BOOK REVIEW
SMEDLEY’S SECRET GUIDE TO WORLD LITERATURE BY JONATHAN LEVY WAINWRIGHT, AGE 15
By Askold Melnyczuk
PFP, 254 pp., paperback, $14.95
Jonathan Wainwright isn’t a bad kid. A privileged Cambridge youth with an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse group of friends, he’s smart and aware of his place in the world. But he’s also 15 and acts precipitously, with real-life consequences, several of which propel this fast, fresh novel by Cambridge novelist — and UMass-Boston writing teacher — Askold Melnyczuk.
As this quick read opens, Jonathan is being suspended from school because of his participation in a particularly horrid prank on his friend Astro: an attempted illustration of waterboarding, aggravated by Jonathan being stoned. Jonathan’s poet father and activist mother are fighting: Dad’s recently come out, and mom’s so depressed she is literally pulling out her own teeth. And so they send their oldest child to New York, where he’s supposed to care for his ailing godfather, a former roué, and to write a 5,000-word essay on the history of literature in the age of Twitter.
That essay, which never quite comes together, is the basis for this book: the rambling first-person musings of a confused teen, interspersed with bits of research on writers like the 17th-century poet Richard Lovelace and the early-20th-century writer and journalist Agnes Smedley, interpreted primarily in terms of how they relate to the teen’s life.
Jonathan’s expulsion comes at a complicated time, as his girlfriend, Rene, may be pregnant: Two tests have given differing results, and the couple are waiting for a confirming doctor’s appointment. That’s a lot for a 15-year-old to deal with, and young Jonathan feels beleaguered. “Circa 1912, Agnes Smedley had an abortion,’’ he types on his iPad. “Consider the relevance.’’ “Agnes too never finished her formal education yet she was offered a teaching gig anyway. The pattern is now clear: I will never return to school.’’
In his self-absorption, Wainwright is a believable modern teen, wired more into his phone than the real repercussions of his actions. But between his slipshod work on his essay and prying into his godfather’s romantic past, he is trying to make sense of his life.
This isn’t easy for anyone, and Melnyczuk successfully captures these existential dilemmas in a believable teen voice. For example, although he claims to love Rene, who is both younger and more mature than he is, Jonathan is a hormonal mess. “Felt cool, at first, knowing something no one else did — grown up and real,’’ he says, of their relationship and its unintended consequence. “For a while, you feel it’s the two of you against the world, and you of course are bound to win. After a time, it starts to change. Becomes more like a fungus, festering inside you.’’ Soon he is dodging Rene’s texts and pretending that his phone is giving out when she calls.
An encounter with the attractive older daughter of his godfather’s housekeeper serves as a bit of a wake-up. Jonathan imagines himself in love (again) with the beautiful Beatriz (although he is not literate enough to cast himself as Dante). But when he pursues her to the Catskills, he is forced to recognize a reality beyond his own, one that includes poverty, incarceration, and deportation. “?‘Open your eyes, Jonathan,’?’’ Beatriz says to him. “?‘Nothing’s easy for me.’?’’
It would have been overly glib had this ill-starred outing changed the course of Jonathan’s life. And when he returns to New York City to find his godfather has taken a turn for the worse, the young man begins, perhaps, to grow. “I think to myself: what if this was me?,’’ he asks himself. “What would I want to do? Who would I want to see? . . . I don’t have the answers to these questions yet what could matter more? Everybody gets here, eventually.’’
Everything resolves, at any rate, and by the end, even Jonathan’s voice has matured a bit. “Some things have worked out. I know where I belong. I know who my friends are. And that’s not a bad place to start,’’ he concludes, before life throws him one more curveball. That he survives this one, too, is explained in a brief afterword, which also catches us up on the fates of his friends and introduces us to a more measured Jonathan, one who has found his way.
SMEDLEY’S SECRET GUIDE TO WORLD LITERATURE BY JONATHAN LEVY WAINWRIGHT, AGE 15
By Askold Melnyczuk
PFP, 254 pp., paperback, $14.95
Clea Simon, a novelist and freelance writer, can be reached at cleas@earthlink.net.
