The Temple of Gold

Go meet the new family's son, Ray's mother tells him.  He's about your age, and he seems like an absolute angel.

Ray, a seventh grader bearing a grudge against life in general, hated him already.

"I hear you're an absolute angel," I said to him that morning.
"I  hear you're not," he came right back, which threw me because I didn't know how the news had spread so fast.

Ray, a fairly nice looking, outdoorsy kid, who struggles to get by in school.  Zock, an "ugly" straight-A student who loves poetry.  They have nothing in common, and so, of course, after a brief fight, they become best friends.

William's Goldman's first novel, The Temple of Gold (1956), which he dashed off in three weeks, tells a tale that probably has been lived by many a small town kid.  A childhood reasonably happy, because he doesn't know better.  A high school career that is undistinguished academically, but fun, exciting -- the odd synergy between the two boys making them joint leaders among other students.  Graduation.  One boy remaining in his small Illinois town, aimless, messing around with girls, choosing girls badly, being repeatedly dumped.  Spending night after night alone, drinking, drunk.  The other boy living an exciting life in the Ivy League.  All the makings of tragedy.

They part, following graduation, with characteristic humor.

"Well, Zocker," I said belting him one on the arm.  "Don't take any wooden nickels."
"My mother has already warned me."
"And stay loose."
"I shall," he said.  I shall endeavor to try."
"Do endeavor so," I said, imitating him.
We shook hands.  "Good-by," I said.  "Good-by, Euripides."
But neither of us moved.
"I hear you're an absolute angel," I said finally.
"I hear you're not," he said.
Then we both ran.

Zock returns home after his first year at Harvard, excited to see Ray again.  After one year, Ray wants only to drink.  Ray insists on driving while drunk.  The inevitable accident.  Zock is killed.  "Murdered" in the eyes of Zock's parents, of the townspeople, and of Ray himself.

Ray joins the Army four days later, unwittingly contributes to the death of a fellow recruit, and is discharged.  He marries the whore who he's been seeing in town.  As a newly married man, he determines to pull himself together.  In effect -- although it's not made explicit -- he tries to live the life that Zock would have lived.  Had he lived.  Had Ray not killed him  He enrolls in the local college. He studies hard and becomes an A student.  He works his butt off to become editor of the school literary magazine.  He fails to become editor only because the adviser can't forget the boy's past, and refuses to appoint him..

Meanwhile, his wife tires of  his dedication to his studies and to the magazine.  She's sick of being a "good girl."  She has an affair with the 16-year-old boy next door, and then leaves.  Unlucky at school; unlucky at love; unlocky at friendship.

Ray sinks lower and lower.  Not for the first time, he ends up at Zock's grave in the cemetery.

"Zock, I'm cracking.  Help me.  Help me for Christ's sake.  I can't find the handle, Zock.  Tell me what to do.  Tell me now because I'm cracking."

He finally finds himself lying in bed, spending a spell in the hospital's mental health ward.

The Temple of Gold was published at roughly the same time as Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye.  It is written in the same breezy, informal style, and is told by the same sort of confused adolescent, one whose decisions appear to the reader as disastrous and self-defeating.  Goldman's work is darker, perhaps because it does not stop where Catcher in the Rye stops, at a stage where we still see some realistic hope for the future (as Goldman's original manuscript did, before his publisher insisted that the novel be doubled in length). 

The story attempts something of a hopeful final few pages, but I had the feeling that Ray had played all of his cards, and had pretty much lost all of his chips.  He's like guys we've all known, kids who might have made a good life for themselves, but who made poor decisions they lacked the resources to overcome later. 

Ray's glory days were in high school, and his friendship with Zoch was the golden thread that ran through his life.  He attempted to relate to his girlfriends with the same breezy, jokey, mildly-insulting approach that had been so successful with Zoch.  It might have worked with some girls even then; it might well have worked in 2018.  It didn't work in the 1950s, in small town Illinois.

All of the tragic aspects of the novel having been noted, the dialogue is often quite funny, especially in the early chapters between Ray and Zock, and between them and their high school friends.

Goldman's subsequent career was prolific.  Among his novels, he wrote The Princess Bride.  He has written numerous screenplays, including All the President's Men and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.