Twice Real by Silvia Sanza

This short novel is set in NYC, (people, apartments, streets, work) and in the Catskill region as experienced by NYCers, (cute shops, trees, lakes, natural beauty). The time, 1990-91, is set by the first gulf war and the first President Bush. This sets a vague yet palpable atmosphere of outer danger, especially after a character is eliminated in a sudden newspaper headline kind of  way. 

This novel is not so much about plot. The heart of the novel is perhaps a look at desire and connection between individuals and the connections and desires those impulses lead to. The plot elements come in to illustrate the power and consequences of these emotions, the plot serving the characters rather than story for its own sake. Is this what makes a book literary fiction rather than, genre, crowd pleasing pop product?
But wait!

The novel centers on a handful of interrelated characters, plus a wildcard. There is a feeling of passage from youth, a time of personal movement into middle-age. Death is looming, but in outer danger, suicide,  and world events, the news, rather than the dull slow terror of old age and natural passage. The fear is centered in not so much personal physical decay, but the mid-life feeling that you are basically here for awhile if not taken out by accident or some other random outside of the self occurrence. Or some madness. 

There is a male-female couple of a not explicitly specified age gap. Large enough that his sister felt entitled to label it, “jail bait” or some other slur. He is a writer of perhaps little worldly success, yet not without some means, some purchasing power for things like trips to Europe and connections offering summers in the available empty country place. She has a job, so it is not all framed in the rich old guy - gold digger young thing, cliche.
So perhaps they have a gap of as much as 20 years.
The age gap is not so much of an issue as the variation of their longings, desires. She has a healthy eye for other men, looking anyway. No harm in that. Still she is not exactly contented. Not entirely sold on this relationship. And, that guy over there looks hot. 

He seems to be settling, older.
His desire, longing, is to bond with his 20ish nephew in an innocent dad like way. 

The wildcard is a character who attaches herself to the young woman in the age gap couple. She seems of another class, or at least sinking, brought down by her compulsive overeating and obesity, into a living as a freelance apartment cleaner. The lack of physical beauty and hardly-getting-by type of job would perhaps put her at a different economic status than her object for connection, the woman in the apparently privileged couple. Economic issues of separation are not explicitly the business of this novel, so her character can represent a self one could become with a little age, hard luck, and doubtful choices, all of which are easy to come by. This character could be seen as a harbinger of an undesirable future for the young woman she is attracted. Or the person who is sinking into quicksand and might just pull you in with her if you offer a hand. Contaminated by insanity, hard luck, poverty, or a combination of those. Insanity and poverty might be catching. It could be some strange telepathic viral thing, it’s transmission still unknown. 

The kind of literary poetic quality of the writing, with focus on the characters, allows one to forget plot for a pleasant spell getting aquatinted with the tapestry of these desires. We get to know Wildcard in this way and it ends up that she is chaotic enough to drag the others into plot weather they like it or not. 

There is a nicely staged climax by the summer lake when the individual desires clash and the literary novel reader awakens from that dream and finds themselves on noir alley. 

Satisfying read. 

I came by this novel in a rather odd social media connection way. I got curious and I’m glad I did. 

The Blackboard Jungle by Evan Hunter

This is the first big selling novel produced by Evan Hunter. It came out in 1955 and reflects his own work as a teacher in such a school for a very brief time. 

It is a well done, plot and character heavy novel, that has some grounding in social concerns. Namely, Are these schools working at all? 

The novel has a lot of common association with the youth culture. The screenplay also by Hunter was directed by Richard Brooks in a movie that came out in 1955. Unfortunately the content of it all was overshadowed by pop music. Legend has it that Rock Around the Clock recorded by Bill Haley and his band was the first rock song used it a movie. The song became a big hit and it is said to have begun the rock and roll change over to this newer type of music being heavily marketed to young white kids. Mass communication and corporate power took care of the rest of it, niche marketing and a few other things less important produced the generation gap. It is interesting that a book that is so thoughtful ended up marketing the generation gap and made the juvenile delinquent appear cool and edgy. 

