About majoring in English there was no question. Some of this surety had to do with John Rothstein and the Jimmy Gold novels; so far as Pete knew, he was the only person in the world who had read the final two, and they had changed his life.
Howard Ricker, his sophomore English teacher, had also been life-changing, even though many kids made fun of him, calling him Ricky the Hippie because of the flower-power shirts and bellbottoms he favored. (Pete’s girlfriend, Gloria Moore, called him Pastor Ricky, because he had a habit of waving his hands above his head when he got excited.) Hardly anyone cut Mr Ricker’s classes, though. He was entertaining, he was enthusiastic, and – unlike many of the teachers – he seemed to genuinely like the kids, who he called ‘my young ladies and gentlemen.’ They rolled their eyes at his retro clothes and his screechy laugh … but the clothes had a certain funky cachet, and the screechy laugh was so amiably weird it made you want to laugh along.
On the first day of sophomore English, he blew in like a cool breeze, welcomed them, and then printed something on the board that Pete Saubers never forgot:
‘What do you make of this, ladies and gentlemen?’ he asked. ‘What on earth can it mean?’
The class was silent.
‘I’ll tell you, then. It happens to be the most common criticism made by young ladies and gentlemen such as yourselves, doomed to a course where we begin with excerpts from Beowulf and end with Raymond Carver. Among teachers, such survey courses are sometimes called GTTG: Gallop Through the Glories.’
He screeched cheerfully, also waggling his hands at shoulder height in a yowza-yowza gesture. Most of the kids laughed along, Pete among them.
‘Class verdict on Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”? This is stupid! “Young Goodman Brown,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne? This is stupid! “Mending Wall,” by Robert Frost? This is moderately stupid! The required excerpt from Moby-Dick? This is extremely stupid!’
More laughter. None of them had read Moby-Dick, but they all knew it was hard and boring. Stupid, in other words.
‘And sometimes!’ Mr Ricker exclaimed, raising one finger and pointing dramatically at the words on the blackboard. ‘Sometimes, my young ladies and gentlemen, the criticism is spot-on. I stand here with my bare face hanging out and admit it. I am required to teach certain antiquities I would rather not teach. I see the loss of enthusiasm in your eyes, and my soul groans. Yes! Groans! But I soldier on, because I know that much of what I teach is not stupid. Even some of the antiquities to which you feel you cannot relate now or ever will, have deep resonance that will eventually reveal itself. Shall I tell you how you judge the not-stupid from the is-stupid? Shall I impart this great secret? Since we have forty minutes left in this class and as yet no grist to grind in the mill of our combined intellects, I believe I will.’
He leaned forward and propped his hands on the desk, his tie swinging like a pendulum. Pete felt that Mr Ricker was looking directly at him, as if he knew – or at least intuited – the tremendous secret Pete was keeping under a pile of blankets in the attic of his house. Something far more important than money.
‘At some point in this course, perhaps even tonight, you will read something difficult, something you only partially understand, and your verdict will be this is stupid. Will I argue when you advance that opinion in class the next day? Why would I do such a useless thing? My time with you is short, only thirty-four weeks of classes, and I will not waste it arguing about the merits of this short story or that poem. Why would I, when all such opinions are subjective, and no final resolution can ever be reached?’
Some of the kids – Gloria was one of them – now looked lost, but Pete understood exactly what Mr Ricker, aka Ricky the Hippie, was talking about, because since starting the notebooks, he had read dozens of critical essays on John Rothstein. Many of them judged Rothstein to be one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century, right up there with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Roth. There were others – a minority, but a vocal one – who asserted that his work was second-rate and hollow. Pete had read a piece in Salon where the writer had called Rothstein ‘king of the wisecrack and the patron saint of fools.’
‘Time is the answer,’ Mr Ricker said on the first day of Pete’s sophomore year. He strode back and forth, antique bellbottoms swishing, occasionally waving his arms. ‘Yes! Time mercilessly culls away the is-stupid from the not-stupid. It is a natural, Darwinian process. It is why the novels of Graham Greene are available in every good bookstore, and the novels of Somerset Maugham are not – those novels still exist, of course, but you must order them, and you would only do that if you knew about them. Most modern readers do not. Raise your hand if you have ever heard of Somerset Maugham. And I’ll spell that for you.’