Recovering Maurice by Martin Zelder; Intellectual and Introspective Academic Journey

 Recovering Maurice by Martin Zelder; Intellectual and Introspective Academic Journey

By Julie Sara Porter 

Bookworm Reviews 

Spoilers: Recovering Maurice by Martin Zelder is a novel about an academic’s journey of self-discovery that is both intellectual and introspective.

Maurice Obster (pronounced with the long “O” he insists), is a 60 year old economics professor who is contemplating his comfortable life, nice home, and relationship with his wife, Lucia. However, a chance meeting on a plane changed his outlook. A passenger is reading a book called Trauma and Recovery. This meeting illustrates the maxim of “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear” because this quick encounter causes Maurice to think about the traumas that occurred throughout his life.

Maurice largely reflects on his older brother Emil who had hydrocephalus. His parents often paid more attention to Emil than Maurice leaving the boy to parent himself. 

This results in a boy who learned independence but anxiety. Self-reliance but self-consciousness. Quiet in nature but longing for attention. Supporting his brother but jealous of him being the primary focus. 

In one key moment, Maurice auditions to be a guest on the Bozo show but isn't able to make it out of the studio audience and get on stage. This moment says something that throughout his life Maurice often comes close to happiness but never quite hits the landing.

This self-consciousness, anxiety, restlessness, and constant searching become consistent through Maurice's life. He accepts various positions but has trouble remaining in them. Sometimes he has issues with colleagues, sometimes the students, and sometimes with the faculty. He has immense knowledge in the subject of economics but not the ability to establish roots and let that knowledge grow in a stationary place.

He also has some relationship issues that end early until he finds a stabilizing influence with Lucia. Lucia becomes a catalyst for Maurice to settle down and find some permanence in his life. He is able to find the familial, personal, and professional success that has eluded him for so long.

Maurice's successful life becomes halted when his parents and Emil go through separate health crises. He is then forced to confront his childhood in which he was neglected and cast aside and assume the role of caregiver and primary focus. 

Maurice's chapters with Emil reveal the depth of Maurice's care for him and also the deep seated regret of being away for so long. It's a relationship where words were never said and instead of saying them Maurice went away. Now the two brothers are surrounded by a silence that needed time and each other to fill it. 

Oliver's Travels by Clifford Garstang; Cerebral Introspective Plot About Writing, Traveling, and Searching for The Past

 Oliver's Travels by Clifford Garstang; Cerebral Introspective Plot About Writing, Traveling, and Searching for The Past

By Julie Sara Porter 

Bookworm Reviews 

Spoilers: Even though Oliver's Travels sounds like Gulliver's Travels, Clifford Garstang’s novel is not a fantasy satire of a man traveling to different weird lands that mock various aspects of 18th century life. Instead it is a cerebral introspective novel about a man trying to discover the answers to his past through philosophy, writing, and traveling.

Ollie Tucker just graduated from college with a degree in Philosophy. He leaves his troubled father and siblings behind to move in with his estranged alcoholic mother and teach at a community college. Ollie becomes obsessed with learning about his missing Uncle Scotty especially when he has disturbing flashbacks concerning their relationship. 

Oliver's Travels takes a thoughtful look at its lead character. His family is toxic with an emotionally distant father, an alcoholic mother, a Fundamentalist sister, and a brother who has PTSD since his return from Afghanistan. He looks inward for support and validation that his family weren't able to give him. Ollie enters into a romantic relationship with Mary, another teacher, a relationship that is fraught with frequent arguments, miscommunications, and Ollie's uncertainty about whether he loves Mary or her brother, Mike.

 It's obvious that Garstang made him a Philosophy major to show him as the type of character who would examine his life and choices. His present situation often segues into past conversations with his academic advisor, Professor Russell where they talk about things like guilt, free will, memories, and identity. These conversations focus on what troubles Ollie and propels him to do the things that he does. They also have dark edges in the later chapters when Oliver and Russell’s student-mentor relationship becomes more intimate and disturbing. It makes one wonder how many of their Q&A sessions were genuine and how many were used for seduction. 

Besides Philosophy, Ollie examines his life through writing and travel. He writes a novel about a man named Oliver who travels to exotic locations, lives as a free spirit, and has a troubled romance. There ends up being a lot of parallels between fiction and real life but it is also clear that Ollie's novel is a sense of wish fulfillment. Oliver is the person that Ollie wants to be: bold, assertive, and daring. He goes on similar journeys but the fictional Oliver isn't as bound by these concerns as his author is.

 Ollie asks questions that are never answered. Oliver gets those answers. Ollie waffles about whether he can afford to go to another country and worries about cost and his relationships. Oliver just goes without repercussions. Ollie has a troubled on and off again relationship with Mary. While Oliver has arguments with his partner, they are able to work through them. Oliver is what Ollie wants to be: Someone with many of the same problems but is able to face them and shape himself into a better person.

Besides writing, Ollie uses travel as a means of finding answers. He and Mary travel from Singapore, to Tokyo, to Paris, to Mexico City to work or vacation. Each leg of their journey brings new struggles and disappointments. Ollie and Mary might go to different places but they are the same people every time. They are filled with the same insecurities, worries, conflicts, and ties to their dysfunctional families. A new city where they have to teach a different class of students, see sights, and learn a new language does not change who they are. In fact the relocation only adds more stress to their fracturing relationship. The relocation and the real unspoken motives for the traveling. Ollie is chasing leads to where Scotty might have lived.

