Benji Spends the Whole Summer Trying to Be Ben
The thing Benji decides at the start of the summer is that he is going to be Ben now. Not Benji. Benji is the kid name, the little brother name, the name that comes with being half of a matched set with Reggie. Ben is supposed to be the version of him that girls notice and friends respect. And what gets me about the book is that the name basically never sticks. He announces it and then spends three hundred pages still being Benji, still mumbling, still hanging back. Whitehead is pretty honest that reinvention is a thing you declare way more than a thing you actually pull off. The summer is not Benji becoming Ben. It is Benji finding out how slow that actually goes. Part of why it does not stick is that he was never one person to begin with. He says he and Reggie "had recently ceased to be twins. We were born ten months apart and until I went to high school we came as a matched set, more Siamese than fraternal or identical, defined by an uncanny inseparability" (Whitehead 6)....