Displaced: Crazy School by Cornelia Read

This is the second time I've read this book in a year. One of our blog members is big on this book, having recommended it to me twice -- when I was recuperating last year as an "easy read," and then again for our Massachusetts selection. I don't like it any better this time than I did last winter.

I've been reading the Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch and thought I could use it as an instrument to fillet Crazy School, evidencing that Madeline Dare, Read's alter ego (check the anagram last name), is narcissistic and that Read herself writes only to be adulated. But the book is a novel, not an autobiography ... as if you can't do web research to find the commonality between author and character. Read likes to be "rough," to swear and smoke and rage with the best of them, all the while trying her darnedest to turn the phrase "just so" to seem with it and witty. Sounds too contrived and effected to me.

Madeline is a theatrical teacher who can regale her naive students with tales of hippies, hitch hikers, and felons on the run, who all visit her parents house where drugs, manufactured and herbal, are there for the asking, as are the joys to be garnered from the latest Californian self-realization craze.

Read makes the point that the teachers are equally if not more disturbed than the kids: addicts themselves with shady, criminal pasts. The owner of the school is portrayed as being completely theatrical and foppish, self-centered, money grubbing, you name it. So I guess her point is we're all crazy. Let's love it, hug our best friend, and move on.

The book is set in western Massachusetts where the school for terribly troubled children is located, evoking the real life Berkshire School. But Madeline comes from Long Island blue blood diluted by too much acid, etc, from California dreamin'. The school could be in Oregon for all it matters to the author, given her need to bask in her psychedelic, "we have money" upbringing. (OK, Read does have throw away references to the Stockbridge police and Arlo.)

I find the book not especially contributing to our search for the meaning and relevance of location and the story lacking a reflective history and hopeful future. Only at the very end of the book is one character's motivation for working at the school fully articulated by what had happened previously to him and his family. None of the "crazy" kids are explored in terms of the causes of their acting out or on how the school or Madeline, as it's most dedicated teacher, intends to get them ready for their future lives. Hence, the author dismisses them be having them die, get transferred to another institution, or runaway, without so much as a picture on a milk box.

The more I thought about it, there is a strong theme of displacement throughout the story: the teachers have been recruited from far and wide and the teenagers come from other special schools across the nation. Parents, some at least, fly in for visiting day and then jet off to vacation meccas. No one has local roots. The "community" that is forced onto the students discourages bonding and fellowship. All conversations are games people play, laced with venom or therapeutic echoes. So maybe there is something for the Slackers to garner from Crazy School: potential is not fully realized and relationships found lacking when people are compelled to be where they don't want to be, doing futile work for others with whom they choose not to meaningfully engage.