Ollie asks his parents and siblings about his Uncle Scotty because the family won't talk about him. They give him evasive answers and contradictory statements which only fuels his curiosity even more. He wants to know about him to see if his disturbing memories were real or fabricated. He believes that if he finds and interacts with Scotty, then Ollie can finally get some answers about why he is stuck in this place of insecurity and frequent conflicts. 

When Ollie learns the truth about why Scotty left, he realizes that everything that he thought about him and the rest of their family was wrong. At first, Ollie envies his uncle's nomadic life but the more he pieces together Scotty’s real story, he realizes that his romantic image was errant. Scotty wasn't living a carefree life or running away from a past crime, he traveled because he felt compelled to. He went to different countries to get away from his own traumatic memories and because he couldn’t find a place that felt like home. In his drive to learn about his Uncle through philosophy, writing, and travel, Ollie realizes that he is more like him than he originally thought and is destined to end up in the same place.

I Was a Teenage Communist by JC Hopkins: Seriocomic Novel About Teen Communism Growing Up in Reagan Era America

 I Was a Teenage Communist by JC Hopkins: Seriocomic Novel About Teen Communism Growing Up in Reagan Era America 

By Julie Sara Porter 

Bookworm Reviews 

Spoilers: The teen years are a time to explore connections to the world around us. To find ideologies that speak to us, friends that accept us, and breaking familiar patterns while discovering new ones. JC Hopkins YA novel, I Was a Teenage Communist, is about that.

In 1981 Orange County, California, a group of high school misfits are fed up with the Capitalist Materialistic Reaganomics world around them. They are interested in the philosophies expressed by Karl Marx and become fascinated by Socialism, Marxism, and Communism. Despite personal turmoil in their lives, the teens surreptitiously distribute through their school a newsletter that expresses their newfound beliefs and challenges the system that they see around them.

The protagonists are an eclectic group of outcasts. They consist of: Sunshine, a trans female trying to live her life truthfully. Davy, AKA Savior is a smooth talking philosopher fascinated with religious and spiritual questions. Geraldo is a firebrand ready to embrace the paths of his friends and older brother as his world crumbles around him. Tommy is a musician obsessed with conspiracies. Tommy's brother, Barry is the quiet leader and is described as a “legitimate red.” Finally, there's Charles, Geraldo’s older brother who is a political activist and the teens’ mentor. Through an eventful school year of bullies, romances, break ups, neglect, abuse, coming out, parental separation, activism, punishment, and politics, the kids make their voices and views heard.

I Was a Teenage Communist uses political ideologies as a framework to capture the conflicted and complex personal lives of the young protagonists. That's not to say that politics isn't important. It absolutely is in this book. These kids are motivated by the society that surrounds them. They see income inequality, American Imperialism, Reagan’s reactionary policies, jingoistic patriotic propaganda, the superficial “Greed is Good'' Yuppie culture, Christian Nationalism making its first links to the Republican party, rejection towards the LGBT+ community, and a sharp decline in women's and minorities’ rights. These are problems and issues that shaped that time period and honestly haven't gotten any better in 2024. If anything they have gotten worse. It's easy to see why someone would want to embrace a political structure that is contrary to what they are faced with every day.

Even if the Reader doesn't agree with their political ideology, what they may understand and relate to are the reasons that the protagonists embrace Communism. Everyone is looking for some reason and need that isn't being filled by their known world. Geraldo is looking to make his voice heard and a surrogate family when his actual family falls apart, caught up in their own problems. Davy is looking creative freedom and for spiritual answers that aren't being fulfilled by the religion around him. Sunshine and Tommy are looking for acceptance towards their sexuality and gender identity. Barry is looking to make some noise. Charles is looking for a way to hold onto his ideals as maturity and stability hover near him. This is a lost group looking for a way to be found.

Politics is important to the characters in this book but what also emerges are their personal problems. Teenagers by and large are emotional, reckless, thoughtless, immature, rebellious for the sake of being rebellious, argumentative for the sake of arguing, snarky, obnoxious, inquisitive, loyal to their friends, sensitive, curious, and idealistic. The protagonists are all of these traits and more. Sometimes, they are written so broadly that they almost reach parodic or satiric proportions. However, there are also layers of humanity that make them whole figures that are meant to be understood and not laughed at.

The characters follow their Communist path as they are faced with various conflicts. Geraldo and Charles's father walked out on them and their mother responded by having an affair with a colleague. Geraldo begins to date Maria, an undocumented immigrant and the troubles that she endures make him even more determined to fight the system. Charles’ relationship with his girlfriend, April, becomes more complicated when his mother gets involved with her father.

Davy is torn between his spiritual philosophical pursuits and his basest sexual longings. He hops from girl to girl as much as he moves from one religious path to another. Tommy weighs a new romance with Sunshine and his acceptance of her identity. The cause means everything to Barry so he doesn't have much in the way of a private life. He tries to keep his friends as focused and driven as he is as they make their plans.

By far the darkest and most heartbreaking subplot is that of Sunshine's. She is comfortable with her gender identity in front of her friends and new boyfriend despite parental objections. Those objections graduate from words to actions as Sunshine's parents put her into a conversion therapy center. Hopkins does not skimp on the details about how the experience is physical and psychological torture that traumatizes her. Her ties to her friends are strengthened as they try everything that they can do to get her out. However the bonds with her parents are forever weakened as they allow such a cruel and dangerous ordeal to happen to the child that they should have loved and accepted.

I Was a Teenage Communist is a great mixture of how the political and personal affect young people. It is a book that is better read than dead.