Belzhar

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Belzhar Book Info

Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: Dutton Juvenile (September 30, 2014)
Language: English

ISBN-10: 0525423052
ISBN-13: 978-0525423058
Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.4 x 1.1 inches

Meg Wolitzer’s 2013 bestseller, “The Interestings,” featured a group of precocious teenagers who met at summer camp in 1974. Wolitzer’s gift for capturing youthful exuberance and insecurity in that book suggested that she’d also be a natural at writing a young-adult novel.

“Belzhar,” her first work aimed at a younger audience, is narrated by 15-year-old Jam Gallahue. For almost a year, she has been inconsolable over the death of her boyfriend, Reeve, an English exchange student. When the story opens, Jam has just arrived the Wooden Barn, a boarding school in rural Vermont that’s “sort of a halfway house between a hospital and a regular school. It’s like a big lily pad where you can linger before you have to make the frog-leap back to ordinary life.”

The school eschews drugs for treating depression or other mental illnesses. Internet and cellphones are banned. Instead, Jam and four other students are subjected to what might be called the Plath Method. They’re chosen for a class called Special Topics in English, whose elderly teacher assigns just one book a semester. This time, it’s Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar.” She also gives each student a red leather journal. Their homework: Read Plath’s novel and write in the journal twice a week.

Sound like an easy A? It turns out to be a wrenching, complicated experience. As the weeks pass, Jam and her friends discover something unnerving. The process of reading Plath and reliving their own traumas by writing them down transports them to an eerie, magical way station, a place they call Belzhar (pronounced “bell jar”). In Belzhar, Jam and her classmates find that their lives are frozen in eternal replay mode: Each relives the moments leading up to his or her trauma, but it’s an unending “before” with no “after.”

This metaphor for the grieving process makes for an uneasy amalgam of teen angst and the supernatural. Wolitzer’s first novel, “Sleepwalking,” written more than 30 years ago when Wolitzer was a college student, also deals with young people obsessed with Sylvia Plath. The teenagers in “Belzhar” seem to have been magically transported from that period to 2014. They don’t speak or interact much like contemporary adolescents. Reeve is the most egregious example, spouting lines from ancient Monty Python routines. And the perfunctory references to “The Bell Jar” seem more like canned fodder for a book group Reader’s Guide than an attempt to illuminate Plath’s life and work.

Still, Wolitzer works her own dark magic toward the end of her tale, when, as the semester draws to a close, the five friends are forced to choose between remaining in Belzhar or resuming their lives. As Jam confronts the truth about Reeve’s death, these last few chapters rewrite everything the reader knows about her and what Jam knows about herself. And, despite its flaws, “Belzhar” finally demonstrates the power of words to heal. Get online Belzhar today.

Belzhar Book Reviews

This is a young adult novel. I am a decidedly older adult; my children are long out of their teens, and my grandchildren are not yet into them. So I don’t represent the target group, even by proxy. And yet Meg Wolitzer did such a superb job of writing about teenage characters in THE INTERESTINGS, and I have such respect for her as a writer, period, that I was very interested to see how she would tackle writing not just about but also FOR teens. It seems to me she handles it superbly.

Reading the book description, I did wonder if this was going to be INTERESTINGS-lite. There, we had a small group of talented friends bonding at a summer camp; here we have a similar group at a Vermont boarding school for talented teens who may be psychologically fragile. As in the earlier book, we even have a in-group of the chosen: the Special Topics in English class hand-picked by its teacher, Mrs. Quennell. It soon becomes clear that the five students in the class are all damaged by trauma. Casey has been confined to a wheelchair; Sierra has lost her brother; Marc’s family has broken up; Griffin, who grew up on a local farm, is afraid of fire; and Jam (for Jamaica) Gallahue, the novel’s narrator, has lost the love of her life, an exchange student from England called Reeve. Very soon, all comparisons have been forgotten; you are completely drawn into these kids and their personalities, and swept up by Jam’s voice, whose balance between humor and pain Wolitzer has judged perfectly. Read Belzhar book online now.