Jo Ann Beard’s In Zanesville is the opposite to last year’s Cheri, which was my book of the year. Where that slim novella explored a woman facing the end of her life thanks to a breast cancer diagnosis, In Zanesville focuses on two fourteen-year-old girls teetering on that knife-edge between childhood and adult life.
It’s the 1970s in Zanesville, Illinois – ‘the farm implement capital of the world’ – and the novel’s unnamed 14-year-old narrator is returning to high school after a summer spent daily with her best friend, Felicia, whom she calls Flea. Together they cope with the usual teenage issues: babysitting unruly kids, periods, navigating crushes on unsuitable boys and wondering whether being a member of the school marching band is killing their reputation (they decide that it is and in a memorable passage quit the band mid-March!)
Our narrator is, but her own admission, weird and bookish. She has never kissed a boy and both wants to and doesn’t want to, knowing that there is a world beyond that first kiss within which she will be irrevocably changed.
What if he just spontaneously started talking to me and I just started talking back? What if I talked to him first and he started talking back? What if her said something to me and I went completely dormant and didn’t say anything back? What if I said something to him and he didn’t say anything back?
Her friendship with Flea is tested when they are accidentally and unexpectedly invited to a slumber party hosted by one of the school cheerleaders. When Flea abandons the narrator, leaving her alone while she makes out with a boy, it seems like their relationship may not survive.
In terms of plot, In Zanesville is standard young adult fiction, but where it goes beyond that genre is in how Beard explores ideas of consequence and how the girls are learning about their world through the actions of the adults around them. The underlying tension of adult life is beginning to encroach on the girls and Beard translates this into a sense of unnameable tension which permeates the narrative.
The novel opens as the girls are babysitting an unruly family of feral children, one of whom starts a fire in a bathroom waste basket. The ensuing chaos is handled with a wry humour, but the consequence of that fire, where the culprit has his had held on to the stove by his unforgiving father, sets the tone for the rest of the book. Beard explores girlhood as it is; complicated and confusing, exhilarating yet often sinister.
The narrator’s father is a door-to-door salesman who starts his day drinking bear at 10am and who, by dinner, is incoherent. Her mother is frazzled, beset by money worries which are impacting the family. In a painful scene, the narrator realises that her father’s shotgun has gone from its usual spot and spies shell cases on the floor of the basement, leading her to wrongly believe that her father may have killed himself. This conflicting concern for her father colours her life in ways she can’t yet understand.
Beard is also gifted at dialogue and inner monologue and manages to capture what it is like at that age without ridiculing the kids. Even her cheerleaders have issues that she subtly introduces, a reminder that adolescence is hard no matter what your social status.
Balancing on this threshold of adulthood, Beard presents her protagonist as one who knows that life is changing and that some things will never be the same again. She captures the want that exists in the teenage years, but also the knowledge that once that want is sated, there is no way of going back to how things were before.
Stuck in the mirror are mementoes from my childhood…which is over now. I wandered through it and came out the other side. It’s a stark feeling. Like getting to the last page of a book and seeing ‘The End’. Even if you didn’t like the story that much, or your childhood, you read it, you lived it.
Beard is a gifted lyricist and captures the boredom of youth without being boring. She seizes on those ephemeral moments that pass, often without incident, but later become the building blocks of adult life. The plot is slow, grounded in realism and more interested in interactions than events. She perfectly recreates the vulnerability of those early teenage years with a light hand and a great sense of time and place.
What she also preserves is the magic of that liminal time, of the possibility and hope that is contained in every decision and every milestone and the sheer strength of emotion that being a teenager entails.
Read on: Book
Number Read: 469
Number Remaining: 277
20 Books of Summer: 8/20
