Reading Fathers and Teachers, Belden Johnson’s novel about growing up in the late 1940s and early 1950s, is like stepping into a series of Norman Rockwell paintings: there’s a small town, a country store, a house with green shutters and a wide front porch, a happy mom and dad with four children, a man who still plows with a team of horses, and a boy and his dog. Johnson captures both the idyllic aspect of this period and the dark underside, including racism, greed, and anti-Communist paranoia. The setting, Pohick, Virginia, is described in such detail that the town itself is like a character in the book.

Without judging, Johnson shows things that are socially unacceptable today but were considered a normal part of life at the time. For example, the father in the happy family beats his son Billy with a belt. Today most people would call this child abuse. I grew up in the 1950s myself, and I know that back then many, maybe even most, people hit their children with their hands, their belts, or their yardsticks to make them behave. Johnson describes this as though it were perfectly normal, and at the time it was. The man who beats his son is a good and loving father.

Bullying is also accepted and taken for granted. In the first of many bullying episodes in Fathers and Teachers, Billy meets up with four bullies who first taunt him, then jump him. In this situation—which would now require action by the school, the bullies’ parents or guardians, and maybe even the police—Billy’s father says kindly, “I’ll teach you how to box…so you can defend yourself.”

When Billy is nine years old, his father gives him a rifle, and when he is eleven, he uses it against a soldier who has killed a friend of his, an odd and gentle older man. In the book this feels justified, but in real life, I do not think a nine-year-old or an eleven-year-old should have access to a gun, let alone have his own. Thus, Fathers and Teachers keeps us asking questions: Were the 50s the good old days? What’s wrong with this picture? Are things better now?

There’s a great deal of humor in the book and several memorable, eccentric characters, such as a man who sings to his bees and a plumber who recites Shakespeare. But, above all, Fathers and Teachers is Billy’s coming-of-age story, and it is reminiscent of such classics as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Catcher in the Rye. Definitely an entertaining and thought-provoking read!