Essay Questions

What are the Frets?

The name kind of gives the answer away. That is “the Frets” as in fretting about things. The narrator provides a litany of synonymous imagery that helps to explain the term including the un-sit-stillables, the worry wiggles and the jumpy grumpies. Portico’s grandma has a different name for the second basic condition: anxiety. Anxiety on one of its most basic levels is exactly that: sitting around and fretting over things which, quite often, you have no control over. Just one very significant example, for instance, would be the anxiety instilled in Portico as a result of the fact that his parents don’t seem to do much of anything together other than arguing. Of course, it will turn out that there are plenty of other things to fret about in his life as anxiety is a normal aspect of the modern social condition.

What is the anxiety that has driven Mr. Mister to an obsessive compulsion?

Mr. Mister is one of the idiosyncratic characters that make the massive apartment building the narrator calls home an entire world to be explored. He is notable for standing outside apartment 1B for most of the day doing little more than retying his shoelaces over and over and over and over again. Mr. Mister is certainly not alone in developing obsessive compulsive behavior in response to social anxiety of dealing with the conditions of modern existence. His rationale actual makes a strange sense off logic, at least metaphorically. He is moved to pathologically retying his shoes as a reaction to the fear of leaving his feet somewhere. While this certainly sounds like a mental condition on the surface, Portico makes things clear in this character’s introduction. As long as he continues obsessing over his shoes, he is making sure that he is not de-feeted. So, in reality, his anxiety is quite common throughout the population.

Is Herbert Singletary really the Worst?

The book, to a rather healthy extent actually, is about redemption. Many characters find redemption to one degree or another. And when the plot is boiled down to essentials, it is not too far off the mark to suggest that Stuntboy’s actual superpower is being the agency—to one degree or another—of that redemption. Herbert Singletary is the schoolmate who is introduced with “the Worst” appended to his name because he is such a mean rotten bully. As the narrative plays out, however, Portico and Zola discover the truth that few kids ever become a bully simply because they were born rotten. Every bully has a story of how he got there and the story of Herbert becomes one that redeems him later for his earlier transgressions.