Summary
Narrated in the third person by an omniscient narrator, Fuzzy Mud opens on Tuesday, November 2 at 11:55 a.m. The novel’s protagonist, Tamaya Dhilwaddi, is in the fifth grade at Woodridge Academy, a private school in Health Cliff, Pennsylvania. Once an opulent private home, the brown and black stone building has been converted to host three hundred elementary school students. Miles of woods and rocky hills surround Woodridge Academy. Tamaya walks to school every morning with Marshall Walsh, a seventh-grade boy who lives on the same block.
Tamaya eats lunch with friends. The boys speak of wolves in the woods and Tamaya doesn’t know if they are making it up to impress the girls. One shows a rip in his pant leg—supposedly proof of a wolf’s bite—but Tamaya still doesn’t believe him. She reminds the boy that they aren’t really allowed to enter the woods. The comment prompts her friends to tease her for being a “goody two-shoes.” Tamaya wonders when the rules changed and it became bad to be good. Meanwhile, Marshall sits across the lunchroom, eating silently and alone between two loud groups.
Thirty-three miles northwest of the school is SunRay Farm. Unlike a typical farm, it is secured by armed guards, barbed electric fences, alarms, and cameras. Giant storage tanks are connected to an underground laboratory that makes Biolene. A year ago, the United States Senate Committee on Energy and the Environment held secret hearings about SunRay Farm and Biolene. The narrator includes excerpts of testimony from the inquiry. Senators Wright and Foote question Dr. Marc Humbard about his former employment with SunRay Farm.
Dr. Humbard says Jonathan Fitzman is one-hundred-percent crazy and Biolene isn’t a viable clean energy alternative to fossil fuels, but “an abomination of nature.” He says Biolene is a slime mold with altered DNA—a single-celled living creature unnatural to the planet. It is created for the express purpose of being burned in car engines. It is life created just to be destroyed. Senator Wright suggests that this is what all farmers do.
Later in the day, Tamaya dreads the long walk home with her heavy books. Marshall walks past her; it is his rule that at school they act like they don’t know each other, because he doesn’t want people to think they are a couple. To Tamaya’s surprise, Marshall gruffly informs her he is taking a shortcut for the first time in three years. While walking, Tamaya considers how she has had a crush on Marshall for those three years, but less so lately because he’s been such a jerk. Though she is frightened to break the rules and move through unfamiliar territory, she pretends to be brave and follow Marshall under a gap in the fence.
The narrator comments that Marshall isn’t as brave as Tamaya thinks. Once well-adjusted to life at Woodbridge, Marshall has been miserable since Chad Hilligas joined the school in the fall. Chad had been a problem child, kicked out of three schools in two years; he proudly claimed it was five schools. Chad turned on Marshall one day when Marshall expressed disbelief over a story about Chad riding his motorcycle right up to the school’s front steps. Chad accused Marshall of calling him a liar, and his glare burned into Marshall. The glare stuck with Marshall, and his grades suffered. Earlier today, Marshall answered a question in Latin class after Chad got it wrong. Chad challenged Marshall to a fight after school on the corner of Woodridge and Richmond Road. To avoid Chad, Marshall is taking a shortcut home.
The point-of-view returns to Tamaya as she struggles to keep up with Marshall in the woods. He hassles her for not moving as fast as him, saying it isn’t much of a shortcut if he has to wait for her. Tamaya considers how her parents divorced when she was very young. It didn’t make sense to her that they could still love each other but stay separated; she wanted them to get back together. Tamaya feels as if something is following them in the forest, but every time she turns, there is nothing. She runs to catch up to Marshall when something grabs her. However, it is just a tree branch that has caught her sweater.
As Marshall goes up a cliff to get a view of the area, Tamaya laments the giant new hole in her sweater. Even though she is on a scholarship, her mother had to pay $93 for the sweater. While waiting, she notices the odd quality of the mud on the ground. It is dark, like tar, and covered in a fuzzy yellowish-brown scum. Leaves are everywhere, but it looks as though none have fallen on the mud. She then hears movement in the forest and turns to see the boy who’d told her about allegedly being bitten by a wolf. She thinks his name might have been Chad. She calls out to him. She also shouts Marshall’s name, saying “we’re saved!”
