Good Times / Bad Times

As I've discussed before, when I write a book review here in my blog, I also copy and paste it over onto Goodreads as well.  Sharing my wit and wisdom with a wider audience, right?  But books I review for this blog are books that have made an impact on me, in one way or another, and that I'd like to discuss at some length.  Books I read that I may or may not have liked, but that don't seem worthy of lengthy comment, I just summarize quickly for Goodreads, and award the proper number of stars under that site's grading system.  

However, once in a while I start out doing a short blurb for Goodreads which, once I get going, ends up longer than intended, and I'm tempted to add it here as well, with the warning that I'm not certain of the book's importance or, more important, of its appeal to my readers.

Thus it was with Andrew Smith's weird fantasy, Grasshopper Jungle, whose Goodreads review I posted here after some contemplation in February 2014.  And thus it is with the book I review today, Good Times / Bad Times, published in 1967.

James Kirkwood is known primarily as a playwright, winning a Tony award for the Broadway musical A Chorus Line, and producing a number of other shows.  But he was also an author, perhaps best known for a semi-autobiographical novel, There Must Be a Pony.  I haven't read that novel, but it's received reasonably good reviews on Amazon and Goodreads.  A television series was produced based on the novel, which received uniformly abysmal reviews.

I suspect that the book reviewed here also has its autobiographical aspects, simply because the details of 1960s prep school life are so detailed and abundant.  I gave it only three out of five stars on Goodreads.  I don't enthusiastically recommend it, but it has its strong points if comic-tragic coming of age stories appeal to you, even when they seem a bit far-fetched.  And the subject of a teacher's attempt to abuse a student certainly has some topical interest.  I enjoyed it enough to finish it, and with me I guess that carries a certain cachet.
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Peter Kilburn, sitting in jail awaiting trial for the murder of his headmaster, writes a 309 page (in my paperback edition, written in small font) letter to his attorney explaining what happened.

Peter, son of a Hollywood actor, explains how he showed up as a senior at a small, isolated, New Hampshire prep school with a declining reputation -- "tacky," as he describes it -- and met the surprising disapproval of his headmaster, Mr. Hoyt. Over the first third of the book, he overcomes this initial disapproval by his grades, his ability as a tennis player, and his desperately reluctant but successful participation in an inter-school variety show competition.

But he's a lonely and unhappy kid.

Then Jordan arrives at the school. The friendship between Peter and Jordan is instantaneous and understandable. They are both considerably more intelligent than their classmates, and have similar senses of humor, of irony, and of the absurd.

Their friendship is so close that Mr. Hoyt concludes it's a sexual relationship. Peter assures his attorney (and us) it was not, and to assume he was lying about this fact (as some readers suggest) would destroy the credibility of the entire story. Yes, high school boys are capable of intense but platonic friendships.

It soon becomes clear that Mr. Hoyt's own feelings toward Peter are not platonic, and that his hatred of Jordan is based on vicious jealousy.

Peter tells us at the outset that Jordan has died, which he does -- of a congenital heart condition -- near the end of the book. The last forty pages or so become a horror thriller, with Peter desperately fighting off Mr. Hoyt's advances, and culminating in the headmaster's death.

The most enjoyable portions of the book, by far, are the scenes between the two boys as their friendship deepens -- their humor, their intimacy, their sophisticated (for their age) knowledge of the world, their ridicule of most of the other students and of the somewhat bizarre faculty. The book also presents an interesting picture of prep school life in the late 1960s, at a somewhat inconsequential school.

In my opinion, the book could have been edited much more carefully. Too many of the scenes drag on interminably, without advancing the plot or developing notably the characterization. As examples, Peter agonizes for page after page, repetitively, at being required to deliver Hamlet's soliloquy on stage. Less would have been more. And the two boys get embarrassingly hysterical while watching a rather pathetic Indian pageant put on by some decidedly non-Indian New Hampshire residents. We don't really need to know their reaction to every absurdity as the pageant progresses.

The verbose padding dilutes the impact of many of the scenes. The conclusion, however, was described vividly -- if melodramatically -- and certainly kept me turning the pages.