Brinksmanship: In Zanesville by Jo Ann Beard

The telephone is on my side of the room, sitting on the dresser with its cord in a neat coil.

"Hello?"

Silence.

"Hello?"

Muffled sound in the background, of cars, or of people talking.

Suddenly, I know it's him, Hector, standing at the pay phone next to--where? Maybe the Dairy Mart, while Galen is inside shoplifting. My heart starts pounding, with the strangeness of it all; nobody has every prank phone-called me before, and I don't know what to do.

I set the phone back in its cradle.

In the dresser mirror my face looks the same, but I feel something happening around me,some change as palpable as weather. Stuck in the mirror are mementos from my childhood--red and yellow ribbons from various underachievments, a brown corsage from grade school graduation...

It's a stark feeling. Like getting to the last page of a book and seeing "The End."

In Jo Ann Beard's best-selling In Zanesville: A Novel (Little, Brown, 2011) nothing and yet everything happens.

The first-person narrator (who goes essentially unnamed) and her long-time best friend Felicia, called Flea, finish off the summer between eighth grade and high school being the world's worst babysitters for the world's worst family with their house on fire, and slip into small-town summer limbo until John Deere High School opens.

Both of them are middling, Midwest girls, no sure thing for the popular crowd, not noticeable enough for the loser crowd, clinging to each other and their three friends from elementary school as they drop into the abyss that is adolescence. Our narrator thinks of herself as the sidekick to Flea, who is more daring and less conventional. Her own family is a perpetual tragi-comedy, with a father who spends half his time half-drunk, yelling "I'll say this about that!" meaninglessly at her on-the-edge mom who chain smokes her way through countless cupcakes, mending, meatloaves, sarcastic asides, and shouting matches in the kitchen.

But out of all this miserable miasma, in a chance encounter in the girls' bathroom, our girl catches the attention of Patti the cheerleader, who inexplicably invites her to a sleepover. She inveigles an invitation for Flea, whom Patti grudgingly deems "kind of cute," and the two warily set forth to Patti's grandmother's palatial house, depending of each other to keep them from looking as out of place as they know they are among the otherwise all-cheerleader guests.

And then comes the watershed moment. Patti herds everyone into a pre-arranged sneak-out to meet boys in the park--a bunch of boys whom our girl knows only by reputation. There are thirteen girls, but only twelve boys, and when Flea pairs off with one of the twelve, she is left alone, mortified, in the dark. Flea's betrayal is almost more painful than being the only one rejected, and she knows nothing will ever be quite the same between them.

And yet, life goes on. Just being on the fringes of the popular note-passing, flirting-with-guys crowd gets her noticed by some boys, and despite all that happens, she realizes that some significant rite de passage has occurred and she has moved on into a new life. School is still the same; her family hasn't changed; but something, a different set of possibilities, is out there, ahead of her.

Beard is a master at using the minutiae of daily life to to reveal character and move the plot in understated but lyrical precision. In one telling scene the narrator watches through the kitchen window a scene with the neighbor's hopeless, always angry dog which speaks volumes about her father's life--and perhaps her own.

Outside my father is putting on what be brought down from the attic--trout-fishing boots. As he flips the canvas suspenders over his shoulders and fastens them, he seems to be talking to Curly, who is listening warily from the end of his chain.

He's going to try to walk him. Forget the gun. This is suicide by dog.

Where my dad grew up nobody ever kept a dog chained.

He takes a step, and Curly attacks him at the ankles and calves. Amazingly, the boots withstand it, and after a moment, the dog retreats, hackles up. Attack and retreat. Then, at the next step, there's a lunge but no bite. Still talking, my dad slowly reaches down, unclips the heavy chain from around the tree, and winds it around his gloved hand.

It's like pulling a car, getting him out of the dirt circle. It's been twelve years since he's been beyond that two feet. My father drags him along, inch by inch.

Then Curly is out ahead, hauling a tall man in hip waders through a shrub and down a terrace. The man has a look on his face I've never seen before. He looks happy, leaning backward as the dog strains forward, into the world.

Jo Ann Beard's portrayal of adolescence in the 1970s is right on target, well rooted in the time, yet universal, with its beginning coming-of-age narrative, at times painfully poignant, at others deep-down funny, but always frank and real. One not to miss.

Greek Tragedy: Crazy by Han Nolan

Shelby starts again. "My mother wants me to help her die."

I feel Shelby's hand claw my back and grab my shirt as though she were looking for something to hold on to, to save her and keep her from falling into that terrible place where those kinds of thoughts live, but I know there is no holding on, not for any of us. We have become, through no fault of our own, these falling bodies. Just like O'Hagan's odd mathematical equations for falling bodies, and as scary as that is, sitting here with Shelby, Pete, and Haze makes me feel for the first time that I'm not alone. At least we are all falling through space together.

Jason Papadopoulos is alone. His mom had died eight months before after a sudden stroke on a hike with Jason, and since that time his father has drifted back into the mental illness he's fought all this adult life, believing that he is being pursued constantly by the Furies of mythology. Knowing that he is the only person who can induce his father to eat and take the few medications they can afford, Jason struggles to hide their predicament from his neighbors and his school. Without his father's income, their house is deteriorating around them and there is no money for winter heat and little for food, much less shoes and haircuts. Jason loved his mother, but now he struggles to suppress his resentment of her for leaving him to deal with his father's increasingly scary madness, and he is haunted by an almost-repressed memory of his father's insane attempt to bury him alive at the age of six.

Jason's only companions are what he calls the "Greek chorus" which speak to him from inside his own head.

Ever since the fifth grade, I've had this imaginary audience in my head who follow me around and watch me like I'm the star in a movie. I talk to them, and yeah, they talk to me, although I know they aren't really there.

