First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.
                                                                                                                                                    Martin Niemöller

This quote was all I could think of reading Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door.  It is an interesting piece which examines the post-war state of mind of the 1950’s.  It tells of a time that was still innocent, in some ways:  “It was a time when even the guilty displayed a rare innocence”—none of the adults in the book who are given clues or told: David’s dad, officer Jennings, and Tony Morino’s mother, are willing or able to grasp what’s going on and pass it off with excuses.  “Lucky for us, the Morinos are real strict Catholics.  His mom said she probably deserved it, she’s probably loose or something.  She said that parents have a right and Ruth’s her mother now.”  This backdrop gave Ruth Chandler, and real life killer Gertrude Baniszewski a lot of room to maneuver as she held a teenage girl captive in the basement and tortured her with the help of neighborhood kids.

The use of David, the boy who lived next door, as a narrator, brings the reader face to face with what’s going on.  In his essay “The Sublime Trials of Jack Ketchum: Teaching  The Girl Next Door in the Era of Torture Porn” Douglas Ford says, “The Girl Next Door works on a much more sophisticated and arguably more disturbing meta-textual level, insisting that the reader constantly evaluate his or her responses to the atrocities being depicted.”  David’s best friends, with their mother at the helm, are perpetuating these atrocities.  More than halfway through the book, David still equates Ruth with supervision, “She was still an adult, wasn’t she? Adults couldn’t let that happen, could they?”  The adult blessing gives David the ability to justify these actions, lets him keep quiet where he might have stood up for her, had the perpetrators been only other children.  This brings to mind the Nazi mentality, of just following orders.  Ford tells us,

 

“Had Ketchum wanted to tell a ‘true crime’ story, he would have found plenty of details to work from in the original murder case. However, the opening line, with its emphasis on calling upon the reader’s associations with pain, establish his primary purpose: not to relay the ‘facts’ of a murder case, but to force a reader to scrutinize his or her own responses to horror.”

 

David strikes a balance between curiosity and abhorrence.  For a while, the scale seems about even, then later tips (quickly and with good reason) to the latter.  But for a while, before it gets too bad, even David isn’t wholly opposed:  “Fuck it, I thought, Let it go where it goes.”  This is after Meg makes the drastic mistake of going to the police, back before the abuse was too bad.  The next chapter surmises one sentence:  “Where it went was to the basement.”  The lesson here that Ketchum wants us to pull from Meg’s story (and indeed, Sylvia’s story) is one about complacency, and standing up for what’s right and wrong.  From hindsight, the consequences of interfering were much worse for David by speaking up when he did, as opposed to much earlier.  If he had done the Right Thing, and not been seduced by the pack mentality, everything would have been better for everyone.  It’s hard to make those kinds of choices, especially when we can see, even today, our government taking the easy way out in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, doing what is easy as opposed to what is right.  (I’m reading Ahmed Rashid’s Descent into Chaos for some light reading as a break from this class, and it has me thinking about the Middle East).  David’s moral ambiguity is what makes this a fascinating read, and is the most important key to why this book works.