Michael Weingard writes a coming-of-age novel in verse
If you came of age in the 1980s, certain cultural icons and events are likely imprinted in your brain. Like MTV. And Nintendo, Sega, and Game Boy. The Bourne Identity. Michael Jackson. Yuppies. Back to the Future. Madonna. The Apple II. Pop and Hip-Hop. The Color Purple. The IBM PC. Reaganomics. Indiana Jones. Prince. St. Elmo’s Fire. The space shuttle. Fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. Bonfire of the Vanities.
Eugene Nadelman is a novel of coming of age in the 1980s. It’s the story of a young teen, Eugene Nadelman, growing up in Philadelphia. The story begins with the celebration for Eugene’s bar mitzvah. He falls in love and has his first kiss. The romance continues until he goes to summer camp. He gets involved in an online game that turns into something of a duel.
Even with elements that remind us that this is a story, after all, no matter how familiar and real it may seem, it’s a rather straightforward account of a teenaged boy experiencing life in the 1980s. I suspect it may be something like what the author Michael Weingard, himself experienced. It’s too close to what most American teenaged boys have experienced, in the 1980s, before, and after.
Except it’s a novel told entirely in verse.
Rhymed verse.
The work is comprised of four sections – “The Kiss,” “The Duel,” “The Plan,” and “Paradise,” along with a brief “Interlude” and a concluding section of four stanzas entitled “Envoi.” Each section has numbered stanzas.
I’d read novels in verse before – Robin Robertson’s The Long Take comes to mind – but this is the first extended coming-of-age story I’ve ever read in poetic form.
In short, it works.
Eugene Nadelman is funny, poignant, and familiar. I identified with this young teenager trying to navigate life and especially life as it involves girls. We’ve all been there, when reality is hysterical, sad, horrible, and usually downright strange. Eugene is no longer a child, but he’s also not an adult. You know everything, and you know nothing. It can be terrifying. And wonderful.
Weingard explains why he wrote it.
From Envoi, Stanza 3:
So make the poem an incentive,
Dear reader, to recall your own
Experience, to be attentive
To things you felt and what you’ve known.
How rain on ancient windows glistened,
The thrill the first time that you listened
To (put a favorite single here).
The first time you tasted beer,
Your teenage mishaps, strange caprices,
The secret things you daydreamed of,
The first time that you fell in love
And how your heart was smashed to pieces,
The fears you faced, the lines you crossed.
The friends you made, the ones you lost.
Michael Weingard
Weingard is a professor of Judaic Studies at Portland State University, teaching courses in Jewish and Israeli literature, fantasy literature, and the Jewish graphic novel in Israel and France. He’s published two books on modern Hebrew literature, translated the Israeli graphic novel Judessey, and writes regularly for scholarly and literary publications. He received a B.S. degree in English from Yale University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English from the University of Washington, Seattle.
I came of age almost 20 years before Eugene Nadelman (and Weingard) did, but to read this novel in verse is to relive the experience. One day, I might be persuaded to tell the story of a dance at a popular teenage hangout in the New Orleans Garden District, when the police staged a raid for underaged drinking, and my date was a federal marshal’s daughter. I boosted her over a seven-foot brick wall and scrambled after her, both of us then running the swiftest race of our young lives until, a block later, we stopped, looked at each other, and nearly collapsed in laughter.
That’s what reading Eugene Nadelman brings to mind.
Related:
Eugene Nadelman, Chapter One, “The Kiss” – excerpt at the Jewish Review of Books
Photo by reggipen, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
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