Jason's chorus gives him what he needs. There's Fat Bald Guy with a Mustache, the voice of know-it-all middle-aged wisdom, Aunt Bea from The Andy Griffith show, all motherly solicitude, Sexy Lady, who tells him he's both cool and hot, and Crazy Glue, a teen slangster with a running ironic commentary on everything. But even his personal chorus is not enough to keep Jason's anxiety from spilling over into occasional erratic behavior, like writing his social studies exam without capital letters, spaces between words, or punctuation.

The school places Jason in a support group, led by school psychologist Mrs. Gomez, with three other students with equally difficult family problems, Haze and Pete, and also Shelby, whose mother is dying of ALS. Initially resentful and determined to conceal his own problems for fear of being removed from his home but frightened by his father's physical deterioration during an illness, Jason turns to his friends for help. They respond supportively, but when Mrs. Gomez is brought into the medical intervention, the situation becomes obvious to her and Jason is placed against his will with a foster family. His time there begins terribly when he is stabbed by another foster child who resents sharing his room, and Jason then learns that he is to be denied the right even to check on his father when he is released for lack of insurance to go back home alone.

Jason's Greek chorus fails him in these circumstances, but his new friends from the group do not, and when Shelby's mother dies, sharing her wild and deep grief somehow brings a kind of catharsis to Jason and he experiences his own grief fully. When he does, he begins to recognize his deep anger at his parents' seeming abandonment of him, and to forgive both them and himself.

I recall the dream--the ocean, the darkness, a chilling terror.... I'm fighting, struggling to breathe, to break free...but wait--no, it's not me. That's not me down there. It's Dad. Dad's the one buried alive--my dad, my brilliant dad, buried beneath a craziness he can't break free of or control.

It isn't me at all.

Han Solo's forthcoming Crazy (Houghton Mifflin/Harcourt, 2010) is a moving psychological coming-of-age novel in which the not-quite-fifteen year-old protagonist comes to realize that he is not alone, that his parents' sad destiny need not be his own. As his friend Shelby puts it, Jason can be the good that comes out of his parent's tragedy. This is a complex novel, made understandable by the running commentary of Jason's chorus, an emotional roller coaster ride for the reader, all with the difficult theme that as long as we are alive, we can be more than the sum of our past.

To the Bone: Bone by Bone by Bone by Tony Johnston

Best known for her whimsical books for young readers, Tony Johnston has written a book aimed best at young adult readers, her 2007 novel, Bone by Bone by Bone. "I am haunted by my father," she says in her foreword, in explanation of why she wrote this semi-autobiographical novel about those "innocent-mean times" of the 1950's in the deep South.

Main character David Church is nine as the novel opens, a motherless and only child of Dr. Franklin Church who grows up in a house which has sheltered six generations. The kitchen door frame shows penciled heights and ages as far back as his great-grandmother, now nearly 100 years old, who tries to rule the household from her bed upstairs. David both reveres and fears his father, who installed a yellowed skeleton, scientifically labeled, beside his crib so that David could begin to follow him into a medical career from the cradle.

But even so, David is his own man. When he meets up with Malcolm Deeter, age 8, Negro and costumed in his mother's bedsheet for trick or treat, he sees in his sparkling eyes a kindred spirit. Dr. Church snatches the sheet off Malcolm's head and throws it in a trash can. "Jesus Christ, boy! You can't wear that! he shouts, dragging David away. "He can't be your friend. He's a n-----."

Despite his father's warning that he'd shoot any n----- who came in his house, it is "friendship at first sight" for David and Malcolm. They play together whenever they can escape adult eyes. They make a mud tar baby and play out the story, they dabble in the murky waters of Jesus Pond, tell ghost stories in the graveyard, invent a secret code, and discover a cave where, over a campfire meal of swiped hot dogs, they decide to become blood brothers. David even teaches the names of all the human bone he knows to Malcolm. Together at Miss Grace's, who doesn't seem to care if they are different colors, they earn shiny half-dollars doing chores and search surreptitiously for the severed arm of her Confederate great-granddaddy reputedly hidden somewhere in her house.

It is an outwardly idyllic boyhood, but David is unable to reconcile the two sides of his father--a doctor who gently bathes and consoles a dying patient with small talk about their own childhood games and a man who keeps a shotgun loaded with rock salt to shoot at any cat who violates his yard, a father who shares birthday banana splits and yet is involved with Klan doings in the countryside around. David is torn between love and hate for the father he can't understand. When his father turns a drunken old black handyman, called "the Mole Man," away at Christmas, David defies him by taking the man a plate of food. Then, during one of their now rare meetings, David and Malcolm discover the old man lynched, a dead mole crammed into his mouth and a sign, ONE LESS N-----, around his neck.

David knows he has to choose. It is his father's way or his own. David begins by deciding that he will not follow his father's orders to prepare for medical training. Then, on a Sunday, the day after his thirteenth birthday, a Klan Klavalcade of local men ends with the town's white drunk leading an attack on Malcolm. When David tries to shelter Malcolm inside the house, his father, true to his word, fires his shotgun at Malcolm just as David moves to shield him. David realizes that he will never know if his father thought the gun was loaded with rock salt or buckshot and knows that he will never really be his father's son again.

Bone by Bone by Bone received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal, and Booklist and appeared on several lists of noted books for 2007. However, perhaps because of its honest portrayal of brutality, the authentic language of the time, and perhaps the knowledge that its readership would be limited by these factors, it did not win any major awards. For the right readers, however, this book, although like Huckleberry Finn a work of fiction, stands as an eyewitness account of its time which deserves to be read, discussed, and remembered by those who did not grow up in that time but live in its shadow.