.”

This quote comes from Cameron Boxer as he narrates his mindset on his dedication to video games. Cam explains why he devotes all his time to a single hobby, showing how Cam validates his way of life through a quote he’s held onto all these years. This quote helps to characterize Cam and explain his devotion to his slacker lifestyle.

“A lot of words have been used to describe Cameron Boxer over the years—goof-off, loafer, shiftless, slouch, lazy blob of protoplasm. Those all said it pretty well, but he was more than that, too. What people couldn’t see was that there was something special about Cam. Yes, he was a slacker. But Cam was a slacker the way LeBron James was a basketball player—through a mixture of rare natural gift and intense practice.”

This description of Cam, provided by one of his best friends, Pavel Dysan, gives perspective both on how people around Cam view him and how those closest to Cam view him. The comparison to LeBron James serves to characterize Cam not just as a slacker, but as a hardworking slacker who will actively put in work to protect his lifestyle. This description explains Cam’s motivations as the novel progresses, even in the chapters that aren’t told from his perspective.

“We all stood around, pretending everything was fine while the mall sucked all the business away from Main Street. No—it was worse than that. We were the customers abandoning our own town and driving to the mall to do our shopping. No wonder the Transportation Department was planning to demolish Sycamore’s crumbling interstate exit, now that there was another ramp a mile and a half down the road to service the mall. Think about that: Our whole community wasn’t worth the cost of a little shoring up and road work.”

Daphne’s assessment of the state of Sycamore’s community sets up one of the overarching conflicts of the novel and introduces the theme of The Importance of Community as well as the freeway ramp as a motif to communicate this theme. The impending destruction of the ramp is an indication of the degrading state of Sycamore’s community.