ADAM CANFIELD, WATCH YOUR BACK! By Michael Winerip.

All the Principal’s Men

By RICH COHEN
From The New York Times(nytimes.com)
Children Books: Pulished March 16, 2008


Life is not like high school. Life is like junior high school. Even high school is like junior high school. That is the real proving ground, the passage from elementary to upper, bliss to hell, where identities are fixed and alliances hammered into place. If you’re a kind of Columbus of the near at hand, wanting to map the world, there is nothing better to be than a reporter at a junior high newspaper, just like Adam Canfield, the hero of Michael Winerip’s new novel. Adam is the star reporter of The Slash, a paper named for the punctuation mark that so aptly describes the school as a place of painful transition: Harris Elementary/Middle School. Of course, Adam, having the body of a middle schooler but the soul of a reporter, likes to think the paper is in fact named for the verb, because the pens of his fellow newshounds “were so mighty, they slashed like swords through thick, swampy lies until they reached the truth.”

This is the story of a good, overachieving, overscheduled American boy, as imagined by Michael Winerip, a good overachieving American journalist (writes for The Times, won a Pulitzer). It opens with Adam walking the streets of his sleepy town on a snow day, shovel in hand, looking to make some cash. “The one nice thing about being the most overprogrammed middle-school kid in America was that doing nothing felt like a special treat,” Winerip writes. “Even shoveling snow seemed enjoyable.”

This episode ends with Adam getting mugged by high school bullies, who make off with 40 bucks and set the plot in motion. A half dozen subplots also play out, giving the book the classic structure of a newsroom drama, wherein each story — a report on a popular old tree that is to be felled; a poll on the school’s most feared bullies; an examination of a plan to gentrify the town’s last poor neighborhood — is pursued until The Slash goes to press. All else is postscript. In this, the book is organized like an episode of the old “Lou Grant” show. Of course, this is a junior high paper we’re talking about, one that semi-regularly outperforms the local newspapers, TV news, etc., so to some degree a willing suspension of disbelief is required.

In fact, now and then, too much so — the characters are seldom allowed to think the thoughts of kids, which are often trivial or cunning or even lowdown and dirty. They instead serve almost as pieces to be moved around to make points about life out here, in the world of adults. The book can seem a little too good for you — the jokes and fine writing like the sugar on the pill.

The novel is a sequel, second in a kind of Philip Marlowe series for the junior high set. At times, it takes on the tone of the old noirs: “They always wanted the big ones from him. Just once in his lousy life, couldn’t he do an easy story?” The series began with “Adam Canfield of The Slash,” in which Adam and other newsroom characters were introduced (Phoebe, the annoying third-grade phenom; Jennifer, his co-editor, Hepburn to Adam’s Tracy). Adam broke a series of stories, the biggest leading to the ejection of that queen bee of all youth-league bogeymen — the junior high principal. “Adam had caught her red-handed ... and once they printed it in The Slash, she was fired.”

With these books, Winerip has set himself a grand task. He does not seek merely to entertain or educate — he seeks to rescue the newspaperman, even to save the newspaper itself in the age of the freebie Web site and blog, by planting the image of the truth-seeking newshound deep in the mind of the next generation. (“Adam had his eyes shut, and Jennifer nudged him. ‘Are you asleep?’ she whispered. ‘Unfortunately wide awake,’ he said. ‘It’s easier to spot the lies with my eyes closed.’”)

We see Adam experience the joys of the newsman, the perks that go with the job: the adventures, which are real, that compete with any chase on the far side of the wardrobe, and the occasional glimpse of the big picture that all little stories add up to: “Jennifer was quiet, finally. If this didn’t convince her Phoebe’s tree story was worth saving, nothing would. It was almost dark; they could still see their breath in the cold. Lights were coming on all over town. From up this high, they could spy the red lights of a cargo ship moving down the Tremble River and the green lights of buoys bobbing on the river and the boatyard all lit up.”

In short, the book is excellent — funny and charming, with occasional flashes of big-league beauty that are way more than its junior high school audience deserves, but let’s give it to them anyway.


Rich Cohen is the author of “Tough Jews” and “Sweet and Low: A Family Story.”