you, sir, are no Edith Wharton

Eliot Schrefer’s debut novel, Glamorous Disasters, follows the social climb and fall–okay, stumble–of Noah, an SAT tutor hired by various prestigious and wealthy New York City families to insure their children’s success in life–or to help them beat the SAT. Whatever. The novel centers around Noah’s work with the “troubled” (read: spoiled and neglected) Thayer children, Dylan and Tuscany, who are both one party away from complete disaster. Thus the title, I suppose.

Schrefer’s novel has been compared to both Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth and Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus’ The Nanny Diaries; neither comparison works for me. The Nanny Diaries relies heavily on the near-anonymity of the protagonist; we know just enough about Nanny Drew to sympathize with her as she struggles to do her job under increasingly bad and bizarre conditions. Her ethical struggle is clear: leaving her job means leaving her four-year-old charge with no one to love him, which is unconscionable. Schrefer tries to recreate this same type of relationship between Noah and his students, but it is difficult to believe that two hours a week of tutoring could result in the same bond (particularly since Dylan spends his entire tutoring sessions IMing and text messaging his friends). Additionally, Schrefer allows us to see Noah thinking about his sexual attraction to fifteen-year-old Tuscany, which frankly just made me like him even less. We are told, over and over, that Noah feels torn between his small-town Virginia roots and the Upper East side word that his Princeton alum friends inhabit, but this tension seems more like a staple of the genre rather than a true character trait.

But if Noah is no Nanny Drew he is even less Wharton’s Lilly Bart. Schrefer wants us to feel that Noah’s dilemmas are not of his own making, that he is overpowered by the world of his wealthy students and their immoral parents, but at every turn we see Noah making bad choices and then flinching when the consequences come around. He is sitting on a dark secret, about a former student and the lengths to which he was willing to go in his devotion for her, and this comes back to haunt him–but frankly it’s his own fault. And, of course, unlike Lilly Bart, who was constrained–and, ultimately, destroyed–by her gender and the rules of society, Noah has other options for repayment of his massive student loans. He could get a real job, for example. Or he could just stop getting over-involved in his students’ lives and tutor them, rather than trying to save them. Either way, this is a disaster of his own making.

In large part, this novel fails because the characters are both entirely one-dimensional and entirely unsympathetic. Noah’s students are alternately pampered and ignored by both their parents and their tutor, but unlike The Nanny Diaries‘ Greyer X, we just don’t give a damn about them. The Thayer kids, with their drugs and parties and lackadaisical attitude toward anything of relevance in the world, are clearly past redemption, or they are on their own, self-determined road to redemption–there is nothing that Noah can do that will change that, and all his whining about needing to help them is just that: whiny. Little Greyer, on the other hand, is a child, and we are drawn in by the hope that maybe Nanny can compensate for his parents neglect and stupidity adn stop him from growing up to be, for example, Dylan Thayer. While The Nanny Diaries tugs at our heartstrings, Glamorous Disasters only irritates; in the end, small children are sympathetic while slutty, druggie teenagers just aren’t.

Finally, Glamorous Disasters has the dubious distinction of including–on page six–what is arguably the worst line ever written: “His hair looks like he has just taken a nap, or been licked by a goat.” I don’t have any idea what that image–of Dylan Thayer looking like he has been accosted by a farm animal–has to do with anything else in this novel. Unfortunately, Schrefer often tries to make up for any sense of depth in his narrative with turns of phrase like this one. In the end, the only disaster in this novel was the novel itself.

superheros redeemed

For the past, oh, probably two years, Henry has been fascinated by superheros. And by “fascinated” I mean “obsessed.” My house is strewn with superhero action figures, our playdates consist of pretending to be various members of the League of Justice, and dinner conversation revolves around which hero has what power and how he might use it. Charlie likes to mix it up by announcing that he prefers the bad guys, and frankly I’m starting to sympathize with him. Those superheros are driving me berserk.

Fortunately, Wade is always on the lookout for ways to redeem himself (he’s the one who started the whole damn superhero thing) and a week or so ago, he came across The Extraordinary Adventures of Ordinary Boy, Book 1: The Hero Revealed, by William Boniface. It’s the story of Ordinary Boy, a ten-year-old resident of Superopolis, “Where everyone is exceptional! (And we mean that in a good way).” All the residents of Superopolis are superheros, except Ordinary Boy, who is, as his name implies, ordinary: “everyone here, except for me, has a superpower. The thing is, though, they only have one power. You won’t find some guy who can fly and has X-ray vision and is strong enough to lift a truck. It just doesn’t work that way. Sadly, just as with looks, talent, and brains, the powers that people end up with are hardly equal.” Like all boys his age, Ordinary Boy is searching for something to set him apart from all the other kids in his grade. Unfortunately, when your friends have super strength and the ability to change into bubbling ectoplasm, this is quite a challenge.

This is an incredibly smart and funny book. Boniface deploys all the conventions of the superhero narrative–the evil villain who consistently fails to exploit the hero’s weakness, for example–in a way that is accessible to young readers. He also mocks those conventions, but with great kindness. Ordinary Boy carries his L’il Heroes Handbook with him at all times; it not only tells him the names and powers of all of Superopolis’s residents, but provides the addresses of the secret hideouts of all the city’s super villains.

That information comes in handy when Ordinary Boy and his friends set out to solve a mystery: why is it so hard to get all 64 of the Amazing Indestructo collector cards? Of course, in their search for the missing card, Ordinary Boy and his friends uncover a great and sinister plot to . . . well, you’ll have to read the book. But I will say this: the story is predictable enough to be fun for young readers but clever enough to be engaging for their parents. A good deal all around.

Boniface does a good job of skewering the conventions of the superhero narrative, but he also mocks the conventions of marketing, particularly marketing directed at children. When Superopolis’s greatest superhero, the Amazing Indestructo, recommends McCavity’s Ultra-Paste, Ordinary Boy says, “I never used to like their toothpaste because it sticks to your teeth and sort of tastes like mushrooms, but if AI recommended it, I would have to give it another try.” I found this part of the story absolutely hysterical, because we have the ENTIRE line of tie-in Batman toys for a television series my children don’t even watch. And I hate those poorly made pieces of junk with a passion.

I can’t say enough good things about this novel; it is well written and funny and smart. Ordinary Boy, of course, turns out to have powers his friends don’t, like good critical thinking skills, and despite his lack of conventional superpowers, only he can outsmart the villain. Unlike the other superhero books my kids tend to pick up–all of which are movie or TV tie-ins–this one has a good message and enjoyable prose. Honestly, I will be sad when we’re done reading it.

I’m already waiting for the sequal.