When the movie version of Pay It Forward came out in 2000, it looked like something serious I didn't want to see. The other thing I remember is that it starred the kid from Forrest Gump and The Sixth Sense (Haley Joel Osment). I didn't even know that it started out as a book until earlier this year, when I read Love & Other Words. The two kids in it had bonded over Catherine Ryan Hyde's heartbreaking novel. Which made me curious, as I sometimes enjoy having my heart broken too. So when I started to read it, I thought, okay, I get it. It's about a sweet, naïve kid who thinks people are good, but life keeps proving him wrong.
Twelve-year-old Trevor McKinney hasn't had it easy. He has no idea where his dad is, and his mom is a recovering alcoholic. Yet despite this, he believes that people can change. So when his closed-off yet kind social studies teacher, Mr. St. Clair, assigns the class an extra credit project posing the question: How would you change the world?, Trevor comes up with this: What if one person helped three people, and then each of those people helped three more people, and so on? Soon everyone would be helping one another, and bad things would stop happening. Trever calls it Pay It Forward -- and all of his classmates laugh. But Trevor remains undeterred, giving one hundred dollars of his paper route money to a homeless man. As Trevor's project progresses, there are ups and downs -- mostly downs. Especially because one of his goals is to help Mr. St. Clair, an erudite Black Vietnam vet missing an eye, and his mom, a beautiful woman insecure about her lack of education, fall in love and get married. (Here I must pause to interject my reaction to the movie, which I watched after finishing the book: How could Trevor's teacher be a white guy with two eyes? And how could that guy be Kevin Spacey?!) At first, the story is a little hard to follow because it's interspersed with interview excerpts from the future. Yet eventually I realized that they're there to show how the Pay It Forward project -- or movement, as it came to be called -- gained traction. I sensed that if I stuck it out, then it would, ahem, pay off in the end. And it turned out that I was right.
Poignant and stirring, Pay It Forward shows that we're all vulnerable to the whims of the world, and that our only defense against it is decency. It also shows that we're all connected, and that even the smallest kindnesses can add up to make a big difference. That it does so by making the ultimate sacrifice to help humankind is unsettling. But this is the way that it has to be to deliver the book's moving message.
On that note, my copy of the book is the fifteenth anniversary edition and includes a new introduction by Hyde. In it she explains how she got the idea for the book. One night when she was in her twenties, she was driving through her not-great neighborhood when her car began to smoke. So she pulled over. This was before cell phones, so she couldn't call anyone. That's when she saw two men approaching her car. This is it, she thought. This is how I die. But to her surprise, they popped the hood and helped her. By the time the fire truck arrived (because where there's smoke, there's fire), they had gone without a word. Hyde felt bad about that. If they had exchanged contact information, then she could've thanked them properly, even sent them Christmas cards every year. But her inability to do that, coupled with these Good Samaritans' anonymity, made her wonder, what if? What if a stranger did something nice for you, and you had no way to thank him except for doing something nice for someone else?
It makes you wonder. And just maybe believe in the miracle of the human spirit.
Except when it comes to Kevin Spacey.