LIFE AT THESE SPEEDS

A teenaged track star in Missouri uses his gift for speed to cope with traumatic loss—in a first novel that gives new life to the subject of athletics and coming of age.

Kevin Schuler is a popular member of the eighth-grade track team in his small elementary school—14 of the 16 students in the entire grade are on the team. The story opens with a wonderful, heartbreaking set piece, an away meet that vividly brings the team to life as a unit and as individuals—until the school van goes off a bridge on the way home. Everyone dies. Only Kevin, who’d driven home separately with his parents, is left. His response is to lose all memory of the accident and his friends. The following August he enters ninth grade at a large high school in a nearby town, feeling grateful for the anonymity it offers. On the track team, he soon realizes that only in the silence that running—and running fast—creates do the memories return. His talent for speed is quickly noted and exploited by school authorities. In a Dickensian approach, Jackson concocts a slightly absurd, almost humorous plot about institutional greed and social malfeasance complete with preposterous names for supporting characters, such as the villainous school superintendent Umbar Porphorhessohln. But Kevin narrates with a matter-of-fact formality and refreshing lack of psychological posturing. He loves his simple parents, who have no clue about his emotional life, and he respects authority as long as he can. He tentatively enters into new friendships—with a black football star, with the sexy school newspaper reporter who takes her reporting very seriously, and with a sensitive, not very good girl runner who finally wins his heart. The story’s modulated pace, not unlike a long-distance race, can be lulling at times but ends in a satisfying burst of speed and exhaustion.

A quietly remarkable achievement of pathos and wit.