三人行，必有我师(焉)

A recent book review by rachelmanija reminded me of a forgotten, and now unmourned, novel I wrote somewhere between tenth and eleventh grade, about a high school that barricades itself in a "revolution" for a time. This wasthe mid-sixties, when student unrest was a news item. The escalation of the Vietnam war--the concomitant intensification of what we called the military-industrial complex--'Don't trust anyone over thirty'--no jobs for women except service (secretary, nurse, grade school teacher), and those underpaid--and meanwhile, the ferocious overcrowding caused by the world trying to squish the baby boomers into existing spaces while conveying, repeatedly, the message 'There are too many of you, you don't matter, you'll never have meaningful jobs'--you have the atmosphere.

But this high school revolution was really about the hypocrisy of teenagers using the news as theit excuse in their hierarchical battles with each other. What I was going for, in my clueless sixteen-year-old brain, was the lethal artificiality of being locked up with a few thousand of your age mates, which prepared you for. . . . what? In the workplace (or marriage, supposedly the destination for women) you weren't having to negotiate crowd of age mates suffering from the same hormonal chaos as you were.

But what came out was teenage boy violence for the sake of violence--something I knew firsthand--and the more insidious violence of mean girl crowds. My small friendship circle and I, experts at drifting into the woodwork to avoid attention, divided our gender into two groups, the indes and the pakkies. Indes--inde, for independent--were frequently the targets of the pakkies, the ones who roamed in packs, looking exactly alike in their teased behives, layers of Twiggy eye make-up, short skirts and t-strap shoes. They took over the bathrooms at every break and lunch, filling the air with hairspray and cigarette smoke, and the meanest would target any loner who dared to go in to try to pee. So you got used to holding it all day.

The novel had plenty of action, but central were the heroic indes, who of course knew how to survive, and when they didn't know what to do, they went to their retreat, the library. It all came to a satisfactory close, but I knew at the time that therre was something crucial missing, so I never typed it up and inflicted it on a New York publisher after scraping together postage from babysitting, the way I'd been doing with various other projects.

I finally gave it to a friend to rewrite, which was kinda cool, seeing what someone else would do with your story, but unsurprisingly the friend just doubled down on how great the indes were, and how stupid the rest of the kids. And so it finally went into a box, with varous other things piled on top over the years.

In culling all that old stuff, I rediscovered it. Glancing through, I wondered if there was any hope of resurrecting it as a period piece, but five minutes'perusal made it plain that it'd have to be completely gutted: the non-indes were all one type, even though on a personal level I knew better. The indes had no arc whatsoever, except in the wish fulfillment sense--they were the despised cool ones at the outset, then the heroes at the end, but Revenge of the Nerds did it better twenty years later (making me wonder if the originator of the idea was a peer). The story's potential interest would have to focus in on the pakkies, who would have to confront the very conformity they were trying to enforce. There was a possible story worth telling.

So out it went to the recycle bin. But it was fun to look back and remember the fierce pleasure I got in writing it and reinforcing the conviction that geeks are cool.

I don't know how many times I've read this, but as my book group is meeting Saturday, I dug it back out of the box and have been rereading it. The influence on Jane Austen is clearer with each reread. Astonishing that it was considered so genteel at the time, with all the thoughtless animal cruelty as well as abuse of the characters set up as comic villains.

The hero and heroine are dull as ditchwater, of course; she is unswerving in her maidenly modesty (and beauty) and purity, and he remains at a distance, regarded by all as a cynosure, and ever ready to rescue her though they scarcely have an actual conversation. But there's too much delicacy to actually get to know one another as people; she has to know that he's a gentleman, and he has to know her virtue before the wedding bells can ring.

The fun is in the secondary characters in all their vulgarity, and in the minute descriptions of life in London in the 1770s.

I'm halfway through, maybe more to come.