Two Across
Let me start by saying that I’m a sucker for misfits-falling-in-love stories. Give me awkward anytime. I also appreciate a) books that feature intelligent, interesting characters, b) settings in mid-20th Century America, and c) story arcs that span a decade or longer.
As such, I’m the built-in audience for Jeff Bartsch’s “Two Across”. It is the story of two brainy, awkward teens who first meet at the finals of the 1960 National Spelling Bee (they tie). They look forward to annually renewing their friendship because their lofty IQs and constrained family lives mean they have few peers with whom they can relate. But three years after that fateful meeting, their relationship takes a 90 degree turn: Stanley Owens, now 18 and desperate to escape the check-the-boxes life his mother has laid out for him, impetuously proposes a sham marriage to his spelling bee co-champion Vera Baxter. The purpose for the marriage: to collect money (and presents that can be turned into money) that will allow him the breathing room to create his own life as a creator of crossword puzzles.
Vera goes along with the idea. Her own life is one of accompanying her thrifty, career-driven mother to an endless string of cheap motels while Mom tries to break into mainframe computer sales. Vera’s traveling companions are books and math journals (she’s a math prodigy as well as a memorizer of arcane words). Stanley’s offer provides the first opportunity for rebellion in her young life. Emotionally immature, they cannot foresee the consequences of what they are about to do.
Their con – a sham wedding attended by Washington DC’s elite – goes exactly as planned. But the event is also the dead weight that will leave both of their lives in shambles, and not just because the ceremony meant far more to Vera than it did to the desperate Stanley. Soon they are ensconced in Cambridge – she in a dorm at Radcliffe, he in an off-campus garret – Stanley supporting himself writing term papers for dissipated Harvard ‘legacy’ enrollees while creating crossword puzzles. When one of Stanley’s clients attempts to paw Vera, Stanley gets even with the student in a way that has disastrous consequences for everyone involved. It is just the first of those aftermaths that will reverberate across a decade’s worth of missed and shattered opportunities.
Through it all, Vera is the one trying to hold her life together. It will take four colleges to earn her math PhD with Stanley’s impetuousness or emotional catatonia too often causing grief and/or heartache. (To be fair, there is also a hilarious though cringe-inducing interlude when the pair are induced to appear on a “Newlywed Game”-type program.)
But if they are star-crossed lovers, they are also one another’s intellectual equals with a magnetic attraction that will cause them to inevitably seek out one another using crossword puzzles planted in newspapers around the country.
There are many reasons to read this book, and learning how crossword puzzles are constructed is one of them. The historical research is excellent, though I doubt crossword puzzles appeared in the Wall Street Journal in the 1960s. Bartsch recreates a shabbier version of Boston and environs that rings true. Most important to readers, in the end both characters achieve that emotional maturity they so sadly lacked earlier.
My quibbles are just that – quibbles. The money from the faux wedding seems to have had no impact on Stanley’s quest for independence given his Spartan lifestyle, and the fate of a larger gift is vague. A wealthy Newport family that plays a role in their lives appears to have been cut from cardboard. And Bartsch reels off an unnecessarily precocious narrative vocabulary that fairly shouts ‘writer’s workshop’.
This is a fine and satisfying book. Stanley and Vera are appealing characters who come to life on the page. “Two Across” is the kind of book you purchase in hardcover and keep in your personal library, because it’s the kind of story that you’ll want to come back to.
As such, I’m the built-in audience for Jeff Bartsch’s “Two Across”. It is the story of two brainy, awkward teens who first meet at the finals of the 1960 National Spelling Bee (they tie). They look forward to annually renewing their friendship because their lofty IQs and constrained family lives mean they have few peers with whom they can relate. But three years after that fateful meeting, their relationship takes a 90 degree turn: Stanley Owens, now 18 and desperate to escape the check-the-boxes life his mother has laid out for him, impetuously proposes a sham marriage to his spelling bee co-champion Vera Baxter. The purpose for the marriage: to collect money (and presents that can be turned into money) that will allow him the breathing room to create his own life as a creator of crossword puzzles.
Vera goes along with the idea. Her own life is one of accompanying her thrifty, career-driven mother to an endless string of cheap motels while Mom tries to break into mainframe computer sales. Vera’s traveling companions are books and math journals (she’s a math prodigy as well as a memorizer of arcane words). Stanley’s offer provides the first opportunity for rebellion in her young life. Emotionally immature, they cannot foresee the consequences of what they are about to do.
Their con – a sham wedding attended by Washington DC’s elite – goes exactly as planned. But the event is also the dead weight that will leave both of their lives in shambles, and not just because the ceremony meant far more to Vera than it did to the desperate Stanley. Soon they are ensconced in Cambridge – she in a dorm at Radcliffe, he in an off-campus garret – Stanley supporting himself writing term papers for dissipated Harvard ‘legacy’ enrollees while creating crossword puzzles. When one of Stanley’s clients attempts to paw Vera, Stanley gets even with the student in a way that has disastrous consequences for everyone involved. It is just the first of those aftermaths that will reverberate across a decade’s worth of missed and shattered opportunities.
Through it all, Vera is the one trying to hold her life together. It will take four colleges to earn her math PhD with Stanley’s impetuousness or emotional catatonia too often causing grief and/or heartache. (To be fair, there is also a hilarious though cringe-inducing interlude when the pair are induced to appear on a “Newlywed Game”-type program.)
But if they are star-crossed lovers, they are also one another’s intellectual equals with a magnetic attraction that will cause them to inevitably seek out one another using crossword puzzles planted in newspapers around the country.
There are many reasons to read this book, and learning how crossword puzzles are constructed is one of them. The historical research is excellent, though I doubt crossword puzzles appeared in the Wall Street Journal in the 1960s. Bartsch recreates a shabbier version of Boston and environs that rings true. Most important to readers, in the end both characters achieve that emotional maturity they so sadly lacked earlier.
My quibbles are just that – quibbles. The money from the faux wedding seems to have had no impact on Stanley’s quest for independence given his Spartan lifestyle, and the fate of a larger gift is vague. A wealthy Newport family that plays a role in their lives appears to have been cut from cardboard. And Bartsch reels off an unnecessarily precocious narrative vocabulary that fairly shouts ‘writer’s workshop’.
This is a fine and satisfying book. Stanley and Vera are appealing characters who come to life on the page. “Two Across” is the kind of book you purchase in hardcover and keep in your personal library, because it’s the kind of story that you’ll want to come back to.
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