Synopses & Reviews
Chapter One The Frisco Two-step
The history of dance shows it to be deeply intertwined in mankind's social customs. There is a natural urge to move in rhythm to music, but dancing can also be a powerful and effective method of communication. In worship it can be full of symbolic gesture, and in courtship it offers people the chance to get to know each other.
We have dancing fifth period with Mr. Compton, and all year the bigger kids have been moving me up or back in the line when they see where the girls are situated against the far wall. Ivan Kidder and Tim Torkelson arrange the boys' line so they can dance with Karen Wilkes and Linda Aikens and Josie Herron, the cute girls, girls with boobs. In June, we go to dance for the last time, and I notice that Kidder and Torkelson move other kids, but not me. When they get to me, they move somebody else around me, nodding at me or saying "Hi." Something has happened, and I realize that a signal has been exchanged and I could belong with them. They move my buddy Rafferty, whom they call Four Eyes, but they don't move me. Raff hasn't been wearing his glasses for a month, but you can still see the marks on his nose, and the guys still call him Four Eyes.
I look to the back of the line where, as always, the last guy is Witt Dimmick. The last five guys don't get a girl; they have to sit on the folding chairs by the phonograph. This is exactly Witt's plan. He sits there, arms folded, shirt untucked, the way it has been untucked for the six years he's been my best friend. I can see him eyeing the assemblage with a frown. He thinks of himself as a scientist, an observer, but when I ask him about dance class, he only says, "Human behavior.Man, that is trouble."
We have done some stuff. Witt and Raff and I have gone deep into physics and chemistry and electromagne-tism and gravity and geology and magic and baseball in its thirty versions, and we have come out the other side. We have done all the experiments you can do on train tracks. We have smashed organic and inorganic matter. We have done experiments with the river. We've sawed a baseball exactly in half with a broken crosscut saw. We've burned ourselves and made ourselves sick. I've puked off the walk bridge down by the junior high twice after our experiments. Raff has puked once. We've only done one experiment with a cat. The cat gave Witt the scratch I can still see coming out of his hair and down his forehead now. I've torn up two pairs of Levi's and one school shirt, and melted the bottom of a shoe. We've done a dozen experiments with household chemicals, and Witt gave Rafferty a tattoo of Utah on his chest that is fading real slowly. He also spelled his name in his big dog's hide with Turtle Wax and bleach. It was a little hasty on his part, because everyone who sees the dog calls it Witt, and its real name is Atom. Witt's motto, which I love, is "It's just a world; we can figure it out."
Things are changing. Torkelson and Kidder are about to be thirteen, out of baseball and after girlfriends. Rafferty and I will be playing our last year of Little League. Witt is going to want to do experiments all summer. He says his goal is "to find out everything. I don't want to know just part."
When the boys' line curves forward to meet the girls' line, I find myself with Linda Aikens, one of the cute girls. There must be some mistake, but no one does anythingabout it. Her hair is combed and she wears a straight blue dress. Linda is smiling a little, and Ivan Kidder says to me, "Whoa, Larry, way to go." Something has happened.
Mr. Compton nods at Keith Gurber. Keith sets the hi-fi arm onto the record, and the music starts, an old-time song called "The Frisco Two-Step," and Linda and I commence dancing. Witt has his arms folded and watches me with massive disdain. "What are you doing this summer?" Linda asks me. We've been instructed in the elements of dancing, and after you get three steps into the music, you can initiate conversation. My right hand is on the small of her back in the proper position, and my left hand holds hers out and away to steer us.
It is the boy's responsibility to initiate conversation, but she has jumped the gun. "Play baseball," I tell her. Though I would like to tell her about some of the stuff we've done, the geothermal pit or the crossbow, I know I couldn't make it understandable without confessing that I puked or got caught or got hurt. I wouldn't mind showing her the scabs on my knees; they make it look like I've been somewhere.
"Are you going over to the tennis courts at all?"
There are a couple of seconds between everything we say because I'm trying to keep the two-step beat and steer us clear of twenty other couples. If you lag, Mr. Compton calls your name and begins to clap the rhythm so you can stop "dragging your backsides." If you don't initiate conversation, he yells, "Why aren't you two having a conversation? Have you fallen in love?" Mr. Compton is ominous and riveting in the way of some adults; his long face never moves while he talks. His lips ripple in jolts, as if he is being run bysomeone standing nearby with a controller.
"I'll be in the park a lot," I tell her.
Synopsis
It's a long summer of change, and three boys approach the inevitable start of adolescence from different vantage points, in this young adult debut by the acclaimed author of The Hotel Eden, At the Jim Bridger, and other fiction for adults. Praised by authors as diverse as Stephen King and Amy Bloom, Ron Carlson has a keen eye for language, for the subtle dynamics of friendship and growing up. While the characters in this book face complicated, difficult home lives, this is definitely not a standard problem novel; complicated issues are woven deftly into the fabric of an absorbing summer read.
Synopsis
Summer
Baseball
Car Baseball
Sock Ball
Wall Ball
The Time Tower: can you get older faster?
The speed of light: can it be measured?
A carp, washed up in the riberbank: what's inside?
Larry, Witt, and Rafferty have a whole summer to play all the different kinds of baseball, to build structures in the backyard, to find out what makes the world tick. "We've got to keep busy," says Witt. I want to know everything. Not just part."
Larry doesn't want to know what keeps him heading for Witt's backyard, rich with weeds and rotting appliances, whenever he's not at baseball practice. All he knows is that there's no one he'd rather be with than these two friends, that the chaos of Witt's universe offers refuge from his own orderly home and an entrance into a world of change, growth, and unpredictability. THE HOTEL EDEN author Ron Carlson's first novel for young readers is a heady immersion in the first moments of adolescence, when nothing is as it ever was before.
About the Author
Ron Carlson grew up in Salt Lake City. He is the author of seven books of fiction, most recently
At the Jim Bridger and
The Hotel Eden, a
New York Times Notable Book and
Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. He is a professor of English at Arizona State University. He plays infield, mainly second base, and bats right and throws right.