I don't imagine I'll post too many book reviews, but I just finished reading this novel and wanted to get my thoughts about it down since it whacked my gong with a heavy hammer.
“The Kingdom of Childhood” is brutal and real. A number
of times on my trip through the book I had to take a breather and emotionally
withdraw from the characters, because with a plotline like this, you know it’s
not going to end well—and the more you care, the more it will hurt. The story
is simple: 40-something lonely kindergarten teacher (Judy) seduces, or is seduced by,
16-year-old good-looking, likable high school kid (Zach) who happens to be friends with
her son; all of this takes place at a K-12 Waldorf school. Then it all goes inevitably
wrong, because it’s literary fiction; if it doesn’t, it’s soft-core MILF porn.
So why get
invested in a dark and doomed storyline, in characters who are playing out
their mistakes to the hilt like a train wreck in slow-mo? The answer is in the
writing. This book is masterfully created, from the plot itself down the
nitty-gritty of the individual sentences. I never stumbled once on an awkward
bit of dialogue, or on a character description that I couldn’t envision. No
overuse of adverbs, no stumbling passive tense. The subtleties sucked me in
just as much as the overall story arc. There’s a particularly heartbreaking
scene that sums up a lot: Zach, while trying to hide his crumbling mental state, eats
a cookie at a school fundraising carnival. The cookie turns out to have been made
by Judy. Not long after he eats it, he leaves the carnival and throws up in the
parking lot behind the dumpster. Judy finds him, apologizes for upsetting him, and gives him a blow
job he can’t bring himself to turn down. Who’s to blame here?
The cookie
is, of course, a metaphor, as is the kids’ playhouse Zach builds to be raffled
off at the school Christmas bazaar: inside it is where the first intimate scene
between Zach and Judy takes place. The Kingdom of Childhood,
desecrated by lust and mistakes.
Judy makes
an error in judgment that most of us are guilty of: She mistakes a thing she
wants for a thing she needs. But she carries it too far when she victimizes a
person hovering at the line between childhood and young adulthood; she
yanks him, half-willing, into the deep end before he quite knows how to swim,
and he’s forced to either learn to keep his head above water at the expense of
his self-respect, or to sink. She tells him time and again, as abusers do, that
the ball is in his court, that he calls the shots. He believes her because he
isn’t experienced enough to determine where he’s culpable and where he isn’t,
and because he can’t stop himself from taking what she offers—he’s sixteen and
flooded with hormones, Judy is there, he can’t turn it down even though he
knows how wrong it is and that she doesn’t care about him, only about what he
can give her/what she can take from him.
I didn’t
care much about Judy. I couldn’t sympathize with her, even after seeing her
suffer as a child and knowing what her current life is like: cold husband,
distant children, recently dead best friend. Her life is full of holes she can’t
plug up. I get that. Zach’s crisis is the one that made the story worth reading.
The tug and pull between his developing moral compass and his willingness to do
things he hates himself for is the stuff of a good bildungsroman. Where will he
end up? You hope for him. You fear for him. You kinda wanna kill Judy.
From Judy:
I should have
affirmed that it was [a no]. I knew the full litany of what he did not want to
do, and this was where it began. If there had remained any possibility that
life could throw a cup of cold water in my face and reverse the course of
things, it would have been that moment, that question.
Instead, I
climbed into the back of the car [with Zach].
And it was
at that moment that I stopped being a woman who had made a series of
exceedingly bad judgment calls, and became a child molester.
Later, from
Zach:
“My problem
is I don’t know how to get myself to stop.” He laughed humorlessly. “I don’t
know how to make myself stop wanting to be raped.”
To string
up tension like that and run a bow of words over it and make beautiful music
that breaks your heart is the work of a gifted artist.
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