Skinnybones

As Alex learns hard lessons about the pitfalls of ill-timed humor and tall tales, the rising tension of his team’s upcoming showdown with T.J.’s team brings all his insecurities to a crisis point, particularly when an outsized audience turns up to watch the game. Notably, the events leading up to the game are peppered with Alex’s recollections of previous situations in which his humor failed to save him from awkward scenarios, as when his disastrous decision to goad the barber resulted in a botched haircut. In this and other flashbacks, Park emphasizes that Alex’s tendency to joke with authority figures leads to harsh consequences, suggesting that Using Humor to Cope With Conflict often makes matters worse.

However, Alex’s descriptions of his attempts to improve his bunting suggest that he is not utterly devoid of skills on the field, and even though he continues to focus on his perceived inadequacies in the game, his determination to perfect this one skill offers a glimmer of hope. His decision to persevere in the game despite his limitations also shows his commitment, even if external events often conspire against him. Although the protagonist continues to focus on baseball, the author also showcases Alex’s unique talents in other areas, suggesting the novel’s eventual shift toward celebrating The Value of Talent Beyond Athleticism. In the meantime, however, the revelation that T.J.’s and Alex’s teams will face off in Little League sets up the largest conflict of the novel and forces Alex to come up with creative ways to mitigate his anxieties.

In Chapter 8, the novel’s main conflict is compounded when T.J. invites the entire class to the game to watch his team beat Alex’s. Painfully aware that his team “ha[s]n’t won a game all season” (73), Alex knows that the event will be “a slaughter,” and he is so distraught by the prospect that he puts all his comedic skills on display to try to get out of the game entirely—but to no avail. By emphasizing the inevitability of this baseball-themed showdown, Park suggests that The Consequences of Lying involve dealing with immovable realities that cannot be wished away or avoided through deception. Her narrative therefore delivers the important message that some challenges must be dealt with directly, no matter how unpleasant the consequences may be.

Within this context, Chapter 9 delves into Alex’s relationship with God and faith as he resorts to desperately wishing his problems away on a cosmic level. For example, when Alex mistakenly believes that the game has been displaced by the eighth-grade graduation ceremony, he exclaims, “Thank you, God […] This is a wonderful thing you’ve done here! A wonderful, Godly, zippy, wonderful thing” (81). However, when he realizes that he’s mistaken, he begins to bargain with God instead, saying, “I think it would be a nice gesture on your part if you could make it up to me” (84). Notably, even his conversation with God uses humor to deflect responsibility, and he makes several attempts to ask God for unlikely forms of divine intervention, like making everyone go home to turn off their running water or causing lightning to strike near the field. However, when his prayers go unanswered, Alex wryly decides that “God is not the pushover that some people would like you to believe” (85). Once again faced with the prospect of dealing with his challenges head-on, he nonetheless catches a glimmer of hope when he manages to catch several balls, and he chooses to see this as a moment of subtler divine intervention on his behalf. Thus, although he does not quite get the answers he sought from God, his faith doesn’t waver, and this speck of optimism recasts the tone of the imminent final conflict.