Of course this doesn’t happen front reading the book. The JD’s in the book are confused kids trying to live through a time in an institution that doesn’t work and practically forces them to act like jerks to get along with the other kids. But they sure look cool and act cool in the movie. Movies have trouble getting deeper than surface cool. The movies become a battle of the Cools, whoever's image comes off the better, is the most memorable, wins the movie. The Joker will outlast Batman. He is just Don’t-Give-a-shit-COOLER.

The notion of Rock Around The Clock, a really basic dumb lyric diddy, overshadowing impact of the novel’s story is discouraging. 

(I don’t recall if I ever saw the movie all the way through.I know it’s a good movie, a riveting melodrama.)

The plot of the book is basically a new young male teacher gets his first job out of college in a tough all boys vocational high school in The Bronx, NYC. It’s the old hero’s journey with him coming in all idealistic but having that questioned with the disillusioning reality of it. It is far far from easy and physically dangerous. 

He also has a, pregnant with their first, wife at home in their housing project apartment.
 

There is a very interesting scene in the book about youth culture that has its base in the marketing of music. Another new male teacher, Josh, befriends our Rick. Josh is a big pop music fan with a big record collection. He and Rick go out for a drink and Josh tells him excitedly about his plan to connect with the students by bringing in his cherished record collection. 

The class where he brings the records is vividly set out in the novel. He very reverently presents the big band stars from 10 years before. This is met with disrespect and ridicule. The novel is written before the conversion to vinyl LPs.The shellac records back then were stiff brittle and breakable fragile.  

It is in no way explicitly stated as to the meaning and point of this episode, but I have a high level of interest in the effects of art, culture, and mostly popular culture on our lives. I’m on the lookout for stuff like that and the record gap scene appealed to me from that perspective. 

The point of conflict with the teacher and the students is the students’ long standing alienation from a system that they can feel is not at all in their best interests. So any individual teacher vanishes behind the role of being another agent for the enemy system. The same thing works in reverse with the jaded tuned-out teachers seeing the students as all being “garbage” in a dumping ground school. This is all clearly pointed out in the novel.

In the record scene a new teacher still has hope of connecting with the students with something that he takes as indisputably wonderful, something he holds dear and loves. Something connected to when he was like them, only 10 years ago, young, and open. Here another problem beyond to one of the school system surfaces. Culture went from locally based to centralize and attached to the capitalist need for growth, the cultural is artificially split up in service to market profits. Telling a specific demographic, “You are special!, They are old, here is your special music, that crap is old and wasn’t as good as they thought it was to begin with because they were less sophisticated back then”. None of these people have control or even cognizance of this hijacking of whatever human culture once was, not that is was much better in whatever, “Back then”, but surely somewhat different before mass electronic media controlled by remote corporations dominated our common entertainment choices. They/we just go along as conditioned.
This is all illustrated in the record scene. Reading it today the absurdity is amplified by our view of the pop music of 60 and 70 years ago. It’s all old, old fashioned stuff on some level even if it’s “great”. The kids in the scene ridicule the big bands, Glenn Miller, etc while asking for Julius LaRosa. LaRosa was no radical performer, just the latest product in a long line. 

Also perhaps concerning shifting points of view the young female teacher is badly handled. It could have worked a little better if this could have been two characters. She is sexually assaulted, attacked by student in the hall top ripped open, breast exposed, rescued by our hero Rick. But couldn’t some teacher other than her come on to him in an unsubtle way later in the novel? We get how he has to deal with workplace sexual harassment, that is fine and interesting, but it should have been a different character than the one he rescues from being raped.. 

Aside from that this is the type of novel that anyone going into or involved with teaching at an institution, might want to read. It is very sad that sixty years later the same problems continue in the same type of institutions, more or less. It this kind of 19th century home/work/school idea ever going to work out again, if it ever did?

It very enjoyable and rich read in multiple ways.  There is a lot of plot and story that moves things along and issues to think about. Nicely done.