"The Holdovers" and my own upcoming boarding school novel
When a new emphasis on rigor opened elite doors to the unwashed strivers among us.
Aristocracy looks better the farther away from it we get.
Finally watched The Holdovers, set in a New England boys' boarding school in 1970. Directed by Alexander Payne, written by David Hemingson, the film was not, to my surprise, based on a novel, despite being much more coherent and original than your typical movie fare.
My first novel, Pontiac, (very coherent and original, of course), due out in September, also is a New England boys' boarding school tale.
Mine is set 10 years earlier than Holdovers, 1960, but I was tickled to see some identical scenes -- Brattle Book Store in Boston, for example, with the big pencil sign and the eccentric outdoor bookshelves in winter.
My story, surprise surprise, is a bit rougher around the edges, less sweet than Holdovers. Watching the movie, which I think is pretty accurate historically, I also was struck by what a difference that decade made.
Boys smoking cigarettes semi-openly, trading weed in the dorm in 1970-- very different from '60. In '60, guys got kicked out for cigarettes, and if a boy had been caught with weed and the school had been able to figure out what it was, the school would have called the FBI.
Depending on who he was.
In the historical period of Holdovers, there still were no girls. Co-ed happened in the ensuing decade. Actor Dominic Sessa does a brilliant job conveying flustered preppie awkwardness and hunger in the presence of the opposite sex.
I think my own novel is perfectly and totally unmovieable. In fact it was unpublishable until the brilliant and debonair Will Evans of Deep Vellum Publishing picked it up.
Will hired book editor Michael Jauchen to get me and the book into shape. He did a great job with the book. Me, I don't know. I feel kind of unimproved.
My story is set in the afternath of Sputnik, when a national call for academic rigor sparked a radical stiffening of admissions requirements at the Ivies, with downward pressure on the boarding schools to admit more scholarship boys.
Lost to history, I think, is that this first step toward what would now be called diversity had nothing to do with social equity. The aim was to salt the mix of smug Bar Harbor rummies with some smart, envious, insecure, ambitious middle and working class kids who might show up later in Cambridge and New Haven and do some damn work.
Also forgotten? That academic rigor, SAT scores, grinding and sweaty insecure competition were the beginning of the end for unquestioned WASP privilege and the opening of the door for equity.
The publishing process at Deep Vellum so far has been meticulous and professional beyond anything I ever experienced with New York publishers. And Mike Jauchen is a latter-day Maxwell Perkins.
My novel? Yeah, well I guess we'll see, won't we? I feel like I'm 593 months pregnant .
Shootsy: This explains a lot. How much of the book was written in the cabin with Ted Kaczynski?
Huh, sounds interesting. I hadn't read a true coming-of-age novel in ages, but recently powered through Jason Kirk's outstanding work Hell Is A World Without You in order to be conversant with friends, and it knocked my socks off. Look forward to yours, too.
Dallas folks: SMU is running Nilaja Sun's tremendous play No Child... about the NYC public school system this week. Should be terrific.