Wednesday, August 5, 2020

The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place by E. L. Konigsburg

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

We have previously enjoyed a couple of E. L. Konigsburg audiobooks. While the kids don’t adore them quite the way they do Terry Pratchett and Richard Peck, we have enjoyed them. I am kind of surprised that I hadn’t read any of her books as a kid. It is a weird gap. Anyway, I previously blogged about From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler and The View From Saturday, both of which are Newbery Award winners. 

 

The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place is one of her more modern books, published in 2004. Like her other books, it contains quirky characters, emotional complexity, and intergenerational relationships. This book also takes a look at gentrification, cliques, and the obsession middle-class white Americans have with “property values.” 

Reading Konigsburg has been a bit of an interesting experience. She really is unlike any author I can think of. The closest might be Richard Peck, but he tends to write from a more rural and midwestern point of view, while Konigsburg is definitely more urban and multicultural. I suspect this comes down to experience. Peck grew up in Illinois, while Konigsburg grew up in New York City. 

The other thing that I find fascinating about Konigsburg’s writing is this: she is of my grandparents’ generation, which shows in a few places, but she is always progressive in outlook, firmly on the side of diversity and multiculturalism, and willing to openly advocate for characters that are often ignored or pushed to the margins. 

Let me give an example of that. In this book, there is an obviously gay character. The narrator, who is age 12, doesn’t come out and say it, but there are some clear cultural signals. The signals are definitely of an era, so to speak - I think they work well in the era the book is set, the 1980s. So, Peter Vanderwaal is the director of an art center, wears flamboyant clothes, has an earring in his left ear, and complains that his mother keeps nagging him to marry and have kids. I’m a child of the 80s, and yeah, this resonates. I suspect my kids got the reference, but don’t think of “gay” quite in the same terms. It’s a generational thing. So, bonus points to Konigsburg for sounding like a Boomer - that’s ahead of her generation - and of course for creating a gay character who is a key part of the story and also just another person, not a stock “token gay friend.” And, to be clear, while the portrayal is perhaps dated a bit, it isn’t dated in the sense of bigoted - rather the contrary. 

So, about the plot. Margaret Rose Kane is the protagonist, and a thoroughly ornery one. Her parents have left for the summer to go on an expedition in Peru. She is pissed because they have always taken her along before. As it turns out, they are trying (unsuccessfully) to save their marriage. With Margaret needing something to do, they let her pick a summer camp. This does not turn out well. Camp Talequa turns out to be run by the authoritarian Mrs. Kaplan, who doesn’t appreciate Margaret’s free spirit. The bigger problem, however, is that Margaret is placed in a cabin with six girls who have been to camp for years, and are their own clique. They bully and prank Margaret, and Mrs. Kaplan fails to grasp that this is happening. Margaret refuses to participate further, saying “I prefer not to,” which eventually leads to her uncle Alex picking her up. 

Margaret then spends the rest of the summer with her uncles, Alex and Morris Rose, a delightfully eccentric “odd couple.” They immigrated from Hungary around the 1930s along with Margaret’s late grandmother (and namesake), and have worked as clock and watch repairmen until business dried up - by the time we meet them, they are reduced to selling watches at a mall kiosk. 

The uncles are devoted to Margaret, and also to their art: they have constructed three towers of scrap metal, glass, ceramics, and old clock tower parts on their property. The neighborhood they live in was once a factory town for a glass factory, then a declining neighborhood with an immigrant population, and finally a gentrifying historical district. Through it all, the Roses have lived there. 

The new residents and business owners, however, do not like the towers, and convince the city to condemn them. Margaret decides to try to save them, enlisting the help of her mother’s childhood friends Peter (see above) and Loretta Bevilaqua, now an executive at a telephone company. She also makes friends with Jake Kaplan, Mrs. Kaplan’s son who works as a handyman at the camp while creating art when he has time. 

By the time all is said and done, there is civil disobedience, mild blackmail, and general shenanigans. 

In my opinion, the best part of the book is the characterizations. The two Rose brothers are delightful, and so well drawn. Konigsburg grew up in that world, as the daughter of Jewish immigrants - I wonder if Alex and Morris are drawn from her own uncles. Jake is also an intriguing character. He plays the “camp idiot” so that he doesn’t get hit on by the campers, but is far smarter than he looks - something Uncle Alex figures out right away. As I mentioned above, Peter is a nuanced character as well. As is usual for Konigsburg, the characters are both human and eccentric - perhaps like the author. 

I don’t have the chance to take notes when we travel, but I did make a mental note of one line early on, describing Mrs. Kaplan: “She mistook her rules for principles.” And boy, that is not only a great description of cult leader Bill Gothard, it has been my experience with Evangelicalism and my extended family too. The rules come from a person’s personal preferences - usually their cultural preferences - but are then baptized and made into “god says this and you had better obey” principles. As a divergent thinker like Margaret, this didn’t go well for me, so to speak. I never could buy into the rules. 

One slightly sour note for me personally is the portrayal of lawyers. But I really shouldn’t complain, because I know plenty of lawyers who are exactly like the heartless and greedy gentrifiers who cause the trouble. I must also confess that I enjoyed the way things ended up - with the lawyers voluntarily moving to the new development that surrounds the towers (which have been moved and repurposed as bases for those newfangled cellular phone towers.) We lawyers are not all that way, by any stretch, but there is a…type.

Speaking of that, I think Konigsburg does a good job of addressing the problem of gentrification, from the displacement of longtime residents to the obsession with maximizing property values at the expense of human thriving. (It’s a pet peeve of mine - I refuse to live in a planned community for that reason. Give me a neighborhood where you can wrench on your truck in the driveway, and let your yard get a little wooly.) There is a certain soullessness that plagues middle class white America, where money is everything, and “other people” don’t really matter. And that’s how you get “Disneyfied” downtowns and redevelopment projects designed by white suburbanites that aren’t that different from suburban strip malls - just with more brick. 

As with all of the books we have experienced, Konigsburg writes with empathy, and always sides with the outcasts, the quirky and eccentric, and gives her young characters tremendous respect and the space to experience difficult and complex emotions. 

The audiobook was narrated by Molly Ringwald, who was fine, but not transcendent. We probably got spoiled by Jonathan Cecil and Bahni Turpin

 

 

 

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