Chapter One Hundred Fifty-Two Across

I couldn't resist making a little play on words in the title of this post, which is about a book called Two Across, a debut novel by Jeff Bartsch.  My grandmother sent me this book a few months ago, and I've finally had time to read it.  I love the premise of the book, which follows two over-educated teenagers, Vera and Stanley, from their tie at the National Spelling Bee when they are both 15 through their very tumultuous relationship, in which an odd importance is given to coded messages they send each other in crossword puzzles they construct and have published in major newspapers.  Stanley and Vera are both intriguing characters, though I often found Stanley in particular to be rather frustrating.  This book kept my interest, though by the last third or quarter of the book, it was starting to feel irritatingly repetitive.  (Boy loses girl and regains girl via crossword puzzles... and makes the same stupid mistake and loses her again... and finds her again via crossword puzzles... and makes a similar stupid mistake and loses her again... repeat several times...)  However, I found the ending to be generally satisfactory, which I value in a novel.  One element I disliked was the emotionally distant tone, especially in this novel that focuses on the turbulent relationship between two people in their late teenage years and in their twenties.  I prefer novels where I am made to feel the characters' emotions, rather than being told briefly and periodically about their emotions as though they are mere details rather than the glue of daily life.  This sort of emotional distance in the writing seems to me to be characteristic of a certain type of contemporary fiction for adults (I'm thinking, for example, of The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House by Rebecca Makkai, and of The Magicians by Lev Grossman, all previously reviewed on this blog).  Despite the emotional distance and repetitive plot toward the end, the story had many original elements, and I found this book to be fairly engaging.  If you enjoy contemporary U.S. fiction for adults, or stories with lots of quirk, or stories set in the 1960s and 1970s, I'd recommend this book.