In a World of His Own

By David Levithan,
whose most recent novel is "Wide Awake"
Thursday, December 14, 2006

A SEPARATE REALITY

By Robert Marshall

Carroll & Graf. 429 pp. $14.95

Mark Grosfeld, the hero of Robert Marshall's "A Separate Reality," is not like other boys. As a 12-year-old during the election year of 1972, he reads Carlos Castaneda, not J.D. Salinger.

In fact, he brings "The Catcher in the Rye" with him to summer camp only because he's afraid "the other books might look too weird."

He tries to read it on the plane but is paralyzed by what Holden Caulfield might think of him. This makes sense; instead of the rueful, deeply pained nature of the usual Caulfield-clone narrator, Mark's view of the world is impressionistic and spiritual.

Marshall can be a remarkably vivid writer. Mark listens to "Fire and Rain" and observes, "It was comforting to know James Taylor, too, was lonely."

When his mother lumps him in with his father and brother as "you boys," he observes, "The words stung. Boys: a chalk mark across the family, assigning me to Dad and Jason, keeping me from her and Sharon. We worked in the backyard; they did laundry."

He also has a keen sense of the natural world. Through his eyes, cactus flowers along a walkway bloom "a cartoon orange," and the fruit on a tree in a dream has a "sharp juice."

There are many moments, however, when Mark's words seem more like part of a collection rather than a recollection. Transitions disappear, and generalizations are dropped in without any effective grounding:

"When I was little, Nanna had worried about my bowel movements. I'd been unsure what the movements were that she asked about; Mom called it taking a poo. Eventually I'd understood that she was just using the old-fashioned term. She was concerned about my bowel movements, the peace movement, whether my mother was giving me enough to eat (I looked so thin), and about my ideas on religion, poetry, and the problems of the world. Once she'd asked what I thought the biggest one was; I'd told her I was worried about the water shortage, and she assured me the scientists were making progress cleaning up the oceans. I had not been worried about pollution. I was worried that if people kept using water the world would eventually run out. Planets died of thirst on Lost in Space. People misunderstood each other all the time."

Since Mark lives almost entirely in his head, readers must live there, too. Ultimately, the book hinges on our reaction to his voice. When Mark acts somewhere near his age, Marshall has a wonderful way of getting at truths. Take this pitch-perfect scene with his father, which is as good an encapsulation of adolescence as you're likely to read:

"The next day I told Dad I was sorry.

" 'I accept your apology, Mark.'

"But the next night he asked why I was looking like such a martyr.

" 'Because you're being such a fascist.'

"I was sent to my room."

It's funny when Mark measures the success of his own epic poem by whether it has grown longer than "The Waste Land." And it's insightful when he observes that "saying what you mean is an immense task -- you're honest and then no one understands." But it would be more believable if he were in high school. (We are told often that Mark is old for his age. Some readers will buy it; some won't.)

The plot is greatly subdued. The greatest conflict in the first half of the book revolves around Mark's desire to get out of going to camp. In the second half, two promising narrative strands emerge: In school, Mark is befriended by Bruce, a boy whose friendship he's not entirely sure he wants; at home, Mark's father, an activist lawyer, runs for Congress.

Both the friendship and the campaign are handled well, but they are often just buoys floating above the deeper currents of family longing and overly observant reminiscence that fuel the book.

An awkward scene at the beginning of the book tells us that Mark grows up to be a gay man in New York, a revelation that gives away the ending before the story really begins. Perhaps it would have been better to leave Mark on the cusp of understanding. His awakening, while weighted with the concerns of his time, still has resonance more than three decades later:

"Sometimes when I was listening to a song on an album I knew well, I could already hear the next song before it began to play. I had the same sense at school one day walking toward the library: I knew I would see Bruce. Then there he was, sitting under the mulberry. My intuition is becoming more powerful, I thought. It is as if I can somehow look around a corner before I come to it, seeing, just inches, into the future."