The narration shifts back to the Senate’s secret SunRay Farm inquiry, with senators questioning Jonathan Fitzman, who cannot stop swinging his arms as he speaks. They ask him to try to control his arms. He says he has to keep moving. Fitzman says he came up with the idea for the single-celled “ergie” (ergonym) in college, dropped out to work on it in his parents’ garage, and then got investors interested. He says the first gallon of Biolene cost half a billion dollars to create, while the second gallon cost only nineteen cents.
In the forest, Tamaya warns Chad not to step in the strange mud. He spits on the ground and demands to know where Marshall is. Chad accuses Marshall of making him look like a fool by having him wait on the street corner. Chad then attacks him with punches to the head and by throwing him to the ground. Tamaya screams at him to stop, but Chad says she’s “next.” Tamaya stops the fight by throwing mud into Chad’s eyes. While he can’t see, she and Marshall run as hard as they can. Tamaya trips and Marshall helps her up. Chad isn’t following. Eventually, they find their way out of the woods. Tamaya wants to kiss the asphalt when they reach a road. Her right hand begins to tingle. Her skin doesn’t hurt, but it feels “sort of fizzy, like a freshly opened can of soda.” The chapter ends with two sums: 2 x 1 = 2; 2 x 2 =4.
Analysis
In the opening chapters of Fuzzy Mud, Louis Sachar establishes the structure he uses throughout the novel. Although the story is primarily told through third-person narration that stays within Tamaya’s point of view, Sachar also includes short chapters from Marshall’s perspective. Sachar also supplements the main plot with fragments of U.S. Senate hearing testimony. This testimony occurs on a separate timeline and appears—at least initially—to have little relation to what is happening at Woodridge Academy.
But there is a logic behind the book’s structure: By switching between these ways of telling the story, Sachar arouses the reader’s curiosity about the relevance of Jonathan Fitzman and Biolene to the lives of schoolchildren. As the story progresses and the plot lines intertwine, the reader is drawn in by the narrative tension brought about by repeated instances of dramatic irony in which the reader knows more than Tamaya, Marshall, and Chad about the dangerous situation into which they have stumbled.
The opening chapters also introduce the major themes of virtue, courage, isolation, and bullying. As a scholarship student with a perfect attendance record, Tamaya is committed to her education and feels a sense of belonging when she wears her uniform. Unlike her friends, who resent the fact that they have to wear non-normal clothes every day, Tamaya is proud to think of the school’s motto, Virtue and Valor, embroidered on her sweater. Rather than dismiss it like her friends, Tamaya longs to embody the motto by having high moral standards (virtue) and conducting herself with courage (valor).
Marshall, meanwhile, simply wants things to go back to the way they used to be. Since Chad joined the school and began bullying Marshall, Marshall’s self-confidence has dissolved and his grades have suffered. With other students following Chad’s example and picking on Marshall, Marshall finds himself socially isolated from his peers—a state of being captured in the image of him eating his lunch silently and alone while surrounded by people chatting and joking with each other.
Marshall’s conflict with Chad comes to a head when Chad fails to answer a question that Marshall guesses correctly. Chad perceives it as a provocation and challenges Marshall to a fight after school, prompting Marshall to lead Tamaya on a “shortcut” through the woods. As they scramble through the overgrown forest, Tamaya tears her prized sweater on a branch, wounding her sense of pride. The torn sweater is also an issue for Tamaya because uniforms are not covered by her scholarship, and the cost of a replacement is something her working-class mother can scarcely afford.
Soon Marshall gets lost. While he looks for a way out, Tamaya rests on the ground and notices the “fuzzy mud” after which the novel is named. Although she doesn’t yet know its toxic properties, Tamaya senses that there is something strange about the substance, which has no leaves on it despite the surrounding forest floor being covered in foliage.
While she worries about how they will get out of the forest, Tamaya is relieved when she spots Chad coming toward her. Unaware that Chad and Marshall were supposed to fight after school, Tamaya gleefully alerts Marshall to Chad’s sudden arrival in the woods. In this instance of dramatic irony, she doesn’t know Chad has tracked them down not to help but to harm. When she understands the situation, Tamaya is forced to think quickly, and she throws some of the strange mud in Chad’s face, giving her and Marshall a chance to escape.
